#lobster amulet
@ilsa-of-drentha made me write this because of a 4am note she made about lobster amulets. My fellow writers are great people.
“On an Island”
On an island in the wide blue-green sea there lived a people who worshipped the Sea-Goddess and her kin. Their lives were begun in the salt lagoons on the leeward side of the island where the sun warmed the shallow waters and the breeze was gentler and mothers came to birth their children into the pools rimmed with algae and bottomed in carefully tended sand.
Their clothes were of sea-grasses and the scales of fishes and the skins of the sea mammals and the feathers of the sea birds. Their meat came likewise from those animals, and their small light gathering-craft and their cumbersome fishing-craft to stalk and spear and net their prey were cleverly done up with driftwood and seaweed and, folks on the mainland would say, long after the sea-folk had all drowned, a touch of magic. For how else does a boat float in waves so high as those around the island without some charm to protect it?
The sea-folk worshipped their Sea-Goddess who gave all life and who took it, and they wore as amulets against her wrath and trickery (for the sea is a harsh mistress and not given to sentiment) bits of seaweed or scales from deep-sea fishes to trick her into recognizing them not as creatures of land who she might wantonly destroy but as fellow beings of the deep blue-green waves.
Their life was not idyllic there on a small island alone in the great sea but they were happy, for who is not happy when she has nothing more to covet? The sea provided, and the sea took, and they lived and fished and were born and died and celebrated the blue-green depths and white-capped waves and wove seaweed into their hair and imagined themselves alone in the world.
Sometimes the sea-fog would come in and they would be alone indeed for days or weeks in a cloudy, echoing wilderness that swallowed people whole and, worse, did not always spit them back out. Often wild storms came up out of nowhere and took whole boats to the bottom, washed the fish huts off the far rocks and dredged old wreckage up to lay it on the beaches in return.
But mostly people learned to survive with the sea and became complacent with it. And generations passed and slowly the water rose or the island sank and no one really knew which but one day a woman whose home had once been many steps from the shore came out to greet the sea and found it at her door, and the whole island realized what a danger they were in.
And among them sprang up a following who were more zealous than the rest, who saw that despite the amulets of seaweed, the sea was not satisfied. And they found a leader, a man who had survived a great storm by clutching in both hands the shellfish cages he had just pulled from the depths, cages which held live lobsters which also survived the storm and floated back to shore with him. So they concluded that dead and dried objects from the sea were ineffective. So they preached a new doctrine to the island.
The water will rise, and the island will sink, and the sea will reclaim everything she has given us.
But we will survive who carry with us life. We will be granted life under the waves.
I discovered this almost-joke saved in my phone, today. I think I woke up at 4 AM to write it, and it made sense at the time? But then my friend turned it into a beautiful story about life on an island threatened by sea level rise, and it’s gorgeous, and they are amazing, and this is why you always need to wear your lobster amulet.
