Venya

Venya sits alone on the beach. She rocks slowly to and fro, crooning to herself, at one with the waves, staring unblinkingly at the vast expanse of the ocean beyond her. Above, a lone kittiwake mewls as it is buffeted towards the cliff, escaping only at the last moment as it catches a welcome thermal. Blind to the high summer cumulus clouds, she has never dreamt of touching their softness, for the world she yearns to know is far below, sharp and untameable.

The first time her parents held her up to view the sea, the infant Venya opened her arms, beckoning to the waves with her plump fingers. The spray slapped the sea wall and spumed upwards, showering the young family with salty effervescence. She chuckled, wriggling in her father’s grasp, as if trying to get closer to the place that called to her soul. From the open window of their cottage, she would turn her head to listen to the pounding crump of the waves in winter, or doze to the summer-sibilance of pebbles pulled to and fro in perpetual motion.
Later, when her parents permitted the near–silent child to roam untethered in the fishing hamlet where they lived, she would be found sitting on the multicoloured shingle carpet dabbling her feet in the icy water of the Atlantic ocean, singing a strange high pitched song. Watching, always watching, she would shiver, not from cold, but with the anticipation that prefaced the inevitable arrival of the next wave. With her eyes leaving the horizon only briefly, she learned to skim pebbles expertly…six, seven, even eight bounces.

Suddenly, there is a change in the wind. Venya stiffens, her spine rigid. Her head lifts as she sniffs at the brine-filled air. Alert now, her song becomes a high keening and increases in volume.
All but invisible to the naked eye, the horizon rises and comes closer, a dark blue mountain ridge, tipped with corrugated snow-white. Ahead of the roller, the water is alive with silver sparks leaping and dancing in the turquoise inferno. The sea beneath her feet takes a gasping breath, heaves upwards and then recedes, revealing places unseen by man for millennia.
Venya stands and holds her open arms seaward as she walks into the void left by the retreating water. The kelp forest lies neatly deflated as Venya walks along a pathway of stones, carefully placed as if by a hand expertly skimming pebbles…six, seven, even eight bounces.
Her eyes never leave the onrushing wave as her song rises and falls to the rhythm of the tides. She is joined by a second voice, then a third and then more until the air is filled with the sound of sea music that will haunt forever those who hear it.
For a brief moment her song pauses.
‘I’m coming…
For the first time ever, she has spoken.
‘I’m coming home.’