Somewhen Else

In the dusk, in the backslop of the decreasing tide, they sift, hands frozen and bloodied, in the wake of the detritus that fades from them on the outflow, fades into liquid as the light fades to night. Their prey is easy to track: it does not move. A multi-toothed slash in with the rake, then their fingers reach down and scrape against the roughness of the shells’ serrations and the numbness denies the pain from the blood. The finger-clenched crop is dropped into nets at the waist.
They smell the fading, cramped-together sweat of their neighbours, mingling with the salt-stench of the sea-wind.
Out far beyond the wedge of the estuary, out in the land, the floodwaters are gorging their way to the sea.
Sand scours up between the toes.
They moan with the wind, a sort of inarticulate shanty, a shared humming as their fingers wave like crab-spines in the shallow water.
And something is sensed out there; something poised: something ready to release the steadiest of violence. But it is ignored.
And it all retreats into quietness.
And things leak through from another time, another place…
A dry scrape, thousands of bristles on the cobblestones. Hundreds of people, hunched like rabbits on the town hall square, each with a toothbrush in one hand.
It was autumn, wedged between the white night summer and the total black immersion of a northern winter, and the cobbles were neither frozen nor hot, as the toothbrushes were dragged over them to cleanse the impure blood of the taken away, to eradicate the smirch of the disappeared phony rebellion.
Jackboots tapped. Hobnails in the heels clacked against the granite: like a muted military cymbal clash.
The sound of rasping, the wheezing and stretching of backs, the implausibly loud accumulated noise of a million tiny scratches became welded together into some sort of grotesque symphony of scraping whose elements fought with each other cacophonously but were somehow fused into a giant and clashing harmony.
The guards flashed dirty teeth and lounged their torn uniforms and peeling skin against the flaking stucco of the walls. They swaggered around, dispensing petty acts of cruelty, dirtying sections that had already been cleaned and hitting out at the nearest victim, screaming at their incompetence, backslapping the faces of any with the effrontery to hold their brush in the left hand.
And all along time, the sound continued, like a flock of starlings stripping the dry seedpods on a bush.
She kept her head down – the choice was invisibility or a kick to the mouth that would make any toothbrush redundant.
A trickling of ants scurried along the eroded channels between the cobblestones, a blackened powdery decay ready to be scrubbed out, ready to be crushed in again.
And then the soldier, leaning over. A slap, gentle at first, caressing the complexion, the skin like cork. Another slap, equally gentle, but slightly more persistent. A further slap, then the fist coming crumping in, coming crumping in, bending to match the bend of the nose, forcing the heavy bone aside, pushing at the block of the forehead, forcing it back for the other fist to come billhooking through the air, murking the face, driving it to the unrecognisable. Hysterical yells in a voice unrecognised, a voice shrilling ever higher in pitch as his bony arms wormed in, evading her despairing defensive chops, mashing her face to a bloody and salty residue, like that left by unhealthy gums on an ancient toothbrush.
And then came the rains, trickling down the gullies between the cobbles in rivulets, bumping into blockages of old blood, blockages of new blood.
And still the same, unchanged through time, still the cobbles are wet with rain but the rain cannot dissolve the memory: a young girl’s face, breaking into dust.
And a crack of cold wind comes crumping in. And the tale that has percolated through the generations evaporates, dries out and floats away on the wind. And things leak back to the present and the past ebbs away…
The sea salt stings. The sand sucks at the poorly protected feet.
They continue to move forward silently, groping like washerwomen into the mud, lifting their target food like jewels, shuffling towards the invisible channel wrapped in a darkness that has blackened them from each other’s recognition. They continue to edge forward. Something will happen. Something soon.