Cadence-The Spirit of the Sea-Chapter One

The sea was angrier than usual that day. The sailors' wives, sitting on their porches in the rocking chair, cast a wary glance in the direction, dark thoughts playing through their mind that involved masts snapped in half and familiar bloated corpses floating in the shallows while their children splashed around. Cadence watched them for a while- she was usually watching them, her unnaturally dark eyes taking everything in, from their nervous laughs to the wrinkles of worry around their eyes. They usually had nothing interesting to say, so after a while she would wander off and find something to distract her from the inevitable boredom.

Usually, the priests of the Goddess’s temple would let her sit on their laps while they had their meetings in the inner sanctums of the temple. The older priests would puff on their pipes, smoke wrapping around their heads and, for a second, despite their wrinkles they would seem to be powerful and imposing. They treated her more like a pet than a human being, and sometimes she would have to do chores so revolting no one else cared to do it. She would get treats, of course, and pats on the head, but since Cadence was fourteen such things didn’t matter to her anymore.

Or, she could creep through the alleys in the town just beyond the temple’s rocky shadow, in the district where the huts were crammed together in no orderly manner and the unmistakable stench of sickness always hung around in the air. They had no porches here, and most of the huts were really shabby, one-room constructions thrown together in a hurry. The wives would sometimes congregate in the front of their huts, though, and would shoot Cadence such dour glares that she would end up retreating somewhere else.

Then, the women’s husbands would find her and take her in their arms, confiding their secrets, knowing Cadence had no way of sharing the words spoken in some dark corner, or the things they did to her sometimes. They always went away wearing smug smiles as though they’d managed to pull off some grand feat, and Cadence would wonder if she was the only one who they did it to. She would sometimes look at her pale limbs when she was naked, wondering which bruise belonged to which pair of grasping hands.

It was all because she was different, of course. She’d come to expect everything that happened and had learned to take it as a matter of course, her dark black eyes placid and her troubled brown curls going every which way. At an age when most of the other girls were beginning to get married off so they could become a useful, childbearing part of society, Cadence ran through the streets much like the stray cats and dogs, often treated the same as they were. Cadence was, of course, not fit for childbearing- the fact that she was mute made her useless to everyone, and she was sure it was only a matter of time before they found some was to get rid of her.

That day, after listening to the older women talk, Cadence slunk away to see for herself just how mad the sea was. Most everyone with any sense was inside, except for the women waiting to see if their husbands would come in or not, and the silence had sunk down over the streets like a tomb. In the distance, she could hear the waves and some bird screeching uncontrollably.

The further she went away from the city, the more the ground beneath her became more sand than dirt until she was treading on what looked like a blanket of diamonds, with a sea at the other end. It was mad; the waves rose up taller than they ever had before, hurling themselves angrily at the shore as though desperate to put an end to their existence. She was sure then that many of the wives waited for their husbands in vain.

* this is totally another story, but I need to save it and right now I have nowhere else to put it... *

Most of Mara’s time was spent in the attic near the window; from there, she could see a small patch of the dying lawn and the neighbor’s wooden fence with the peeling green paint, and between the broken slats a deflated blow-up swimming pool. Sometimes, she would see the neighbor’s children playing in the overgrown grass