By Georgia, Grade 9
Watching the sea, Eileen suddenly understood why her father was so certain that spirits dwelled within each wave. It made sense why her father so revered the subtle undulations of water that before long flourished into waves, which caressed the shore with a touch at once gentle and fierce – so gentle that its impact could hardly be measured, yet still so fierce that with enough time, those same gentle waves could move mountains. There was a sort of divinity, Eileen thought, in the way that the moonlight scintillated off of the water’s surface – all of it was almost too beautiful to believe. Something so wondrous couldn’t have happened naturally, could it? A deep sense of calm, lustrous and warm, washed over Eileen as she surveyed the sea that surrounded the island upon which she and her father had lived for as long as she could remember. She felt closer to her father through this realization, as though she had at last broken through a layer of the thick wall that kept her from truly knowing her father.
A voice, weathered yet insistent, called out through the chill twilight air, startling Eileen out of her reverie. Her father gestured at her from inside their small home, perched atop the island’s many cliffs that jutted out, forging a sharp silhouette against the night sky. With a soft sigh, Eileen stood and began the climb up to her father, holding up her skirt so that it wouldn’t be torn by the many sharp stones that littered the ground beneath her.
“Come on, dear, faster! I wouldn’t want you to catch a cold – and the spirits seem angry, even vengeful tonight!” Her father’s calls grew louder, and Eileen broke into a run, afraid of further worrying her father who had been full of anxieties ever since the day he was born. With a smile, Eileen remembered how her grandmother had told her that as a child, her father always had his brow furrowed, as if deep in thought – he had always been just as pensive as he was now. If he hadn’t had to resort to fishing in order to feed his family and earn enough money to stay afloat, he surely would have been a philosopher, a man for whom thoughts were a trade.
When Eileen reached her father, a bespectacled man whose hair was peppered with gray here and there, he ushered her in, pointing her towards an empty cot. “Eileen, look! We have a visitor, dear! He’s out cold for the time being, but we’ll surely nurse him back to health in no time!”
There was nobody there. “..Father?”
Elements Magazine 