Helgoland
A Short Story
Answers never came during dusk. So, when the sky frayed into the grey sea, the man turned his eye from the horizon and descended his cliff, alone.
The hand lay on the shore like a pale anemone. He knew it. He’d felt those fingertips against his cheek, traced the lines of that palm.
He left it on the black sand.
In the morning, he pared meaning from patterns in the waves, standing on his cliff, gazing into the violent water. None could survive the journey now.
The patterns evaporated when, descending into the bay, he saw two arms, sinuous as eels in the sand. He ran to them, brushed grit from the skin, which came away like gold leaf.
Atop the cliff he tried to recall his answer, mouth groping for forgotten words. Beneath him, trails of white foam searched like hungry tongues among fissures in the dark cliffs. And there, salt-sodden and silver, her torso, lying in the bay.
Throughout the night, he waited by the tide, plucking her parts from the spume. He assembled her tenderly, cooing to himself as the wind rolled over the treeless island. When she was whole, he left her, as he had before.
From his cliff, he searched the horizon, heard nothing.
But below, in the bay, the wind caught in her throat, and knotted itself into the shape of an answer. She spoke it to the sand.
I felt an immediate pull into the story and was torn between reading it as a horror story of a deranged murderer and/or the metaphoric one of a lover who lost the woman he dreamed of and saw parts of her reappearing, trying to put the pieces together, to explain it to himself. But to no avail.
Well written.
I was only once at Helgoland and have little recollection of it, sometime in the 80’s.
Maybe the quantum theory left an impression in your mind, it is difficult to understand.
In one way, I read this as a man alone on an archipelago, who has had a psychotic break. He's chopped his lover into pieces and thrown the body parts into the sea but the parts keep washing back onto the beach. She knows, and he is trying to understand what has happened.
In another way, it seems like the man is remembering a dead lover part by part. Something has been left unanswered.
AM I THIS DENSE? Missing the metaphor?