Low Tide

Tasnuva Hayden

Low Tide

Everything that should have tasted sweet tasted rusty, or maybe everything that should have tasted rusty tasted bitter, or even, thinking back, a little salty. On the morning they found the stranger, wrapped in kelp and seaweed, I’d caught a cold.

Three weeks later you said, “nice to meet you” and topped it up with a whip-cream smile. You have what my aunt calls calculating eyes. Could you tell that I went a little weak? Pretending that you came here for me. That you keep coming back for me. That you’re not here to measure the vanishing ice. That the Sami and their dying languages are not enough to keep you occupied.

You tell me “it begins when it begins”. Convinced that the vetehinen aren’t real. But then, men with wings have existed since prehistory.

White-blue hermit crabs still fell on the water that day. The doctor kneeled next to the stranger’s body, checking

for a pulse through latex. Barnacles grew on his jaw line and in a half-crescent along his sternum. Between the slivers of shoulders, my eyes darted back and forth. His gray skin flaking like fish scales in the sea-salted mist. Cheekbones serrated. One eye bruised shut. Feathers billowed up into the sky.

Pinpoint a location and an epoch in time. Between 70°01’10’’N and 23°32’09’’E. At the young and unripe age of sixteen. It makes you laugh, makes you choke on your coffee.

Mapping the beginning of a story is hard enough. Is it when you begin to think it? When you, the scholar of love, walked into it? Maybe, it began three weeks ago, or maybe it began today.

It will come to a point, you assured me, that words will become meaningless unless written in blood.

Every winter, a black sky tinted with aurora and punctured with starlight, filters intoxicated dreams through to the Arctic—a north wind, a white bear, and a merman. Polaris, she barely moves. Yes, we had that discussion too. That your heart is a space heater, and if it hadn't been for you, would I ever have kissed with a smoky mouth? Clinging to paper and ink. Maybe that’s what it means to be a virgin after all.

End of winter marked by bloated skin.

Anywhere that is conducive to a mirage, anywhere at all. The shallow tide that also drags with it forests of giant

kelp, dead seal cubs with missing eyeballs, and starfish with fat and tangled arms, but it is all the same when you finally get to say hello, whether on a spine or on the subzero Borealis.