ochre waters

Again, inspired by Erin Morgenstern’s flax-golden tale exercises! 10 sentence stories based on a picture; I hope you enjoy!

Heat bore down on our colony as fingers to a bruise, and it manifested as stickiness under my arms, barren dirt in the land—as though our bodies were forced to suck moisture from the earth to keep them whole. That wasn’t saying much; papery skin, cracked lips, raw thirst up the length of my throat were still all I knew of this life.

My ship’s hull scraped the stone seafloor as I lugged it, and water the color of rust stained both the vessel’s wooden grain and my peeling skin in its harsh hue. A single look at one’s feet, darkened by ochre pigment, was enough to tell you who was who in the colony even without explicit ranks. Me, with the clear demarcation of water levels up my thighs, compared to Chastity, whose soles shone white and pearlescent even in meager starlight. 

As we pulled in our boats, the other haulers turned their faces up towards the Capital; the planes of their tired faces pooling with shimmering gold light, brighter than a sun ray, lighter than moonbeams.

Typically, I’d be among them, gaze weary yet hopeful, but I had turned to dislodge a pebble stuck in the groove of my ship. It was only for this reason that I became First Witness, as movement in the horizon caught my eye: a boy, dry and pale and wraithlike, emerging from the sea. 

When I tell this story, now, I think not of the chill that washed over us, nor the storm clouds clustering together in an unholy knot in the sky. I can only remember the boy’s bare feet, and how, where they touched, the water turned an oily black, so dark and opaque my mind emptied like spilled ink.