night bird

This is how dusk begins: thin, wobbly, the peach soft colors of sunset fading to make way for the blue, and blue, and darker blue of night, with its violet-purple edges. You’d left home when the sun had started its slow descent, and had sat in your car as it slipped itself fully beneath the thick blanket of the ocean. You’d sat there as the few cars still left began to pull away from the beach’s parking lot, and as the cold of eve settled in indefinitely.

It’s an instinctual feeling that pulls you, eventually, from your car; a calling, one that draws you out and out and out further still, until the dark of the sea is lapping in front of you. There’s sand in your shoes, pebbles that gnaw at your feet through your socks, and your lungs inflate stickily, filling with brine-heavy mist. When your hair blows into your face from the wind, a sea of its own, covering your nose and lips and eyes, strands of it stick to your eyelashes like frost onto pine needles.

Then, you wait-- shivering, nose reddening, eyes watering-- as darkness slowly drapes across the earth like a woolen scarf drapes across shoulders. You draw even closer to the water, close enough for waves to touch the toes of your shoes when they ruck up against the shore. Your patience drips away like melting candle wax.

It isn’t until the stars brighten, pinpricks of light burning from the inside out, and the moon waxes, halfway through its path to fullness, already fat and heavy in the sky, that you see her.

First– the dark bobble of her head along the rippling waves. Next– the shine of her forehead, wet and bright in the moonlight. And then, her shoulders, and then, her bare chest, and then, her navel, and then, her thighs, and then, and then, and then. Her hair is dark, stringy, dripping seawater down her back and down the length of her long arms to the tips of her sharp fingernails. Her skin is pale, bright against the black sea, white in the moon's wash. As she gets closer, her lips, thin, red, like skinny flower petals pressed together, separate, showing off teeth sharper than your own. A smile? A smile.

She comes closer still, and you– you’re smiling too. Her mouth opens wider, and you can see as her throat works, as she hums, and clicks, before saying, lips unmoving, in a voice as recognizable to you as a blue jay feather, “Missed you.”

This is how dusk mids: you meet her. As you have been for the past handful of months. “Missed you,” you say, a soft sigh half-lost in the wind, a parrot of her like she’s a parrot of you.

You don’t mind that it’s your voice she most often borrows. She can mimic others, of course, the light coo of a woman, the harsh laugh of a man, the jokes cracked by a teenager, the soft song of a child. She’s spoken with the caw of a seagull, the click of a crab, the bark of a seal. But she likes your voice the best, just like you like hers-- her true voice, the clicks, the hums, the cries and croons which sometimes crackled from being unable to echo the same way on land as in water. Maybe others would be scared of it, but to you, it sounds like a song. A melody that sinks into your skin like seawater, that smoothens your soul like the wind smoothens your hair.

She looks at you intently, deeply, eyes black and cloudy, like coffee-colored sea glass. Her fingers are cold when they touch your face, leaving trails of saltwater on your cheeks. You don’t flinch when a nail nicks you, drawing out blood that trickles down to drip off your chin. She blinks at the line of it, at the red that smudges thinly on her finger, and hums.

The moon catches on the water, rippling behind her, a shivering thing in the reflection of the waves. Your shoes are soaked through.

This is how dusk ends.