After the rain, there’s a sea of red.
Red clay is notorious. It clings. Dyes hands and shoes and faces and hair. During the long, dry days, if the hot winds kick up, everyone walks away red. It’s a nuisance to dig into, chokes out more plants than it nurtures. Farmers have to ship in mulch and lime and manure to make it worth a damn, as they say. It stinks up whole gardens and makes your eyes water when you walk past. All to amend the red clay below.
Corrine loves it.
She escapes from the house once the rain stops. Everyone seems too busy to notice as she slips through the back door. She dips her bare toes into each of the puddles she passes. Everything smells wet: the grass, the dirt from the flowerbeds, the cement of the driveway. Corinne takes a deep breath, lungs filling up with it. She loves the way everything smells just after a rainstorm. Everything’s clean, washed down to a new start.
Bright sunlight breaks through the thin, dark clouds that have emptied themselves out over the ground. Streams of it highlight her path as she carefully navigates the waterlogged earth. The sunshine is warm against her skin, chasing away the cold from the house. Everything is still, aside from her, like the world is waiting to see if the rain, temperamental as it is, will come back. Corinne spots a few birds hopping out of their hiding places, bright little heads turning this way and that, looking for the worms that will have been flooded from their homes. She whistles at them and their dark eyes follow her.
The light leads her to the shores of the sea. Corrine crouches at the closest edge, staring out over the vast red length of it. As she watches something thrashes in the depths, sending ripples of red clay throughout. The birds are starting to chirp and sing again while the insects hidden in the tall grasses start up their chorus. The warm sunshine has filled her with the soupy, tacky heat of a summer afternoon.
With a wild howl, Corinne throws herself into the sea.
It’s thicker than water, grips and pulls her into itself, but she doesn’t mind. It’s warm, not at all like the cold, sticky mud that gets churned up in the gardens, and it cradles her carefully. She can almost pretend it’s caught her up in an embrace.
She dips her head under the waves and feels the clay slide across her lips and nose, mat down her hair. When she opens her eyes, all she sees is copper-tinged red, the faint shadows of the clay creatures moving about in the current. It’s the first time she’s had the courage to jump into the sea after it grew up from the ground, but she’s seen the things that swim in the clay before.
The fosters never believe her when she talks about the things in the clay. They just yell at her about tracking dust in the house, the stains left all over her skin and clothes. They don’t want to hear about the things that brush against her fingers and toes when she sticks them into the sea. The Brent family is okay enough, but they’ve got a houseful of kids that aren’t theirs and they don’t have time for Corinne’s messes.
Corinne remembers the first time she saw the clay sea after the heavy rains had come and gone. It sloshed all the way up to the edge of the field behind the Brent’s, lapping at the tall green grass shores. She thought of her mother’s warm voice; the story of men being shaped from the clay told to her while they lay in bed together at night. Unlike the other kids in the house, she remembers the sound of her mother’s voice, the way she held Corinne while they slept.
She takes another deep breath and feels the mud inch down her throat. It doesn’t suffocate her. She knew it wouldn’t. If everything on earth needed to breathe, then the things that swam the clay needed to breathe too, right?
Something moves towards her and she swims out to meet it. It’s huge, round with fins and flukes and rows of eyes and teeth, all made up of clay. Corinne has no clue how she distinguishes it from the sea surrounding it, but it is distinct. It glides its way around her, making Corrine’s body sway this way and that in its wake. It brushes against her hand with one fin and then continues on, a soft greeting before parting.
Corinne wonders if she’s all made of red clay now, too. Do the other creatures see her as almost-indistinguishable from the sea around her? The thought doesn’t frighten her as much as it probably should. She’d been made of clay, and now she gave herself back into it.
She swims with the current of the sea, passing more creatures made of clay. They’re huge with many fins like the first one, or tiny, smaller even than her hand’s width. All greet her briefly before moving on. None seem disturbed by her presence. They, too, know she belongs here under the red waves. Maybe they’re the same as her — swimmers taking on new forms in the clay sea.
What would she see if she sank deeper? She knows the clay would happily take her down into its depths. Would it get darker, the way it did the deeper down in the ocean you went? Would there be clay creatures down there, too? Or did sinking down make you settle and disperse into the mud?
Corrine wonders about all those things as she swims. She wonders if her mother came back to the sea after she died; if her casket split apart in the red clay it was buried in so she could swim back to the place she was created from. Did everyone make their way back to the sea after they died? If Corinne swam long enough, could she find the clay creature her mother had become?
She looks at all the mother-creatures she passes with new eyes. Could the long one with several tails be hers? Or the huge one she swims over and can’t quite see all of? What about the one the length of her arm that stays by her side for a few minutes before flitting off? There’s one she’s seen out of the corner of her eye for the longest time now. Could that one be her?
Corinne stops swimming, closes her eyes, and lets the clay hold her. Would her mother-creature even recognize her in this form? Maybe she had to die before they could be reunited. She could do that. She could let the clay hold her and drag her down and recreate her in its image. Then she would be a clay creature and she could find her mother-creature.
Something nudges against her side. She blinks her eyes open, startled.
There are several mother-creatures around her. Large and small, many-tailed and many-toothed. They brush against her legs and arms, against her hair and face. Comforting touches. Are they welcoming her? Do the mother-creatures know what she’s got planned? Know how she’s going to join them soon?
It takes a few more nudges before Corinne realizes they’re pushing her up, towards the surface of the sea. They want her to…leave? She tries to struggle against them, but their touches are insistent, compelling. She can’t move against so many. She looks at them, mouths words that don’t echo through the clay, desperate for them to know she doesn’t want to go. She wants to stay with them.
A mother-creature she hasn’t seen yet hovers before her face. It’s small, small enough to hold in her palms if she tried. It brushes its whole body against her cheek. The same soft touch her mother always gave when putting Corinne to sleep, when seeing her off to school, when saying goodbye for the last time. Her eyes burn with tears. She doesn’t want to leave the mother-creatures. It repeats the touch and rests briefly against her forehead.
It doesn’t speak, but Corinne knows it doesn’t want her to stay. Not yet. She can’t stay in the sea. Not until it’s her time to dive into its depths a final time, to swim and become a part of it for good.
Corinne nods, even though she doesn’t want to, and finally works with the mother-creatures pushing her up. The mother-creature, her mother-creature, swims with her until she’s breached, taking in huge gulps of fresh air and spitting out red. She treads the clay for a few moments, getting her breath back. The other mother-creatures brush against her legs as she bobs there. After a short rest, she swims for the grass banks she recognizes. The mother-creatures follow in her wake.
She pulls herself ashore, dripping globs of red clay onto the grass. The sun is up fully, and it starts to bake the clay onto her skin, cooking it back to dust. Corinne looks out at the sea, sees how its edges are growing smaller now that the day is hot again.
The mother-creatures surface here and there, getting a good look at her and making sure she’s where she belongs. The small one stays longer than the others, watching her with its red face. Corinne waves, silently promises to visit again, even if she can’t stay for now. It dips below the red waves and Corinne lays down on the grass. She looks up at the now cloudless sky and trails red-coated fingers over her dusty cheeks.
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