Nightmare Fuel, Day the Twenty-Fourth - At the Shore

A few nice takes on this image, including a sweet hopeful bit by Kary Gaul, something mythic-feeling from Samantha Dunaway Bryant and a bleak atmospheric thing from Jo Anne Cabrera

I should have made this one about my beloved Mets, or about the upcoming World Series.

I didn't. Enjoy this little bit of post-apocalyptic fantasy.

Image is from the Myths & Legends series, by Jeffrey Alan Love.

At the Shore

It's been a very long time.

Long enough that I barely remember my name, my face. Anything. 

Nothing but the taste of sea, nothing but regret. I tried to do it myself.

I tried my best, it wasn't enough. So here I am on the seafloor. Walking on.


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The war has come everywhere, as wars always do. Some days you come to the beach to get away from it, to look over the Atlantic waves. You can still smell the smoke here, but mixed with the fresh salt air of the sea it isn't so bad. At least that's what you tell yourself.

So you sit alone on the dunes, what once was El Salvador behind you, facing the trackless desert of the ocean.


I wander, I meet the creatures of the sea. Those above look down on them as too many looked down on me. I feel kinship, but don't belong here.

I am not home.

I'm not even that surprised when I meet her, a fellow walker here in the depths. And old, old woman, her waterlogged flightclothes from an earlier time, when flight was an adventure. Not like the uniforms I once wore, as a civilian and a soldier.

We walk in companionable silence.

We don't stop walking.


You aren't always alone in this place, but you are often at peace. It's a poor spot for fishing, even if the oceans weren't mostly dead. Like the rest of the world. Those who come are the contemplative sort, the quiet, the loners.

Or perhaps those simply waiting to die, like the rest of the world.

One day you're joined by a very old man wearing a faded ballcap bearing a stylized letter 'P'. As if that matters anymore.

"You know, there's been lots of folk lost at sea. They didn't always find the bodies."

You nod, annoyed at the solitude being broken.

"They say they found his pilot, but not him. Makes a guy wonder, doesn't it? I mean, we can come here and think he'll come back, rolling his neck like he always did, bat on his shoulder. You know he'd do some good in the world."


You stare out over the water and don't say anything. Belief is for children. You don't believe in anything but the water.

After a day, or a week, or an eternity I find myself somewhere near my initial destination, generations ago. My companion has long since left me to go her own way.

That's OK. Sometimes you have to do it by yourself. Sometimes you just need to be a symbol, or a story, or an example.

One foot in front of the other, I walk beneath the sea, whispering to any who might still be listening, who might need me. 

"I'm coming".

After a long time, you turn away from the dunes and the sea and walk inland, in search of shelter and food and all that you need to stay alive. The struggle continues.