Off The Coast Of Nowhere (WIP)

PROLOGUE

Clary had longed for years to visit again this little known corner, to breathe the air thick with salt and the sound of waves. The light – green stained through filtered leaves and the sun warm on her hair, too hot to touch as she dipped her toes into the water, forgetting the ache from the stones under her foot-pads.



This was her palace, her secret Eden where only she governed. It was here, by the sea she was herself. The water filled her, breathed her.



Clary was born from the waves. Sand had smoothed her skin and crafted her bones. The water was her life blood and the air carried her song and glances to the high line of sky and space.



It was the air that carried her beyond her failing sight. Through her outstretched hands she saw more than ever before, eyes shut tight, the slow black web of blindness causing her no distaste. Her fingers intertwined with the air and the sky and the very life around her. She breathed it. She lived it.



It was her and she was it.

1

Cunts. Those fucking cunts.



This beating was worse than before. My limbs ached in a pain beyond myself, throbbing in the loss of blood and control, my body reacting in jerking, repeated movements from repeated hits. And as my form ricocheted, chest heaving, arms clutched to the outer of my skull – inside the bone and mass below my scalp – I was calm.



I was calm for I knew that no matter how many times they beat me, butchered me and left me locked in that tiny room where only the moon seeped in through cracks like a voyeur’s glare, I knew that she loved me and I loved her. I want her. She is mine

and there is nothing you can do to stop me.



So beat me, take me, do with me what you will for I will forever and always laugh in your face and breathe in your hatred like a drowning man returning to the surface.

I

t is your hatred of me which fills me and it is your hatred that keeps me getting back up. Getting back up and spitting on you, on your face and on your very life.



Hate me because we both know how great that feels.

PART ONE

ONE:

Like an uninvited guest she was born to the world.



He sat in his study, ignoring the sounds of his wife down the hall. The foot high stack of papers creating a wall, a void in which to swallow up the noise. His typing was hyper, and he worked with more gusto and speed than before. His eyes darted over words, through books and files. Pen poised in hand, twiddled and twirled.



He pushed the heavy glasses back up his nose, and pretended not to hear the meek sound that escaped from his four year old son.



David sat on the high-backed leather couch, his small knees pulled to his chest. Curled in a ball, his small ringlets brushed against his red and pudgy knees. A loud cry from his mother, louder, stronger and more tortured than before, caused David to dive back against the seating, hiding his head where the back and arm of the couch met.



With hands clamped over tiny ears he shut his eyes and prayed that he’d melt into the seat, into the deep, dark black of the seat. He wanted nothing more than to dissolve into nothingness, where the screams of his mother could not touch him, till there was an absolute, full and utter nothing – nothing of him, of his mother, of his father – nothing.

His small chest heaved with stifled tears and he crumpled further, smothering his face, feeling the tears and mucus and drool pooling on the covering, soaking into the cushion.



Nails dug into his scalp. Bursts of colour exploded behind his red and swollen lids. And he felt his limbs grow heavy, his heart pounding with a ferocity it couldn’t handle. His chest ached. His arms grew heavier, and his eyes stung. He felt the brush of something light against his forearm.

The touch of a smoky coal black mist that now pooled around him.



His hand fell from his ear, his legs uncurled and he fell. He fell into that black. He fell into the nothingness he’d prayed for and he was calm. He breathed easily and his heart stopped its panic, filling his chest with a light tightness that he knew was the calm spreading through him.



The black caressed his form as the study disappeared and he floated. The mist was liquid and fluid yet soft and strong, carrying him from everything. David reached out, though the mist was too thick for him to see his hands outstretched, he could feel the tendrils slip through his fingers and pull his hands further out, pulling him further out. It wrapped itself around him, blanketing him, drifting him away. The bliss was unimaginable. His head lolled and his curls tickled his cheek and he smiled.



The scream broke him.



It pierced through him, ripping his chest. It shred his flesh, broke his ribs and joints.



And he fell.



He fell from the mist, through the mist, and was crushed against stone and bone, choking. But his eyes were still filled with black. He watched the mist swirl above him, taunting him with its absence. His lungs were filled with something hard, something choking him, something expanding and pushing against the barriers in his chest.

His throat burned. His jaw nearly snapping as it expanded, showing teeth, gums white. Fire burned within his whole body.



The pain of descent was too great and his mind shut down, blanking.

TWO

It was in that falling dive that I first felt her. It was in that moment of shifting light that I first heard her.



The small cries of the girl child.

I

n that floating bliss I believed myself dead. I’d prayed for darkness to take me, to take me away from there and as I was pulled forward I wondered if that ultimate bliss was in death – if it lay with the pull of life from the veins and the shifting of weight from the full bodied to the floating nothing.



I was on the brink and she’d stolen me. Her cry broke me and I fell with cut strings. Brought back from that sense of harmony to the life I prayed of leaving.



Her eyes would hang in the middle space – that area between everything.



They were broken. Her eyes were broken. She saw nothing of this world, and our father doted on her for her blindness. But she lied. The baby was lying. She was not blind, I knew this. She saw between. Her eyes would seek out the middle space, twisting in their orbit, looking past the faces of those doting over her.

Often they’d fall on me. I hated her eyes. They would fall on me from across the room and I knew she could see through me, into the pit of myself.