Katabasis

by Catherine George

Katabasis

by Catherine George

This is a sample from Augur Magazine Issue 2.3. The full story can be read by purchasing the issue here.

Content warning: Story mentions miscarriage

They found the foot on the beach the morning after the first winter storm. 

It was the dog that found it, really—the dog who caught the scent of something meaty and rotten, and strained at the leash until Hannah let him loose. There was no one on the rocky shore but the three of them anyhow, Hannah and Dave and Benji, no one to be bothered by the mutt as he ran snuffling through the sea-wrack. 

The storm had delivered a new crop of driftwood, heaved it up above the tideline like the bleached bones of some monstrous beast. 

“It looks like a dragon, see?” Hannah said, but Dave had already slipped off into the fog, slouching along in the dog’s wake, with his head down and fists jammed in the pockets of his jeans. He hadn’t really wanted to come to the beach that morning. He had wanted instead to run down the hours until his shift at the ferry the way he usually did: watching his latest Netflix recommendation while cursing the Internet connection on what he’d once called, in a fit of pique, this goddamn forsaken nowhere bit of mud. He’d changed his mind after a moment, called it a wet spot on the back of God’s butt. Hannah had laughed at that one.

Oh, it had startled her, too, when they’d arrived on the island in October. The water here always seemed to be touching her skin: the wet wind stroking her cheek, the fog settling in her lungs. The peeling bark of the arbutus trees made her think of skin flayed from a man’s back. And you could drown in the deep green gloom of the woods at twilight. After six weeks, though, she was beginning to feel more at home, comfortable enough to feel a kinship with the driftwood. She put a palm on the largest log. Still ocean-soaked, it had travelled such great distances, all at the whim of the current, the tide, and the waxing and waning white moon. It had taken years for Dave and her to wash up here, and hadn’t they gotten lost a hundred times along the way? At every stop, in prairie towns and mountain hamlets, she’d known they would eventually move on, that they couldn’t stay forever. That tug in her belly, like a fish hook in her guts, would fade now—it had to, didn’t it? They had almost run out of places on the map, found the edge of the world. Here be monsters and all that. 

Shivering at the sudden chill of the damp log under her hand, Hannah turned and clambered up the rocks to the tide pools, peering in. She had found a television on the beach a few weeks ago, and before that, when they first arrived, a strange glass ball, opaque, heavy. From some angles, it had looked like it was filled with fog, or smoke; where the sun touched it there were woozy rainbows, like the pearlescent shine of an oil slick. When she’d held it, she imagined it was thrumming, almost as if it was about to turn on—or hatch. She’d pushed that thought aside and took the ferry over to the next island to sell it at the flea market. 

“We’ll get rich off the sea,” she’d gloated to Dave. 

“You got twenty bucks for it,” he’d laughed, though he had helped her search the beach a few times since. After the television—unsalable, its image forever drowned—they’d found nothing more than wood and plastic bags. 

“What’s the sea tossed up today?” Dave said, climbing up behind her. 

Before she could reply, Benji came galloping up the rocks with something dangling from his jaws. He dropped it and Dave burrowed his face into Benji’s fur, murmuring, “That’s my hunter.” Leaning over, Hannah saw it wasn’t an animal at all: it was a strange, soft leather boot, and a large one at that. A set of ornate, tarnished silver buckles ran up the side, each with a strange symbol—like a stylized sea serpent—carved in the silver.

“He’s caught a boot,” she said, leaning over to grab it. “Probably didn’t give him much of a chase.” 

Dave started to reply, but Hannah wasn’t listening anymore. She’d seen what was in the boot: the bleached end protruding, like dried coral, and a ghostly collapsed sack of flesh. It smelled of the sea, the pungent scent of a clam pried open. 

“There’s a foot,” she said, soft. “There’s a foot in here.”

Continued in Augur Magazine issue 2.3…

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CATHERINE GEORGE is a lawyer and writer living in Vancouver, BC with her partner and two young children. After ten years away from writing fiction, she felt the urge to create again during her maternity leave with her second child and now writes all types of short speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Flash Fiction Online, Clarkesworld, and Metaphorosis Magazine. She can be found on Twitter @catinlaw and her website is cgfiction.com.