Scream into Thunder by Tom O’Brien

The following is a sample story from Straw Gods by Tom O’Brien. Now available to preorder from our bookshop.

‘Scream into Thunder’ by Tom O’Brien

‘I didn’t walk into the sea last night,’ I said to the sky while I washed ginger and desolation from my teacups. We’d set our little cottage far from the village, on a mound that exchanged protection for a view of the horizon, but that question drifted across the bay, smuggled in the scent of family meals, in smoke from burning brush, the sound of children protesting bedtime. Would Rosa walk into the water to join her husband?

‘The sand didn’t go cold under my feet. It didn’t change from dry to wet while I chased the tide. You never grabbed my ankles,’ I told the sea, because it asked me too, as did the wind in the endless nights. There was no answer on the cold pillow beside me every morning. ‘I did not,’ I said. ‘I did not.’

The sea called me a liar when it sent silent lightning skittering across its surface on thin violent legs, illuminating the figures on the beach. I recognised my sister and my niece. The mother didn’t talk to me; the daughter sneaked over on visits.

Two young men were there too, admiring the thunderheads, standing by their boat as if they dared go fishing in the coming storm. The father of one sat on a boat a decade ago while the sea stole my husband.

The air boomed, and a magnificent shudder ran through my body. The window shivered the figures on the beach. My jars, tins and boxes rattled their displeasure at this disturbance, but it released me. I hid a scream in the thunder, unheard by sea or sky or dead husband.

When the scream died, I whispered in the long echo. ‘I made myself this for you. I turned into a wife. You turned me into a widow. I made the home you wanted; you promised to bring the world to me. Now I’m alone.’ I’d said too much in a rush and not enough.

I didn’t describe the pushing of the sea around my knees last night, because I hadn’t gone there. Nor the probing of it around my waist, its power, the push behind me as I neared the shelf that drops away fast and deep. There would be no swimming in my heavy skirts, and I would fall fall fall for him again.

I didn’t walk into the sea last night, past that shelf that drops away. But why this morning were my clothes wet?

by Tom O’Brien from Straw Gods (£8.99)