RDP Wednesday: KELP

F. K. M. Rehn, Beach of Bass Rocks, Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1881

That’s Flori Goodchild standing on the beach, can you see her down there by the rocks?

She is out there  everyday when  the tide goes out and she’s even out there when the fog rolls in or the sky turns black and it starts to rain.

I  look for her before I  go down to the beach myself because I liked knowing where she is.

It’s always a good idea to know where Flori is, but I wouldn’t recommend looking directly at her.

Once I was down on the beach trying to remember what it looked like when it snowed,  I was struggling to recall if really felt soft when it landed on my cheek. I was mid-thought, confused, when  started to  turn around to find Flori Goodchild was standing right behind me and she smelled- but she didn’t smell like the Sea or suntan lotion.  She smelled like a laundry room with a cement sink covered with mold  and a  window covered  grime and spider webs.

When she stepped back I could hear her feet slide across the broken shells and bits of dead rotten kelp and the squishing and crunching coming up from under her heel almost made me turn all the way around because the sound was wrong- but not quite wrong.

It was like hearing someone singing a song just slightly off key.

I didn’t lift my eyes to Flori’s face, I didn’t say ‘excuse me’. Instead I started to walk straight ahead.

” Come to me  Jenny  George. ” she said to me.

I did want to go to her, so help me I needed to. But I moved away from her as fast as  could

I did try to run for it, but I couldn’t. My knees were shaking and my teeth had started to rattle and it wasn’t from the cold.

I was up to my chest in salty sea water before I realized where I was, but I kept going and then I started to swim because what Flori Goodchild was back there and she knew my name.

Before long the waves hid me from her the way they did all of those years ago when I saw her on the bow of my boat in that storm when thunder and lightning tore the sky apart and I jumped into the water to escape Flori and her Sea eaten face and her outstretched fleshless hands.

I keep going back to the beach and I always keep an eye out for Flori Goodchild. But I never look right at her. It’s not a good idea.

Still.

I’d keep both eyes out for her, but the crabs took one of them on the day I first saw Flori Goodchild  and if it were in my power I’d pull out the other one to save myself the grief of having to ever see her again.

Max Jensen-Stürmische See

I named the character hiding from Flori after ‘ The Jenny ‘.

Legend says The Jenny is an English Schooner that disappeared  with her crew in 1823. The story says she was found in 1840 locked in an ice barrier in Cape Drake by a whaling ship. By this time the Jenny was a morgue and her crew was said to have been found frozen and preserved- in what areas of the Jenny is never really made clear.

The ‘ Jenny ‘

“The Jenny”