deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: The storm was so powerful, a god in the shape of a jellyfish got
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: The storm was so powerful, a god in the shape of a jellyfish got all broken up in it. Fools flocked to the shore to collect him in vials. Day after the storm, once word got out, we had pilgrims flocking to the shore from all over. They came in wimples and cassocks and high starched collars rapidly wilting in the damp sea air, and waterlogged as we were we crowded around them hands outstretched pleading for alms. Slim pickings. Pious though they were, we never wrung more than a few crowns out of them. They’d head straight down to the coast, falling to their knees and mummering out prayers, all of them with these little engraved glass vials they’d brought along to scoop up the leavings. Trekking home, flushed with pride for their souvenirs, vials dangling from chains ‘round their waists all eerily glowing. Idiots, the lot of them. When we went harvesting, we brought vats. First days on the beach it was a smorgasbord. Me 'n my sisters crawling over rocks, bare feet traipsing through the wreckage, peeling off the jelly strewn around like strands of seaweed. Larger sheets of it, flapping translucent in the wind, picked at by gulls. Part of the bell, I figured, punctured and deflated. Morning after the storm the sky was yellower than I’d ever seen, near glowing, like he’d bled out across the sky as well the shore. We’d slice the bigger ragged sheets into strips, lay the strips out in the sun. Fishing was scarce for a while yet, with most of the boats tossed around like matchsticks, but god provides and god provided. We must’ve still been eating jellyfish three months out from the storm, day in day out until most of us was sick of it. We had it salted, pickled, sun-dried, sometimes raw, slurped down like fish guts. Jarred it, kept pots of it buried in the sand to ferment. Packed into lanterns brimming with oil to glow gently through the night. Raw, it quenched thirst well as staved off hunger. Even cubed and sugared as a treat, the times we had the sugar. Oh, the pilgrims flared their nostrils at us, and I heard the Synod was wringing their hands over it, but in the end they settled on jellyfish being fish, not meat, and so was fine to eat, even on Shrove days. Dunno what they did with their little vials. Anointed themselves with it, maybe. Rubbed jelly into their foreheads. Little tiny sips of it, the vial up to their lips and then gone, as if you could taste just that. Some of 'em tried to tell us the flesh was holy. It was magic well enough. Come dusk, I’d see gulls swooping low, their bellies faintly glowing. Half the kids in the neighborhood turned luminescent, two of my sisters included. We had to bundle them up at night for the rest of us to get any sleep. Me, I stopped sinking in water. It was annoying, when other kids went diving and I’d be bobbing up like seafoam on the surface, but you get used to things. It’s pretty peaceful now, letting the currents carry me, staring up into the bright blue sky as free as anything. I do miss it sometimes, the god. He was beautiful, all right. Sometimes I think back to those nights I’d watch the glow sing out from the sea, or the rare times that he’d surface like air shimmering over the water, all billowing glass painted sunset and starlight and rainbow, tentacles trailing like kite tails. And then I think of his great billowing bell all limp and lifeless torn up on the rocks, and I feel this heavy thing right in my gut.But the sunset’s still there, and the starlight and sky and all of it. Us, and the god in us. And that’s gods, I figure. Good as you can expect from them. Drifting through the currents of the world all holy. A god dead and good enough to eat. -- source link
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