Pebbles, stones pulled from the sea
From the sea and into me
Upturned palms for all to see
And into the sky it shot from me

Her mouth, her coarse lips expel the stones onto the bed of the ocean and the algae extends from the floor to my legs. Her throat is a trench, a gorge in the ocean floor around which the light bends and shadows swell. I don't know how I've got here. The saturation of this place in colours and sound, I can feel the slime, the slippery wetness of the algae that clings to my leg. I feel as if I've just woken up. I've been somewhere sleeping for so long. There's a pulse, at first just a current, then building. The light is erupting, flashpan blizzards of specks and lightning. The water is different and warm and cold flows course around my body in turns while the humming begins to thunder. I am freed by the storm at sea, in sea, but now drifting in the current. My limbs are cast about, tumbling in a kind of wind. All of the green and blue and purple mix with the light and the shadows, chaos rent in water. My hand tingles, and I can feel the skin parting at my palm. It feels natural, no pain, stones are ejecting in a line from my right hand. They twist and fall in a ribbon, twirling around me, looping around my leg until I notice that my leg is not a leg at all but in fact a fin, a tail. I kick against the current and the breath of the woman who is the ocean floor, and I notice for the first time a hazy light from overhead. It's so alien, and cold and distant drifting luminous vexing but I am drawn to it and my hand is gripping, grasping begging for an exit a memento a tiny piece of this beauty. The string has been creeping toward the light, almost almost there now. The mouth in the sea calls to me, demanding I return to my place of slumber but now I've seen the light and I can't sleep again. My mouth waters as the pebbles pierce the canopy of water, like a needle in the eye of the woman in the dark. She howls, but I can scarcely hear her through the pulse in my ears while the stones stretch further on the other side of the water wall. The woman is inhaling, is desperately deigning to draw me in. I am starting to be raised, to rise to the surface. I have latched myself onto the source of this light, and I am being pulled through the currents, through the hissing and the storm of green. I can feel the light on me now, and as the crown of my head breaks the surface and the last droplets of the womb I have slept in for so long drip from my hair and off my body I see the shape of this light. And in that instant I think, who has hooked who?

A bad movie combination:

The Sweet Hereafter

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Boys on the Side