Notes: Sally is a cool mom. Minor speculation ahead. Also, standard disclaimer applies.
Caught A Long Wind
When Sally is little and her uncle is attempting to put together dinner, she likes to ease the glass lid off the tiered candy dish. It is full of tiny, fragile shells, white, tan and iridescent, that she likes to roll gently through her fingers. Her uncle collected them on a trip through Italy and Greece decades ago, and Sally wants to visit these places someday and collect her own, ones she can touch whenever she wants. For now she has the shells, and she sneaks pieces of her uncle's favorite salt-water taffy all the way from Maine. She imagines it tastes just like the seashore.
ooo
Sally Jackson is in middle school before she learns exactly where the monsters come from. Middle school is hard enough, but monsters make it harder. She feels a jumble of relief and fear that she can now put names to the things no one else can see. Sometimes she wonders if her parents could see them, but she pushes away the thought. The monsters are here, her parents are not, and the faster she learns these things the better she can avoid them. Knowing what a monster is means you know how to beat it, so Sally studies. She likes to be prepared, especially when there are monsters around every corner.
ooo
Her uncle is a bachelor of a past age, and he does not know what to do with her. He is not even really an uncle, but a great-uncle, one that has never had to consider the wants and needs of a child in his life. He is awkward and stilted when he is around her, and Sally watches as he visibly prepares himself to speak to her about the simplest things. In spite of all that, they have no one else, and a tenuous bond forms between them. They are not close, this bachelor and girl of different worlds, but they are familiar. This lasts until age and sickness eventually take him away from her too.
ooo
She is young, broke, and with no education to speak of when she arrives at the seashore with the last of her uncle's savings in hand. It has been months since her uncle died, and she is looking for something. A star to sail by, a new purpose to drive her on, anything is better than feeling as adrift as she does now. Sally remembers a novel she read in school that talked about the transformative power of water. She hopes the weeks she spends on the beach will help her transform. She digs her toes into the sand and waits.
ooo
Sally knows exactly what he is the moment she sees him strolling across the sand. Even as he approaches her, the stories she's learned to protect herself crash through her head, but her heart stopped listening the moment their eyes locked. She knows who he is, and yet it is already too late. Something within her settles in to place – this is the moment everything will change. The transformative power of water, indeed, she thinks as the sea god crouches in front of her.
Sally lets herself be swept away, like a shell on a wave, straight into a new beginning.
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