The Danzig Daughters
an excerpt

Hilda stood stiff and tall at the cliff’s edge. A long hooded cloak hung from her thin shoulders down around her ankles. It shifted gently with the offshore breeze and gave an illusion that she was teetering, about to fall into the broken rocks and foaming surf far below. She would never fall though, she was a solid part of the landscape, more permanent than the crumbling lighthouse on the knoll behind her. Waves may break onto the rocks, the stone could shatter and given time even the shore could disintegrate. She would be left standing on the rubble, an obelisk to eternity. The corners of her eyes were moist from the spray that leaped up the rocks and up over the air above her at each crash as breakers thundered and shattered into spray

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Turf, dark thick green, the slimy kind that grows in cold wet places, stretched all the way to the cliffs edge. At the rim there was a small dent where it had crumbled, but it spilled over elsewhere, hanging over the top of the black glistening wall. Far below waves rolled in from the ocean and crashed over shattered, weathered rocks. Foam pushed through channels cut deep in the broken shore and receded in streams back into the ocean. They carried minute particles of sediment back with them. Centuries of battering had carved out boulders and weird shapes. A roar every few seconds and a crash as a new green wave of solid water broke over them. Again the green water roiled back, each time with a minute load of new silt. Each time the broken body of the woman was dislodged a little more from the cleft she had fallen into. She rolled as if in uneasy sleep. It would take months but she too would be carried back, deep down into the ocean.

THE END