Excerpt: The Iron Goddess

Pylons protrude from the water along the shoreline, the splintering remnants of a town long ago cut down by fire. Buildings once stood upon the patchwork of wood stumps: churches and canneries, general stores and houses of ill repute with windows darkened by falls of velvet.
Now, waves curl between the pylons, which lean at delicate angles as their bases shift in the sand, eroded slowly by the currents and the footsteps of crabs and the lonely old ghosts that cling, charred and fading, to the last remnants of their homesteads. A heron sweeps toward the shore, falling out of the night like a winged bundle of cloth, and settles upon a pylon. It extends and retracts its long neck, hoarsely bleats out a cry of warning or salutation, and tucks its head into downy shoulders against the wind.
Music from the public house across the railroad tracks drifts down to mingle with the tidal murmurs. There are few people about on this cold winter’s eve, ensconced within shingled houses and bars with bricks walls, warming themselves at fires that burn oblivious to the ashes that once rained down upon the town. Mist turns to frost upon the sea grass sprouting from the ruined pylons. The river flows past unchanged. And then …
A crest of foam rides in, buoyed by the ship that propels itself towards the sea some hundred yards offshore. Another ship lies at mooring two miles off, its onboard lights rising above the water like a flaming birthday cake, like a fire mountain. None of its glow extends to the shoreline, where the foam breaks against the wooden barriers and bubbles apart, revealing a hand. Fingers up, as white as the frothy river discharge, it dips and rises on the waves. The heron watches, silent, then lifts into the air on its great spectral wings to loft out of sight over the boathouse.
The hand is attached to a wrist, to an elbow, to the back of a head, hair drifting across the skull with the same mossy anti-gravity as the algae just under the tide line. Another surge of water and the body slumps against a pylon, curling around it with the force of the waves and then relaxing, like the flexing of a fist. Flex, shift, flex, and the body tangles with the wood, rolling over, revealing a boy’s face, hairless, eyes at half mast. Some scrap of clothing pins the boy’s torso to the pylon, so that with every wave his face and legs sway back and forth, as if he is shaking his head in shock. No, no, no. I’m not dead. I’m not.