Sea Stars

 

I’m immensely grateful once again to be one of the authors published by our wonderful local journal, Catamaran Literary Reader.  My story “Sea Stars,” also set on the Monterey Bay, has just launched in the Fall 2023 issue—Volume 11, Issue 4.  It’s also featured online, here.  The artwork chosen to grace it, used on the cover too, is an amazingly perfect complement, particularly to the myth mentioned at the end of this passage.

 

“Tobias slept for hours when Lainey had gotten him into the house, into a cozy yellow room with fog outside and kindly evergreens standing sentry.

Later, well after normal suppertime, her old friend woke, uncomprehending, in the foreign yellow room, the soft yellow throw blanket over him, but when he saw Lainey he smiled tentatively at her, the way a baby or a child might.  Practicing.  Following her lead.  She brought him warm potato soup, and bread with unsalted butter, and he ate a little before sleeping again.  She followed Leonard’s directions to the linen closet, and found herself sheets and a comforter for the daybed in the front room.

Tobias still hadn’t said anything, which was entirely unlike him, and Lainey worried, despite the reassurance of the others.  She sat in a butterfly-print wing chair, and talked to him again.  She told him his aquarium was safe, the fish fed, his fellow docents missing him, his stars aligned.  [She mentioned the Greek myths, the stories of the sea creatures and constellations he so often talked about.  That had in many ways brought them together.] 

‘My favorite is that myth of Poseidon extinguishing the stars in the heavens to help the Cretan fisherman woo the woman he loved.  They fell into the sea, all of the stars . . .’ (she waited for the old marine biologist to chime in and finish, but he stayed quiet) ‘. . . and he gathered them up in his hands to offer her—a gift she couldn’t possibly refuse.’”

 

 

Image:  Andrea Kowch, “Light Keepers,” Catamaran