Tag Archives: surf horse

Hopeless inhabitants

In the winter mist

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Winter mist mari by Skulls and Sheets, story by Nimue

I went down to the sea tonight. I don’t like those public rituals for screaming the names of the dead. Grief is a private thing for me. I like to be alone with the waves and whisper what I have to say.

I often see surf horses in the early morning, there’s a herd of them who usually appear in this cove. I think they feed on something in the water,  or maybe it’s the foaminess of the cresting waves that they’re drawn to. 

Today the mist lay heavily on the sea, rolling in banks like a second ocean riding upon the first. The kind of morning when it seems there might be many different worlds all layered one atop the other and that you might easily slip between them. 

Then the slanting winter light cut through it all, buttery and strange, the yellow against the white. I saw her form then. She is to the mist what surf horses are to the waves, I think. Larger and more imposing than even the storm horses I have seen in previous years, but also more delicate, more ephemeral than the sea beasts I normally encounter.

I whispered the story of my grief to her, and she stayed, hovering in the bay as though inclined to listen to my words. I felt comfort, for the first time in many years. I felt understood. Sometimes there is beauty in the terror, and kindness in the most uncanny things. I have learned not to make assumptions.

With her blessing I go back to sleep in my grave a little longer. No doubt I will wake again, tormented by memory and loss. But I will wake knowing that I am not wholly alone in this world after all.

Find more Skulls and Sheets art over here – https://linktr.ee/Skullsandsheets

Hopeless Tales

To ride a surf horse

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It is a horse day. Usually tumultuous, the sea is a grey sheen of deathly pallor, and so still. Glass still. Unnaturally so – assuming anything in this place could properly be called natural.

The sky is also grey. This is perfectly normal. The sky is a cold, untarnished steel grey polished smooth and hanging over the sea, each a mirror of the other, passing grey smoothness back and forth into infinity.

In other times and places it is the lively rush of sea foam that gives birth to surf horses. Here, where the usual rules are seldom honoured, horses are most often born in stillness and in silence. They come from the waves that never were. The sea undulates softly with them. Grey explodes into vivid green and vibrant blue. Where colour infects the placid sheet of the poised and waiting sea, the horses come. Proud and wild, ferocious and terrifying. They are like no horse you have ever seen, and yet still they are pure horse; nostrils flaring, flanks powerful, tails flicking water to make brief, unlikely rainbows in the air.

If they come to you at dawn or sunset, catching shards of light from a distant horizon, they may seem more real than anything else. On this island of misty greys and insubstantial, haunting things, the horses in the water may look more substantial and more trustworthy than the uneven sand beneath your feet.

They speak of other ways of being, these horses. They say, in whispers you can almost hear, that if there can be horror, why can there not also be delight? Look into their deep, soulful eyes for the delight they promise. Look into their tooth sharp not so equine mouths for the horror they are capable of. They are beautiful and they are grotesque, between the sea and the sky in this dire and perfect moment.

Catch one if you dare. Rise it in search of dreams. You can never return. Whether you have left the island with them is another question entirely. The sea is vast, and deep, and very cold.

 

Art by Dr Abbey.

Thanks to Potia for the inspiration for this blog post.