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Sea Monsters Short Story

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Sea Monsters Halla invites me in. The house already seems different, even smells different. Sea air has been allowed to seep into the corners, inflating the rooms with a salty freshness. There is a vase of tulips on the kitchen table. The curtains are tied neatly together with orange ribbon. In the uncluttered space, an old inked sketch of a puffin sits renewed in a white frame on the window sill. Gjúki's trove of brass bells no longer straddle the mantelpiece but spill out of a box beside the door to the kitchen. His woollen Mackinaw coat is missing from its peg, though his boots still stand at attention in their spot directly beneath. Halla offers me coffee from an enamel pot, telling me she doesn't keep any alcohol at home anymore. She takes off her apron, sits down at the table and looks past me, out of the window where two gulls hang in the breeze. I take small sips from my cup and ponder how to begin. My tentativeness fosters an unease around which the silence thickens and …show more content…

Gjúki once said that he had built it himself, but this was untrue, his father had been born here. Little by little, he had added to it, building a firewood shelter, a hut for the creels and half a boat shed nearer the shore, all painted the same noisy yellow as the outside of the house. Gjúki had told me that nothing in the ocean was yellow, so the spirits of the sea would not mistakenly come unannounced. That had been our thing, sea monsters. It could be hard to be on the boat, maybe days at a time with only the sky and an ocean for distraction. People can be just like the weather; overcast, unsettled, sullen and sometimes Gjúki would withdraw into his own pensive mist. Adrift in difficult conditions. I could usually tell straight away if a trip was going to be a good one or not, if he was up or down. Whenever morale was slipping, I would bring up the sea

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