The Oceanic Dead

 Our dreadful harm was our enemy's regret, our tender skulls split like oysters.

We lay there on Japan's shore, my sister and I, assaulted and aggrieved, our blood foaming in the surf, a scarlet ebb of unfathomable loss.

The hated progeny of our Mother's secret love, we were plucked from her forfeit belly by the baleful Emperor Blood, before he slit her throat and threw her beautiful empty form off the bluff.

She flew in the wind, a hollowed flag, twisting, turning until she fell onto the crags far below our step-father's castle and broke.

Mother, children, all separated, all damaged, all alone, perhaps to trudge the endless wastes of the dead for all time among the tattered souls of the samurai and crying painted angels.

But within that salted biome our new-born sinews stretched and muscles fired and like pulleys of flesh we sat together in the water, staring at our twin faces and caressing our rent heads.

Sanderlings flocked around us, our slim movements unnoticed by the hundreds of birds probing for worms. We probed too with our tiny hands and wrenched wriggling things up and slopped them in our mouths and smiled.

Naked, my sister and I began to crawl along the eternal sands, a trail of red left behind. We were slugs feeling our way through day and night among the crabs and bladderwrack, devouring beach fleas as we went. 

We slept on beds of kelp and drank from sea squirts, warming ourselves as winter loomed within the giant corpses of rotting whales washed up onto land, lost ronin robbed of purpose and reach.

Our hair grew long, thick and black, which helped shield us from the prying frosts as October left for November. The days were dark and the nights darker still, a world of intermittent ink, through which we both  crept like tiny brushes pushing for the terrible edge of the scroll.

For a year we traversed Japan's shoreline, our heads misshapen, but we lived, sustained by the larder in our hands. Our long black hair was our coverlet and we learnt to walk like crabs, our great companions on our pilgrimage: to find our beloved mother, to avenge her death and bring calamitous closure to our step-father, the murderous Shogun, Emperor Blood.

Encrusted in salt and cohabited by commensal beings like fleas and sea flies, our crawl's end came that December 1592, when we jostled over the smashed boulders at the base of the castle bluff to find our semi-rotted mother supine at its foot.

She lay there crucified. 

Oceanic. 

The salt and the winds of Hokkaido's sea had kept her skin, strengthened by a carpet of barnacles filter feeding in the sprays. Her innards were partly gone, devoured by our friends the crabs and other hungry things, but it was no matter. We slid inside and filled her up again, re-connecting nerve-ends and synapses with our own, re-blooding her vessels and migrating our two little brains to occupy her waiting skull.

Tidal, together, total, we got our mother to stand once more and stagger over the stones to face the castle wall. Craning, we stared towards it's summit; high, so high, ensnaring the clouds like prisoners.

 We began to climb, along with a raft of crabs, who were following us.

A whole day passed into night until we reached the lip of the sewage sluice near the ramparts. We slipped in and levering our Mother, we crabbed the tilted chimney to the castle yard, where we secreted through the grate and into darkness.

Slinking on and up the towers and stairs, our crustacean clan close behind, my mother, sister and I at last came to the Imperial chamber, where the Emperor Blood was sleeping with his enslaved concubines.

Wanting to scream, the slaves' mouths were gagged by pincers and ushered out to safety. We had no quarrel with more poor souls, only the recumbent wretch before us, our hateful step-father, his bloated giant paunch bare above silken sheets, protruding like a rising dough.

Deftly sprawled atop his form, the terrible noble woke. 

"Hello my dear." Whispered Mother, her lips like starfish quivering in heat.

Her husband now wide-eyed, she smiled and kissed him, her rancid tongue ripping his own from it's roots and sucking it down to fill our open mouths.

"Oh My Lord!", mother sighed,"You appear to have lost your tongue!"

So dumbed, the huge man gargled his own blood and deploying the Emperor's own tanto, the three of us sliced open his hideous gut from loin to neck, upon which it opened like a cupboard, a cupboard in which our faithful carpet of crustaceans leapt into and vigorously emptied it of all it's meat, saving the succulent brain as a soft milky pudding at the end.

The creatures snipped and sheared and dragged out his skeleton and, husked as he was, our friends filed out of the enormous wound, matted in gore and patting their shells with satisfaction. 

We guided our Mother's body inside the Emperor's own sagged bag and tucked her limbs and head into the vacated spaces of his well-fed skin like a dressed crab.

Our Emperor-Mother rose, with us inside.

She donned the imperial garb and stepped out into the castle's fresh day, smelled the air and we laughed, all three.

Seawater pooled where we walked and all bowed down before us at the dawn of our reign of Hokkaido, a reign not of blood but of salt, ruled by we inside the Emperor's skin, the crab-fed babies and our mother, the queen of the oceanic dead.