Mollymawk
Martin Porter
The very oldest age the least.
It is no coincidence that survivors become the founders.
The remainder are dead.
As she gazes at the fishmonger’s slab, tears well up with her memory. She dreams of cruising currents of pelagic wind, wings tipping the white blades of breakers billowing in the wind. She has been looking for riches across the oceans, in the sea spray, under the sand of lost atolls. Now treasure grows within.
She glides with the prevailing wind. She scents the tang of shore pine twisted and bent over to pluck medicinal thyme for healing. She tastes the saltiness of the thin gauze of spindrift. She walks the binding of land and strand, between the trees, foot on grass, foot on cool grass. She is half monster, living in the marginalia of the book of the world.
There is stillness in the continual beating of the waves. She has taken root, Princess Anemone on a rock. No longer mollymawk, no longer wanderer, she is woman. Once albatross, wings outstretched and huge, eyes keen and knowing, drifting from birdhood to maturity. Today, she flies. Tomorrow, the invisible hatchling will root her, unseen through the mists of hope, the need for soft nest and security, the touch of earth beneath the soles, the touch of firm earth beneath the soles.
It is fruitless listening for the sea in the empty conch.
All migrants are voluntary exiles, traitors betraying their past.
All children emerge from the shattered egg.
Martin Porter , born in Jersey, lives a quiet life in New Zealand writing poetry and flash fiction. He has recently had flash fiction published in Bare Fiction magazine, won the Northland New Zealand flash fiction prize in 2012 and 2014 and read at Auckland Library for the NZ National Flash Fiction Day Awards 2013.Some of his work and accompanying notes can be found here and here.
