Sea of Dirt

content:

Rain droplets tickled Alec’s neck, poked his arms and legs. The sound of crashing waves on a beach deepened his sleepiness. Then his eyelids twitched at a harsh raindrop and he blinked out of his slumber. Squinting eyes peered through the trickling curtain of dark rain; he was flat on his stomach on solid ground. Not crystal. Good.

How had he saved himself? The last thing he remembered was falling from that sticky ceiling and falling fatally to the floor. Now he was in yet another world. He must have gotten ahold of the Tablet to whisk him here. He brushed off a light coating of dirt on his arms. He struggled to his feet despite the achiness of his knees. His mind still felt a few moments behind schedule. He halfheartedly wondered where his Tablet was. This was the third time he’d lost it.

Standing up made his head teeter totter in circles. He could barely focus on the craggy hill slope he was now standing upon. It was a rocky slope, littered with little pools of dirt here and there. The melodic crashing of waves permeated the little quiet that was left by the rain – breathy sighs, like pebbles cast across a road.

Alec took a deep breath, taking in the smell of air. He doubled over, coughing, and spat out something that had fallen in his mouth. His mouth tasted dirt, snarling at the sharp, new flavour. His nose, on the other hand, was elated to smell the half-forgotten scent of dried earth that was so common on his childhood farm. But then the farm brought up bad memories, of his parents and of General Stacy, so he shook away those memories that clung to him and went about scanning his immediate surroundings. He also couldn’t stop shaking away dirt from his hair, his clothes, the toes of his feet. Standing up must have uncovered more dirt that had snuck up his sleeves and tattered pants. Painful raindrops kept falling dark into his eyes, poking him, keeping them in their foetal gaze. He shielded his eyes and blinked roughly.

The rain looked… Odd.

Papa had always told him that his favourite time of day was when it rained; good for the earth and the wheat, and when the weather cleared up the sky was awash with unsullied sunlight and filled with the songs of nightingales and other birds. Alec remembered fondly the gentle lashing of rain and its calming pitter patter. But this rain didn’t seem very gentle or calm at all, coming straight down in lifeless vigour and filling the air with earthy plinker plonker. Too shadowy, the raindrops looked.

Alec focused on the rough rocky slope, watching hundreds of brown globules accumulate and roll past his feet and pile into puddles of dirt. He touched his sleeves again and noticed he wasn’t getting wet at all. Just covered in dirt…

The rain. He almost retched. It was raining dirt. He looked up into the sky, hoping it wasn’t true, but all that did him was blind himself with the dirt that pelted down from the heavens. It was dirt, raindrops of dirt! Perhaps the very thought of it would have curiously amused him, if he wasn’t being showered in it. At least it was dry and not wet or sloppy. Being drizzled in these light particles… He could tolerate that.

Shaking his sleeves once more of dirt, Alec looked around for the sandals that were no longer on his bare feet. Then he could look for the Tablet. He turned round, found a shoe, then stepped back in horror.

“No… It can’t possibly…”

A vast ocean stretched out in front of him, on into the horizon. But it wasn’t blue. Waves approached him, unnaturally slow and stately, a rippling and cascading shade of brown. The water lapped at his feet, but it was not water; peaky grains of dirt leaped out of the surf, crawling up the slope to his toes. They rolled back down the beach, joining the relapsing wave of the great rippling sea and marching currents. And it was composed entirely of dirt. Dry, lifeless dirt.

Alec bent down and grabbed some of it. Loose dirt fell from his outstretched, sweaty palm, leaving it sticky and dusty. He kicked at the waves, only to find yet more dirt thrown up underneath. There wasn’t any solid dirt underneath. It all roiled about like some kind of bewitched liquid. He stood stricken in the dirt as it covered his ankles, until like little round ants they dragged themselves back out. The sound of the waves, sickening now, crawled away with them.

Maybe this wouldn’t have sickened Alec under different circumstances. If anything, this was spectacular. What else was different about this world, if entire bodies of water were made instead of dirt? He could climb up the rocky beach and find shelter somewhere on the other side. And if there was an abundance of dirt, surely there’d be an abundance of food? In these circumstances, the dread plaguing his mind would be replaced by wonder.

But there was something else in his mind that compounded dread. It was a little nugget in there, pulsating, pulling Alec forwards.

He didn’t want to stay by the sea. He wanted to climb away, hide away from this dirty rain and this diry sea. But when he put his sandals on, he ignored those pleas and trudged further into the soup that encompassed the horizon. The nugget in his head was telling him precisely where the Tablet of 4612 was.

And as his knees fell below the frothing dirt, he knew that it was in the worst place it could possibly be.

This is a revised version of a story from 15 Jan 2023.