In a crumbling coastal town where the salt hung thick in the air and the waves gnawed relentlessly at the cliffs, the town leans as if weary, its stone and timber structure sagging under the weight, slouched towards the sea though ready to collapse into the churning grey below. The saltness thick, palpable sting in its presence, which clings to the coats of the townsfolk and the facade of cottages and jagged cobblestones with thin crystalline film. An earthly chilled wing, sharp and biting, which roams the narrow alleys in the misty distant and the great below which carries with it a mournful cry of gulls and the relentless roar of the waves against the base.

The cliffs themselves loom vast and ancient, black stone streaked with veins of white from centuries of rain, like they were carved by the hands of forgotten mystics. They rise sheer and unyielding, edges ragged where the frost and the wind has worried them into scared jagged teeth. At their feet the sea writhes uncanny, dark, restless expanse flecked with powdery foam painted with slate, its surface a scar of unseen currents and the horizon an indistinct blur, a meeting of sky and water that seems both endless and impossibly close like it could fold in at any moment.

Perched precariously at the edge, a lone lighthouse stands, its stone blackened with age and its beacon long extinguished. Inside, the walls hum with the sound of the sea, a gentle vibration perminates the chiseled stones. This cliff holds its stories in its teeth, and the town its own. But at the base before the oceans meet, their stories intertwine. Forming together, a cautionary tale, a stain, a sickly trickle, remembered out of spite, price of love, pain to pay, for a quick visitation, a reign of love that stank of thrown out toys. No festival of light, a moral mean majority.

Nowhere New Jerusalem.

Author's Note