Answers to Some Galaktika Magazine Questions

It was a muted day, fishscale colored, and the sea and the horizon merged seamlessly. No wind — the waves were innocent of foam, existing as a series of sullen gray swells.

Ever since stepping on the beach, she’d been catching kingfish: one cast, one fish, usually from just inside the sandbar. As the sun rose higher, its dazzle on the water intensified, until her eyes watered and her head ached from the relentless sparkle.

She reeled in a pair of six-inchers, one on each of the rig’s hooks, and freed them to put back in the water — too small to be worth cleaning on a day of such largesse.

She misjudged the next cast. It went out well past the sand bar, into the deeper, colder, darker water, The strike was swift, a yank that set the reel singing as it spun. How big was it? Twenty-pound nylon line — would it withstand the pull’s strength if she played the fish in right?

The fish leaped, as though in challenge. It was crimson, an enormous, yard-king fish as red as blood, with impossible, ornate fins of the kind seen in heraldry or on ornamental carp. As it splashed back into the water, it seemed to set the horizon aboil with color, blues and violets and emeralds at play beneath the meshed surface of the sea. She set her teeth and braced herself in the fluffy sand.

This post marks a change-up in my Patreon campaign – I will post content publicly. If you’re enjoying it and want to make sure it continues, please consider supporting my ongoing attempts with this publishing model! There are several levels of possible support, but you can do it for as little as a dollar a month.

I’m enjoying on retreat in California right now, which will explain what provoked this piece.

California Ghosts

When you walk in the hills in southern California, through stands of pine and tall grass, up shaly mountains where the sides fall away steeply and the rock splinters rather than crumbles, you can hear the sound of the wind in the treetops, making them sway, making them creak. Stand still and you will hear the little noises, the sound of a deer’s delicate steps, far away a Stellar’s jay scolding some interloper, the click and tap of falling rocks.

There are ghosts out there in the hills, walking the ridges, slipping among the trees, but they are mostly animal ghosts, the memories of deer and mountain lions, a flicker of rattlesnake among the grass stalks, an eagle’s shadow floating over the earth.

If you find a human ghost alone out there while walking, approach it with caution. Groups of ghosts are left behind by villages and tribes, and many of them died peacefully, among those they loved. Solo ghosts are usually ghosts who came to a violent end, blade or bullet or even bared teeth, and they do not want to be disturbed.

If such a ghost blocks your path, stand still enough to hear the protests of the pines, the slide of dust downhill. Do not look them in the eye, but at a point past their shoulder. At first they will know this for a ruse, but give it time and they will falter. Finally they will turn away and vanish, because you can never see the back of a ghost, and you will be free to move further.

There are other dangers in the hills, but you know if you keep walking towards the sunset, eventually you will find the ocean ““ perhaps cliffs dropping down, perhaps sand and rock sloping. There are more ghosts in the ocean than anywhere else, but that is because it is so very large, and most of them are fish and gulls, whose ghosts pay no attention to humans. Sit on the shore and listen again. You’ll hear it say, Why go on walking? and Who knows why the wind blows?

And when you realize that the only sounds you cannot hear are your breath, your heart, your body, you will know you are a ghost yourself, ready to go down to the sea, and swim there in the water, in the waves alive with noise.