Fish Skin Glitter

Cold girls, nowhere girls.

The sea smell comes up from nowhere sometimes, even now, even in cities, and I’m back. I’m always back before I’ve decided to be.

Fish skin glitter on the concrete. The market on a Friday evening. Cardboard boxes of cheap cassette tapes, and we’d buy anything. There was nothing else. There was genuinely nothing else; the amusements closed at five and the shops were already watching us, their eyes following us down every aisle though we hadn’t touched anything, hadn’t even looked at anything properly.

We were fifteen. Cold girls, nowhere girls. The sea’s unwanted daughters. And the sea was just sitting there at the end of the road not caring either way, and the men at the shore were trying to make a living from it, pulling up what they could.

The fisherman used to bring us mackerel – still silver, still beautiful. My mum could never bring herself to behead them so they lived in our freezer for months, going slowly white-eyed. They had brothers, those men. One of them –

everyone’s heard. The dolphin mural on the amusement shutters. Someone put real effort in, after.

Rain streaking the arcade windows and everything inside gone underwater – the lights, the red plastic seats, your face reflected triple in the glass – all of it unreachable and we had twenty pence left between us.

But then – the white moon caught in the dirty streetlight. The light spilling, and the street finally empty, finally ours, the smell of the sea drifting up the hill. The town saying okay, okay, here, this bit’s yours.

We took it. We stood in it.

The moon is caught in the streetlight and we’re cold and we’ve nowhere to go and it belongs to us. It belongs to us completely.

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