Liberty by Sarah Agus (England, 34)

          ​Liberty emerged from the ocean, flicked the deliciously salty sea off her eyes and thought: don’t
be scared. Two more days only.
          She turned to the beach. On the golden sand, the umbrellas looked like smarties on
cookie dough, baked by the shining sun. I am not going to get stuck on this island, she reassured
herself: I am not. I am going back home.
          The sea water, cool and transparent like liquid aquamarine, glazed her temples. She
shivered. Nothing good came out of that island. It was a cruel island. You could not stay on that
island. There was no work, no money, no legacy, on that island, where one struggled, died and
was forgotten. That was the destiny of all the people she had ever met until the day she had left
for the Mainland. It had been her mother’s destiny too.
          Why she had returned for the first time in ten years for that weekend, after she had denied
her roots for a decade, she didn’t know. To show her native land how well she had escaped Her?
How she had succeeded outside her domain and got her college degrees, life experiences,
friends; her new house, her office in a skyscraper, her husband to be? She smiled, admiring the
diamond on her ring finger.
          The plane tickets had been mysteriously cheap.
          The idea of going back to her hometown had made her feel uneasy, but she had
convinced herself: three days only. Three days of sun, tasty food and relaxation: the only good
things that land could offer a human being.
​          If she wasn’t there to show off her new life to the island that had imprisoned her for
almost two decades, she realized, then she was there for the short vacation she needed after all
the hard work she had put in her job that year.
          A fresh breeze hit her face, awaking her from her stream of thoughts, and cooled the
water around her. Liberty frowned. The mistral had left the island the night before: it never
returned so quickly. She shivered again.
          ​She set her eyes on the sunbaked shore and pushed forward.

          She dived to the bottom of the sea, where the silence lulled her body and mind. She felt like she
was back home on the Mainland, in her garden, where peace reigned.
          Her mother had never had the chance to enjoy the garden of their island’s home. She had
died hustling for her monthly wage. She could never find any young person, old person, anyone,
really, willing to take care of it for that little money she could spare. Their garden had been a
jungle where the weeds springing out of the island’s earth dominated, leafy tentacles choking the
flower buds.
          On the Mainland, her days started with her bare feet on the dewy grass, a hot cup of
coffee in her hands, birds chirping in her ears. The peace of her garden was her inner peace.
Nothing bad could happen there. In her garden, she was safe.
          When she emerged, a canoe sliced the water a few inches away from her head.
          “Hey!” Liberty yelled. “I’m right here!”
          Why had she not seen the canoe’s shadow on her way up from the bottom?
          The canoeist didn’t notice her. He turned his bronzed face on his shoulder and said
something in words she had not heard for ten years. He spoke Old Islander, the dialect of the
island. Her mother had always refused to teach it to her.
          “That language,” she used to tell her, “will chain you to this place.”
          Liberty followed the canoeist’s gaze and saw, all in a line, a second canoe, then a third, a
fourth, a fifth… A race?
          “Christ’s sake,” she muttered, bobbing up and down like a piece of cork in a bucket of
water.
          She had to get back to shore: her passport was in the bag she had left by the umbrella.
What if someone stole it?
          Her heart froze. She could not stay on that land for more than three days. She wasn’t
going to. She was going back home.
          She jumped to catch a glimpse of her red umbrella on the beach but the canoes slid one
right after the other, leaving no gaps to look through.
          Her legs felt heavy. Her shoulder muscles tingled. Waiting for the canoe procession to
finish was tiring her. Resisting the rising mistral was not helping either. She needed to rest.
          She looked around: there was a buoy not far away. It was closer to the open sea than to
the shore, but she had no choice: aside from that buoy, the sea was naked. Even the private beach
next to where she had planted her umbrella didn’t separate its swimming waters from the rest of
the sea with ropes or diving platforms that could provide a moment of physical inaction.
          ​She swam to the buoy cursing the fact that now it was going to take her even longer to
return ashore.
          When her arms fastened around the red plastic balloon, her hands met the algae covering the
underwater belly of the buoy.
          The last time she had touched anything so slimy it had been on her head at school. She
had never been popular among islanders her age.
          That algae was gooey like the green slime that her classmates used to glue her hair and
stain her clothes. It was mucous like her classmates, who laughed in the face of the poor students
like her and whispered behind the back of the rich kids.
          I guess I’m the one who’s laughing now, she chuckled. Are they busy polishing their new
‘Executive manager’ tag? I don’t think so. They’re probably jumping from one temporary
contract to another, scraping for money, kissing asses to get whatever job pays enough so they
can dine out once a month. They live in the illusion that they are on their way to success; that
their island offers opportunities, loves them as children. They are struggling like mum did, she
sighed, and will die like she died. Struggling.
          They told me that, for someone poor and stupid like me, getting into the best university
on the Mainland was impossible. That my books were not tickets to a better life. That islanders
belong to the island. Well, look at me now!
          She rested her head on the balloon, wrapped her legs around it, hugged it tight: its curvy
body, marine perfume and gentle rocking soothed her.
          She curled up against the buoy, brought her feet up to embrace it completely, with every
inch of her body; but her right foot slipped on a patch of algae and cut its sole on the chain tied to
the weight at the bottom of the sea.
          “Ahhh!” Liberty cried.
          The cut was not deep but it stung terribly. The cold salty water flowed into the wound
and sent shocks throughout her leg, as if it was not liquid but the sharp, stabbing trident of
Neptune himself.
          Liberty punched the plastic balloon. She punched it and punched it as, when she had been
a child, she had dreamed of mashing to a pulp the well-fed faces of the bullies who tortured her.
Twenty years later, the blood squirting out of her knuckles glazed the top-half of the buoy, while
the blood floating out of her foot sole enveloped the half under the water like crimson smoke.
          “Fucking buoy,” she growled, breathless, after the last punch.
          She started again, towards the beach, with slow breaststrokes, wincing every time her
right foot paddled the water with its injured sole. When she reached the spot where she had met
the canoes - she looked around but they seemed to have disappeared - something brushed against
her leg. Liberty turned… and screamed.
          A shark had followed her blood trail and was circling around her.
          “Help!” She cried. Her terror, exorcized all in that one word, slashed her throat with its
claws. “Shark! Help me!”
          But there was no one around. Only the buoy was near her, still rocking, still chilling. She
was alone. No one on the beach heard her calls for help: the children kept shrieking with
amusement and the ice-cream cart’s trumpet calling new customers. The private beach
megaphone urged a patron to remove his car from an unauthorized parking space.
          After swimming towards the horizon for a dozen yards, the shark U-turned and raced
towards her at full speed. Liberty gasped, swallowed sea water; she coughed, choked, kicked.
The shark opened its mouth and sank its razor-sharp teeth into her right thigh, down to the femur.
          Pulling back, it dragged off a chunk of flesh so heavy that for a moment Liberty thought she had
lost her leg from hip to foot.
          “Aaaaaah!” She screamed. “Leave me alone!”
          The world outside her eyes went black. Her body couldn’t cope, in the space of a few
seconds, with losing so much flesh and blood, and using all that energy to shout that vowel and
those three words.
          Her survival instinct did not switch off, however: it slapped the dark, fainting walls of her
mind, woke her up before she could swallow more sea. Liberty kicked again. Her injured foot,
this time, centered the nose of the shark.
          The monster stopped. It floated, without moving, as if with her kick she had pressed an
off button on its snout. Its eyes stared blankly; the mouth, opened, let the sea in. Then, it
rebooted: the shark closed and opened its eyes, shut its mouth, and swam away, dazed.
          She had to return ashore. To her bag, her plane tickets. Her garden, her career. To James.
She had to get back to James! Their wedding was in two months.
          The mistral howled, now, as if conversing with the sea in a wordless language even more
ancient than the man-spoken Old Islander. It’d be challenging, Liberty thought, to swim against a
wind this strong with two healthy legs. How can I with an injured leg and foot?
          She looked into the water, to assess her wounds, but the amount of blood pumping out of
her thigh was as thick and pigmented as cherry syrup. It was impossible to see her body from her
waist down.
          It’s ok, she reassured herself, the beach is closer than you think. One stroke at the time,
you’ll get there, you’ll get help. You won’t get stuck in this sea, on this island, in this hell.
          She swam, eyes wide open, her sight going on and off like sequences on a faulty cinema screen.
          The beach got closer. When she saw that her bag was where she had left it, at the feet of
her umbrella, her vision returned completely. I can leave! She rejoiced. I’ll take the first flight
today. I’ll be home soon.
          James! My dear James, she thought: I’m coming back to you.
          She had never imagined that one day she could be that happy with anyone. Not after the
boys she had dated on the island, who grabbed, didn’t caress; roared with laughter, didn’t smile;
had kept her behind them, discouraged her to fulfill her wildest dreams.
          She couldn’t remember the name of her first boyfriend. In her memory, he had no face. In
her nightmares, he was a torso that pressed on her lungs, two strong hands that held her down by
her wrists. He was a shadow that ordered her to stand still and quiet, to open her legs.
          ​But then she had found her king on the Mainland. Every time she had curled up in a
corner, crying, reminding herself she was just a poor, stupid islander and could not, deserved not,
do or achieve anything in her life, he had put her on her feet again.
          “You’re none of those things,” he had scolded her so many times, until the day she had
understood that she could, in fact, forget her past on the island and build her own life on the
Mainland. “You are yourself. You are Liberty! Don’t you know what your name means?”
          Had it not been for him, she might have returned to the island and rot there.
          She could not wait to touch him again. Her eyes swelled up with tears and longed to curl
their wet lashes against the skin between his neck and shoulder. That was the nook of his body
that smelled of him the most; where she had found solace every time he had picked her up from
her corner of tears and self-deprecation.
          The mistral rose. It blew her away from the beach, that had become so close she could
have soon touched the bottom of the sea with her feet and walked ashore.
          “Let me go!” Liberty implored the wind. “Please! Let me go home!”
          Swim, she ordered herself. Board that plane, run home and never set foot on this island
again. Return to the garden, to work, to James. Swim for your life.
          But the mistral blew her back to the buoy… beyond the buoy, in the wide-open sea.
          She pushed forward, stabbing and kicking the water with all the little blood and energy
she had left in her arms and legs. In the middle of an arm thrust, she noticed that no diamond
shone on her left hand anymore: her ring had slipped off her finger.
          She looked downwards in the hope of catching the diamond’s shine under her feet, when
black clouds that a moment before had not stained the turquoise vault of the sky blocked the sun.
The sea turned into a black void that stretched to the horizon in every direction she looked.
          She realized that the island wanted her to follow her ring. How long had She waited for
that moment? To see her swim in Her waters again?
          The wind pushed her further away and the beach, the coast, the land disappeared.
          ​She had to stay on the island. Islanders couldn’t leave the island. That beautiful, tragic
island. Her mother had not left, no one ever left, she was not going to leave the island either. She
had boarded her plane home the day before, when she had arrived: her journey was over.
          Liberty stretched her limbs, floated on the black sea like a solitary star in a liquid sky.
The tears that rolled out of her eyes flowed down her temples and disappeared forever in the
void. Liberty let the island pull her down into Her abyss.





Born in Sardinia, Italy, Sarah is a short story writer based in Canterbury, England. When she is not writing, she is most likely reading Japanese locked-room murder mysteries or 19th Century classics. Her work has been featured in The Graveyard Zine and Drip Literary Magazine (Instagram: @ashortstoryteller).