She woke up, face down on a soft nubily thing.
She lifted her head, the effort straining her neck, and her towel stuck to her face. She smelled pine and salt. She frowned and wiped saliva from her face. She crunched on sand and it screeched, grinding on her teeth. Pride reverberateded through her cheek bones. Her muscles felt tight.
She'd left. After all this time, she had left. She was fucked, she knew. The knowledge of needing temperance felt physical.
She would soon be adding to the human population. This thought shook her body's bones and up she went, to her feet. She had sand stuck to her clothes. The plight would be arriving. Survival mode was good for something, it brought with it pure clarity: eat, drink, sleep, safety.
She surveyed the beach, not another human soul in sight. The other souls, the bees and the fish and the birds were quietly breakfasting. The pines sighed behind her.
A smile spread through her, breakfasting with the birds had a nice ring to it. This is nice. She had done the thing labeled by those idiots as "the worst" and she felt nice. Odd, she thought.
Then another smile, her mouth seemed to move in automatic. She felt bubbly inside, an excitement that had been dormant. There had been a lifetime of dodging the whims of the unhinged. It had numbed her, savagely.
A swirl in her gut reminded her, she was feeling for two. Had it awakened the savage in her? A courageous hunger involuntarily turned her head toward the blackberry bushes. Another smile, she would lean into whatever was here for her. She threw her hands up high and howled. The chain reaction set off; birds took flight and fish wiggled deeper into the channel, the pines swayed.
She had been waiting a long time just to survive. Another smile, the freedom and hardship dawning. She closed her eyes and felt the depths of her lineage coming to meet her. Keep going, they whispered. Up the hill, there are delicious berries, they murmured. Welcome to the place where the forest meets the beach, they hummed.
She had chosen the way out. She had taken it. She was into the out now. She was fucked and this time, this way of being fucked, felt good. She pulsed with the romance. She knew it would simmer and settle and the fear would come, the fear and the dirt and the injustice. She knew it but she would not wait around for it. Sunshine warming her, the fear turned alchemized to fuel.
Another smile. The forces at play would excavate her past. She rose to her occasion, agency in tact.
