The Sea is Coming

By Jill Zeller

Quilt of Seas
A young girl waits for the sea to take her home and finds friends in the strangest place
Electric Pathways of the Heart
A young woman fights killer plants and finds love
Memory Song
A man forgets what he wants to remember with the help of a disturbed researcher
Pathways of Depot Verde
In an arboretum in space, a widower uncovers his dead wife's secret
Boy with a Thousand Arms
A teenage boy abandoned by his mother learns more that he ever wanted to know when he discovers where she lives

• Language: English
• Publisher: J Z Morrison Press
• Release date: Oct 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301371273

Jill Zeller

The author of numerous short stories and novels, Jill Zeller lives in Albany, Oregon with her patient husband, and a venerable cat and her thralls, two adult English Mastiffs. Her works explore the complex geology of reality. Some may call it fantasy but there are rarely swords and never elves.

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The Sea is Coming

Tales of Unstoppable Change

by

Jill Zeller

SMASHWORDS EDITION

******

PUBLISHED BY:

J Z Morrison Press on Smashwords

The Sea is Coming; Tales of Unstoppable Change

Copyright © 2013 by Jill Zeller

Cover art by http://depositphotos.com

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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The Sea is Coming

Tales of Unstoppable Change

THE STORIES

Quilt of Seas

Electric Pathways of the Heart

Memory Song

The Pathways of Depot Verde

Boy with a Thousand Arms

Quilt of Seas

The day I met the women we didn't know what the Pacific Ocean had in mind. Their new house, clad in cedar siding with a balcony on a tower, steadily rose up on a stretch of land once grazed by Holsteins. Once my play field, my arena of fantastic games, now it was definitely more interesting. Their names were Shirley and Greta. Shirley was the nice one.

I rode my skateboard to Mary's Kitchen, my mother's restaurant in Tillamook with the best pancakes in the county. She didn't looked pleased when I told her where I had been. At the time I thought she worried Shirley and Greta's way of life might rub off, turn me into one of them. I might catch their anomalous disease.

Don't you bother those women, Ramona. They are busy and they don't need the town ragamuffin bothering them.

She always called me the town ragamuffin because I went everywhere on my skateboard, particularly in summer, and I knew everyone. Other people fussed over their kids, kept them indoors, confined them on invisible, nervous leashes. Mom never did that to me. I hated hanging around the house, except when mom's friends came over. I loved their noise, the odor of pot wafting from their clothes as they ate her focaccia and fruit tarts. But when they left, the house became sad. I didn't like to stick around, then.

I started visiting Shirley on Thursdays, her day off. Whenever I came Greta retreated to the tower into her workroom. The house was hung in rich, delicious fabric smelling like chocolate. Greta's quilts won awards in shows around the country. Shirley was writing a book. They saved money and paid for the building of this house. To live by the ocean was their dream.

That winter as if to warn us of our doom the ocean pounded the coast. In one of those moments you would remember until you were palsied with age, a moment when you could recall what you were doing when you received brutal news, the World Meteorological Conference announced its devastating findings. It was January 13th and I was waiting for supper, looking at my favorite photo of my dad. I liked to look into the background behind my dad as he smiled beside his Volkswagen bus wearing tie-dye and dread-locks and pretend I was standing in the shrubbery.

Barely listening to the newswoman's tense voice I tried to see inside my dad's bus. I imagined myself inside but I could never see myself looking out through the curtains in the back windows. But when I heard my mother's fierce breath, I followed her stare at the TV screen.

They said the oceans were rising much faster than they thought. They said the coast would be under water in two years. They said communities should make plans to evacuate low lying areas.

Mom sat on the ottoman and listened, her face like stone in the TV light. I knew this was a bad thing. I thought of Greta and Shirley and their new house. I saw mom's restaurant lying ghostly underwater.

Holding the frame of my father, I said, Will that mean dad's grave will be underwater forever?

Mom turned her head to look at me. Her ginger hair glinted and I couldn't see her eyes through her glasses. She got up and grabbed me and hugged me.

The sea and rain kept me from Tower House and Shirley for three weeks. When I finally got there one warm February Saturday the kitchen door was open to the back deck. Hearing angry voices I waited out of sight beside the wall. When the voices stopped I walked in to see Shirley at the table, her head on her arms.

I thought she might be crying, but when she looked at me her face was dry. Ramona, come on in. Want some chai?

She always made chai for me. I stood beside the table and watched her make it.

They say this will all be under water in two years. She said it to the water kettle as it blew a plume of steam into the air. It's hard to believe. I followed her glance out the kitchen windows to the blue jewel of the sea, like one of Greta's squares of voile. It breaks my heart. It is killing Greta. She loves this house.

Greta rarely said two words to me and I thought her splendid and cold, like an elf-queen. I wondered she could love this house so. I wondered she could love anything.

With my chai I followed Shirley into the great room where Greta's newest quilt draped the couch. Her fabric sea held all the colors I had ever seen in the Pacific as it shifted moods from blustering to ease. I had grown up beside the sea. Greta had only been here a year. Yet she saw what I saw.

Shirley smoothed it. This is her most beautiful yet. It just needs the backing sewn on.

That evening I told my mother about the beautiful quilt but instead of listening appreciably as she usually did, she told me never to go back there. She said I should be playing with my friends as much as I could because they would all be moving away. I argued that I thought she liked Shirley. I had seen them talking in a friendly manner in Mary's Kitchen. Mom snapped that she was friendly to all the customers and that I should do as I was told.

Stung and irked, I went to my room. She was unhappy since knowing she would lose the restaurant. Everyone at Mary's Kitchen was on edge. They argued and quarreled. They sent angry letters to the editor. Why hadn't the president done something about global warming years ago? How had the ice cap begun to melt so rapidly? It must have been terrorists. It must have been a virus. It must have been liberals.

But when