The Sea Calls My Name

By Hollis Shiloh

He lost his magic. How?

 

Returning to the bookstore by the sea, Daniel worries about how to tell his father that the money he saved to send his gifted son to magic school was a waste.

 

Daniel buries his secret under the pretense of coming home for a vacation. Then he meets Leaf Springfield, a beautiful young man who's been systematically beaten down by his uncle.

 

Irresistibly drawn to one another, they learn they share more than a love for raw fish and the ocean—they both lost a mother, and their ties to the ocean may be more fantastic than they can imagine.

 

Passion explodes between the two. It terrifies Daniel how quickly his feelings for Leaf grow. There may be more here than meets the eye—about both of them.

 

 

This is the second edition.  It has no significant changes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Spare Words Press
• Release date: Oct 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201559854

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The Sea Calls My Name

by Hollis Shiloh

About the story:

He lost his magic.  How?

Returning to the bookstore by the sea, Daniel worries about how to tell his father that the money he saved to send his gifted son to magic school was a waste.

Daniel buries his secret under the pretense of coming home for a vacation.  Then he meets Leaf Springfield, a beautiful young man who's been systematically beaten down by his uncle.

Irresistibly drawn to one another, they learn they share more than a love for raw fish and the ocean—they both lost a mother, and their ties to the ocean may be more fantastic than they can imagine.

Passion explodes between the two.  It terrifies Daniel how quickly his feelings for Leaf grow.  There may be more here than meets the eye—about both of them.

The Sea Calls My Name

Everyone loves the sea, but I love all her moods.

I love her when she lashes and screams as much as when she cups the shore tenderly. I never knew my mother; the sea took her place for me. One of my earliest memories is floating in a little coracle my father gave me for one of the highest tidal pools. He stood near and watched. The water dappled sunlight up at me, and when I put my hand down into the water, it felt warm to my touch, warm as the blood in my veins.

Papa says I have magic. In fact, everyone said I had magic. But somewhere, somehow, everyone was wrong. I’d gone to school with talent, and then it had disappeared.

It was the first day of summer vacation from magic college when I went back to my father’s house. But I was not on vacation. The college let me stay that long only out of kindness, to keep me from the humiliation of heading home early, and in the hopes I would find my magic again. When school resumed, I just wouldn’t return. Because I didn’t have magic, after all. Papa’s fees were wasted. All my studies were in vain. Everyone’s belief in me was wrong.

I shut the gate and walked up the path slowly to my father’s house. I knew he wouldn’t be inside. He’d be around the front, selling books to people who came to the beach to rest and recuperate. We live near a thriving resort area where wealthy people come and breathe the sea air, as well as near a little village with poor fisherfolk and people who earn their living from the hardscrabble soil.

I remember seeing women in their ethereal white dresses breeze into the shop, women with languid, pale faces seeking something light to read as they recuperated from some illness or other by the sea. My father, always the gentleman, made these women right at home. To this day he sells a lot of books to women.

That was how he met my mother. She came to the shop one day and bought a book. The next day she came back and bought the exact same book. And then again, the next day. He said that was when he knew; she might not love books, but she cared for him.

He still doesn’t speak of her, but I think of her as looking like those beautiful, pale women with their sickly faces. He has few pictures of her, and no one in the village talks of her. She drowned at sea, but lives on in my imagination, and sometimes in the harrowed, aching look around my father’s eyes.

I kicked the sand off my shoes and slipped in through the kitchen door. The screen banged, a familiar sound. I swallowed the lump in my throat, set the kettle on the stove, and started to make some tea. My father likes tea, and I haven’t yet grown up enough to really like the taste of coffee, though I try to pretend I have, everywhere but at home.

How will I ever tell him?

I watched the pot, waited for it to boil. Around me, I heard the sounds of village life and the sea. The sea called to me with her gentle waves, but I couldn’t go. If I went to the sea before I told my father, I was sure I’d break down. And then how would I be strong enough to tell him at all?

Sometimes I want to walk into the sea and keep going. That must sound like I want to die, but I don’t. I want to sink into my mother’s arms with a sigh and let her carry me home.

Home. This is home, isn’t it? This little village that was mostly fishing families and doubled in size every summer with vacationers. Not quite far enough down the coast for the big ships to leave from, nor a huge resort town, Collinsville was a great place to grow up. I’d missed it so much while stuck at the college, banging my head against the assignments I couldn’t do. But now I would give almost anything to be back there, anywhere but here to have to face my father’s disappointment.

I am not afraid of him. I have never feared my father a day in my life, the man who feeds strays and seagulls and gives books in secret to women in the village who can’t afford them, whose husbands would be angry if they wasted money on such luxury as stories. He’s a gentle man, almost too generous for his own good: he could barely afford to scrape together the fee for the first year of college.

I wished he hadn’t. I wished it was refundable. I could’ve been happy by his side selling books, I think. But now I would always be a failure, the boy who wasn’t good enough.

There were good jobs to be had for people properly trained and licensed to use magic. If one used magic without a license and ended up causing damage, they could face legal problems, even jail time (or worse). So it was a good idea to get training if one had enough magic to be worth the bother, and it was a good career option. There were always extra job choices for trained magicians—better options even if they chose regular-sounding jobs because of that extra skill.

The school I’d gone to was well respected but not cheap.

I rubbed my thumb between my eyebrows and sighed. When the kettle boiled, I poured two mugs of hot water over two teabags. The warm steam curled up to my nose, and I stared down into the darkening liquid. Then, leaving the tea to steep, I headed outdoors, kicking off my shoes.

My feet felt free for the first time in months, soaking in the feeling of the good, clean sandy earth between my toes and the long whip-thin, soft-looking sea grass. I wriggled my toes, digging them into the sand, and stretched my arms over my head.

Maybe he will be less sad if I cook him a good meal. I knew it was a foolish thought, but I grasped at the straw as if it were gold. Leaving my shoes propped beside the back steps, I headed down to the fishmonger’s.

The salt-smelling sea breeze ruffled my hair. The sea called to me. I ignored her, but it was still a