Hedy moved through the streets of Tempest Bay. On the trail of all that mattered. Nearly at the town intersection. Sound and fury and madness everywhere.
This is what the world could be next, she realised. No data, no fibre optics, just everyone talking and fucking and dreaming and hitting and loving and dealing with each other. This is why they live here, maybe. This wasn’t the past at all. Tempest Bay isn’t quaint old hidden rituals and secrets. It’s the future. A giant howling dialogue taking place on a landscape of emotional climate change. Just taking place here a little earlier, a little more intensely than the crumbling structures overseas.
High above, behind her, the clifftop tower brooded, as it weathered another event in its long history. Breathed the ocean in and out.
Sounds from the northwest. Animal noises up in the woods above the streets. In the hills where she’d heard people went to have sex.
Well, they were having sex now. Wild, howling, noisy sex. The storm and the hills felt like amplifiers. Like everyone was doing the thing inside them turned up to 11.
She realised, with a deep sorrowful rumple in her body, that she hadn’t had sex in a long time. Before her obsessions and broken self took charge of the ship. There’d been a Hedy who had enjoyed the world… and she knew, right then, that she could head up onto those trails and fuck herself blind and enjoy the pure animal bliss of being nothing more than that.
Townsfolk walked past. In clothes and robes. Laughing. Chattering. Pushing a wheelbarrow with a hunk of earth in it. Her earth. She could see the dollhouse in it that she’d blamed Lucia for stealing.
She put the sex sounds out of her head and followed the wheelbarrow. She was a meteorologist. Never one for distractions when she got stubborn about something.