Once upon a time there was a girl who cried a flood of tears.
She walked to the top of the highest hill, to look out over the sea, because she wanted to be at the very edge of the land, to be as far out of the world as she could.
The yellow-green turf was laced with dew and delicate spiders webs. The hill was made of white chalk and hard grey flint.
Her pain was very sharp and it stuck out in spikes all over. Tears were slow to come and were usually cut off before they had a chance to get out of hand. But this time there were too many of them.

tears, salty, hot, soul-healing,
sea sparkles, too bright for tired eyes to gaze upon
filtered vision, fractured with bright shine
green hills kaleidoscope,
your eyes are full and your
fierce tears run down your face.


The tears flowed down her face and carved out rivers in the chalky hills, rivers that flowed into the sparkling sea.

While she was crying, she didn’t know that the pain in her heart and mind was so strong that it broke up pavements and roads, that houses broke free from their roots and sailed away along the rivers. She didn’t know that people were overcome by the torrents of her tears, and floated down on the salt water to the sea. She didn’t know that the breaking roads woke sleeping volcanoes and moved the plates of the earth around, and peals of thunder rolled out from underground as the earth-bones stretched and cracked and the sea of tears created rain and storms and more thunder roared. Strange creatures emerged from deep fissures, creatures who had not seen daylight for many years, their eyes cracking open to blink and gaze upon strangeness.

The waves grew huge and grey, tipped with vast herds of white horses, bright salty-white manes that caught the sparkles from the sea and from her tears.

The white horses thundered around her, their hooves churned up oceans and earth, her pain ran wild, the thunder bellowed, the waves crashed and the gulls screamed overhead.

At last her eyes ran dry and her tears stopped. Gradually the waves settled and the storm faded and the earth stopped moving. The white horses slowed to a walk and then stopped and began to graze.




She now sits waist-deep in the sea filled with her tears.

She gazes over the tops of the hills that have become islands and rise above the sea. The sharp spikes of pain have been blunted.

She twitches her tail and dorsal fins and swims away.