My mother’s face betrayed nothing but the utmost delight. She touched my father’s arms and chest, all the places where the flowers were blooming.
They cut into the ocean in a perfectly perpendicular line. Their color changes depending on how much of the rock is submerged in water in low or high tides and how much sunlight reflects on their smooth surface, but it is always a version of black. They disappear when the moon brings the ocean far inland. In low tides more of them appear, covered in green moss that dries quickly in the summer sun. No one knows how much more is underground, perhaps a whole mountain, and that unknown brings me back to nursing the thought of my mother dying. I think of the underground mountain, how it expands towards the center of the earth, how it pushes deep into the waves towards the horizon, and I wonder if she even died.
More here: https://popula.com/2020/06/08/beneath-the-black-rocks/
