Mythic Muse |
Issue 16
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The computer screen taunted him. A blue-white canvas, unchanging and defiantly blank.
He typed a few words. Hit delete. More typing. Delete. Kavya had engaged in such futile exercises for hours, for days, and, truth be told—in spite of the claims he made to his agent and publisher—for months. At present, he found himself far from his Hollywood home, on the beachy outskirts of Gokarna, Karnataka, a little-known town on India’s southwestern coast, rife with rich mythology, and home to a towering statue of Lord Shiva rising a hundred and twenty-three feet into the sky. His cabin overlooked one of the most isolated and breathtaking coastal landscapes of the Indian subcontinent. A stunning private beach. A secret lair for top-tier writers and artists. The two-week retreat was his publisher’s lavish outlay, a desperate ploy to birth Kavya Shaw’s follow-up bestseller from the gestative confines of his brilliant mind. But now, as he sat at his writing desk with a view of the water, his delete button remained disconcertingly overused. When his agent had pleaded for a first draft, or even an outline, Kavya had insisted, smacking fingertips against greying temples, “I have the story, up here! I just need peace and quiet to write it down.” As the sun set on his first night in Gokarna, with nothing but “peace and quiet,” and a dazzling half-moon rising through a cloud-soaked sky, Kavya’s finger hovered over the keyboard for a long moment. On a whim, he typed “Once upon a time…” He laughed hysterically into the still cabin air and smashed his finger against the delete button until the cursor could move no more and all he could do was keep silent vigil for words that never came. A thick sigh—the perpetual soundtrack of his empty screen—harmonized with the ebb and flow of ocean waves outside. He stared through the window at an expanse of foam-tipped azure as far as the eye could see. A head bobbed in the moonlit water and he sucked in his breath. A porpoise? Or perhaps, a dolphin? There it was again. The hairs on his arm rose and he stood up to peer at the choppy waters. Someone was unmistakably swimming, and yet the illuminated sand was pristine and footprint-free. The figure rose through the water and waded onto sand. It was dressed in white and moved like a woman’s body. A black cloud slipped over the moon, and the beach blackened momentarily. When moon rays lit the vista seconds later, there was only empty water and sand. He blinked, disbelieving. Had he imagined her? That night he fought his bed clothes in a fitful, and ultimately unsuccessful, effort at sleep. The next morning, he made his way down to the water. He was alone and swam until his feet no longer treaded sand. Tall cliffs rose up protecting a bay verdant with coconut palms. The afternoon turned into evening and he ate a meal, and still, the blank screen stared back defiantly. By sunset he stared through the window, half expecting the buoyant apparition to reappear in the water, but there was nothing. * * *
Kavya had desperately hoped the painstakingly-crafted prose of his first book would make a splash somewhere in the obscure annals of the literary world. But unexpectedly, it snagged the Booker Prize and blew up and now it was everywhere.
He was bombarded by interviews, appearances, book club endorsements, blurb requests, guest lecture invitations, and book signings, living every writer’s dream. The book sales rendered him so wealthy he no longer needed to work his 9-to-5 job at the Los Angeles Times. So, he quit, purchased a brand-new home in the Hollywood Hills, and hired an Instagram-famous decorator to curate the perfect writing studio so he could work on his follow-up bestseller. But no words came forth. Kavya Shaw, breakout literary star and erudite intellectual had no idea what to write next. The frenzied waterfall of ideas he had distilled into the first book during late-night writing sessions, while working a full-time job, had dried into nothingness. His peers, jealous of his unlikely success, had slapped him on the back with pronouncements of I can’t wait to see what you’ll do next. But next was nothing. And now, on this haunted beach, a ghost lurked in the waters, taunting the hollowness in his head. * * *
A week passed and, still, Kavya had nothing to show for the expensive writing retreat other than five empty bottles of wine and a cluttered sink, brimful of debris from prepared foods delivered every few days.
He felt a pull, not to the story he couldn’t write, but toward the window, and the distant collage of alabaster cream, piped artfully over a sapphire spread and the mysterious figure that haunted his dreams. The sun marched evening-ward and Kavya stood and kicked his stiff legs, urging blood to flow down limbs. A dozen jumping jacks pumped his body and mind. “Tonight, will be the night,” he said out loud, panting and sweaty. A new night, a new pledge. The story will come. I can feel it. He ate silently, watching darkness plunge the valley below into secret shadows. The moon only the previous week had been half-full and bright as a spotlight, its fractured shards reflected in the churn of violent waves as though inaugurating his retreat. Now, it was new and hidden from view. A subdued tide revealed itself by the dim glow of starlight. An impulse possessed Kavya. He would write by the water’s edge, ensconced in warm sand. The words would flow out of him like the relentless roil of the sea upon land. He pulled on sneakers, shoved a notebook and pen into his back pocket and snapped the emergency headlamp onto his forehead. His foot slipped for an instant on the smooth rock steps outside his cabin and he cursed, grabbing the wooden railing to steady himself. In the dark of night, the familiar beach was an upside-down echo of its sun-drenched cousin. As his feet hit sand, bite-sized albino crustaceans scurried into pencil hole homes by the beam of his headlamp. The sand was smoothed by an even drenching and Kavya’s footprints were the only indentations visible alongside minuscule crab holes. He breathed in salted wind sloughing off the surface of softly lapping water and walked further out, toward the retreating skin of low tide. This would do. Legs crossed and notebook illuminated, his nib hovered over a page as blank as the untouched beach. Minutes passed and no great thread of story emerged, no pithy first line, no kernel of craft or story seed. He was doomed to flail under the weight of grand expectations, to burn out like a fiery supernova. He sighed, switched off the headlamp and closed his eyes to meditate. An unmistakable echo of breath reached him—not from his own chest but from the water. Every hair on his body stood on end, magnetized by fear. There was someone in the water, in the dark heft of night, inside the sinking swirl of water, there was, assuredly, another person. A scream caught in his throat as the breathing, regular and pulsing, came nearer. The sharp exhales of a swimmer. Kavya’s body was paralyzed, but his eyes danced in a frenzy, this way and that, into the darkness. Too terrified to inhale lest he alert the monstrous breather, he began to tremble. Then, adrenaline surged and he snapped the headlamp on, flooding the scene before him into blinding brightness. Skin illuminated, dark hair slapped and flapped, a white sail whipped his face and he went berserk with panic, falling onto his back, his notebook flying through the air before it landed with a thwack somewhere out of reach. Kavya’s throat stuck and then unstuck and he shrieked a high-pitched ragged tear of a scream. His limbs flailed against sand, and distinct footsteps pattered close by, sending grit sprinkling into his eyes and mouth. He coughed and spat and swirled his head in wild panic. The light swung this way and that as he turned away from the water. Shafts of light cast sand and rocks into relief. A swish of white in the distance disappeared into a large rocky outcropping at the base of the hills that ringed the private beach. “Who’s there?” he yelled, the bellow of his own voice anchoring him to the desolate black beach. He stood, readjusted the headlamp, and planted his legs into a fighting stance, ready to tackle the ghost. For it had to have been a ghost. The sandscape, moments earlier, had shown no markings, no bi-pedal indentations, but his own. Now, there was a second set of prints. Kavya steadied his breathing to slow his racing heart and surveyed the snow-angel mark of his tumble in the sand. The wraith’s prints had come within five feet of him and he shivered in the humid ocean air. He picked up his notebook, dusted sand off, and briskly clambered back up the stone steps to his cabin, glancing back to ensure there was no pursuer, and locked himself inside, panting and doubled over against the door. Something, someone, was out there. An icy chill crept up his skin and he scratched his forearms and thighs as though the hairy legs of phantom insects scrabbled across them. * * *
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Sonali Kolhatkar won 3rd Place of the Fiction Writing Contest. is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster, essayist, and author. She is also the founder, host, and executive producer of the long-running program, Rising Up With Sonali which airs as a radio show on 30+ radio stations around the U.S., as a TV show on Free Speech TV (DirecTV, Dish Network, Sling TV), and a podcast.
Her nonfiction books include Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords and the Propaganda of Silence (2006, Seven Stories), Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights, 2023) and Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World is Possible (2025, Seven Stories). Sonali's debut novel, Queen of Aarohi, is forthcoming in 2027 by Red Hen Press. |