Silk Handkerchief

The fort – if that was what it was - seemed to grow out of the seawall as though it was some natural stage a seawall went through in its growth; like a plant flowering or producing some elaborate seedpod. The seawall itself seemed ancient, but recently repaired in places. It was one of those timeless, through being endlessly renewed, monuments to continued human existence in a particular place for centuries. A place were the human seemed to merge into the natural in the same way the seawall seemed to just merge into the rocks of the cliff face at each end of the small bay making it hard to say where the one ended and the other began.

The fort too seemed only natural, not man-made emerging from the seawall as though one day it may flower, or open to drop its seeds onto the waves below. The small window was about ten feet above the path along the top of the seawall. I walked there every morning, glancing up at the small window with rusted iron bars, imagining that it could be some cold damp dungeon deep in the cellar of the fortress.

When the slim delicate hand poked through those bars, waving the pale pink silk handkerchief, I was more than a little surprised. When the hand let go of the handkerchief and let it flutter down onto the seawall, I seemed to rush to pick it up almost out of reflex.

Written on the handkerchief, in what looked like mascara, was the single word:

HELP!