Tlocatl stood looking over the ocean, her hands stroking the sides of her gathering basket absently. She was lost in though, aided by the soft lapping of the sea. She was thinking of something her grandfather used to say about the sea.
'The sea is like a woman - seductive and dangerous. You ought always be careful near the sea...those who venture out upon it take their lives in their hands.'
She had been five when he talked of this and too young to even begin to comprehend what he meant. But even now, in her later years, she never saw the sea as a woman. It was its own creature, neither male nor female....and dangerous in a way humans could never aspire to. More seductive than any human woman - or man for that matter. her own husband had followed his heart out to the sea and had been claimed young. There was ever after a strange melancholy in the sea for her now. a shadow to trouble her mind.
For Tlocatl, the sea was another embodiment of the uncanny....just as the B'alam were. She only saw them in the corners of her sight and in the early wakings from dreams, before the day began. And they also troubled her mind, as the sea did. The longing to know one of these creatures stemmed from some unidentified region of herself. And even old as she now was she could never quite define what made them so alluring to her. The closest she could come to it was to say "They are other than myself"
She murmured these words softly to herself and the sea echoed them back to her.
