Her tears will feed us

   The scene is a small harbor. For as far as one can see the sea is completely still. It is so still in fact that the longer one looks at it the less like the sea it appears. It looks rather like an eye, a huge deep blue eye. A group of men in dark coats and dark pants, shadows, are walking down the rocky beach towards the water. When they reach the shoreline they kneel down and begin hauling in their nets from the deep blue eye. The nets are filled with fish, dark fish that look like shadows of fish in the same way that the men look like shadows of men. It doesn't take long for the men to finish hauling in their nets for their nets are small. Bundling their nets together they carry them over their shoulders. Slowly they make their way back along the beach. As they progress however their nets appear not to be nets at all. Instead they are clear and liquid and the fish that were caught inside them have become invisible.

   And so it is that these men who are shadows walk back towards the houses in the distance, each carrying a tear drop over his shoulder. Behind them the lid slowly closes over the sea.

from Short Films from the Fourteenth Century  © Mike Schertzer, 1994