The Island at Low Tide
The rain stopped between one breath and the next. Zaid felt the last drops leave his shoulders, and the warm air closed over him like a blanket pulled up. He stood in the shallows with his trousers rolled, watching the rings fade where the rain had been. River surfaced beside his knee, whiskers beaded, and shook once. Drops went everywhere. "That's the last of it," Zaid said. The clouds were sliding off toward the far edge of the sea, trailing grey skirts, and behind them the sky had gone the colour of the inside of a shell. The water was warm to the ankle, warmer than the air above it. Somewhere out past the rocks, something made a low sound, like someone blowing across the mouth of a jar.
Zaid knew the stone that sound came from. Out where the rocks went flat, one boulder had a hollow worn through its side, and when a swell pushed in, the air came out of the hole in one long note. Hoo. Then a pause. Then hoo again, as the next swell arrived. He had listened to it all summer from the beach, the way you listen to a clock in another room. Tonight it sounded closer, and lower, and slower. River was already swimming toward it, a line of small ripples peeling off behind them. Zaid waded after. The water that should have reached his waist reached his shins. He looked down and saw pale sand where he had only ever seen deep green. Hoo, said the stone, patient as anything.
The tide was further out than he had ever seen it, and it kept going, the way a sheet slides off a bed. First a ridge of wet sand broke the surface, a hand's width across. Then it was as wide as his arm. Then it was a path, and then a long pale island lying in the middle of the water with the sea on both sides. Zaid stepped up onto it. It held him. The sand was ribbed under his feet, firm as a washboard. River poured out of the shallows and onto the bar and lay on their back, pleased, paws folded on their chest. "Hear that? The sea is still breathing," Zaid said. Hoo, went the stone, as if it had been asked.
They walked the length of it together, Zaid on his feet and River in a rolling, bumping sort of run beside him. The island was longer than his street. Things had been left on it that the sea usually kept to itself. A scallop shell, ridged and heavy, still holding a cup of water. A crab's old shell, empty and light as paper, which Zaid lifted and set down again without closing his fingers. A gull's feather standing straight up in the sand like a little mast. Near the middle, half buried, a pebble of green glass worn soft on every edge. Zaid dug it out with two fingers and held it up. The last of the light went through it. River put their nose against it and sneezed.
At the far end there was a pool, left behind when the water went. It was warm as a bath and clear to the bottom. A flatfish lay in it with sand on its back, pretending with its whole heart to be the floor. Two hermit crabs went about their business in borrowed shells. Zaid knelt and put his hand flat in the water and waited until the flatfish forgot about him and settled again. River watched from the rim, chin on their paws, whiskers twitching every time a crab moved. Neither of them said anything for a long while. Hoo, came the stone across the flat water, and a ring went out from the middle of the pool, as if the pool had heard it too.
Later they lay on their backs on the sand, side by side, and let the sky fill in. First one star, over where the clouds had gone. Then three. Then more than Zaid could hold in his head at once. River had rolled close enough that their wet shoulder touched his arm, and Zaid could feel them breathing, quicker than the sea, steady as a small engine. The sand under him had been under the water this morning. It would be under the water again. That thought sat in him, not sad exactly, more like the feeling of the last day of something. He reached over and put the green pebble on his chest so it would not get lost.
The first water crossed the island while he was still looking up. It came as a thin tongue of foam, no deeper than a saucer, running over the ribbed sand and soaking into it. Zaid sat up. River was already standing on their hind legs to see. Another tongue came, and another, and the two sides of the sea began feeling their way toward each other across the middle. The pool at the far end lost its rim and became part of everything again. Zaid found that he minded. He had only had the island for one evening, and he had not finished with it. Hoo, said the stone, slower now, with more water in its throat. He stood up and brushed the sand from the backs of his legs.
So he spent what was left. He walked the thin spine that was still dry, counting his steps, and got to forty-one before the water took it. He set the gull's feather upright again where the foam had laid it flat. He put the crab's paper shell high on the last hump of sand, so it would float off gently rather than be rolled. Then he looked at the green pebble in his palm for a while. It would be a good thing to keep in a pocket. He crouched instead and pushed it back into the sand where he had found it, thumb-deep, and patted it smooth. "Stay there," he said. River put one wet paw on the spot, which seemed to settle the matter.
The last of the island went under without any fuss. The water simply arrived from both sides and met, and then there was no island, only a paler patch in the dark sea, and then not even that. Zaid stood in it up to his knees, in the exact place where he had been lying down. The sand was still ribbed under his feet. He could feel every ridge of it through the water, unchanged, going about its business. "Hear that? The sea is still breathing," he said, quieter this time. River rose beside him and hung in the water with just their eyes and nose showing. Hoo, went the stone, and the sound came across the surface and went through Zaid's chest and out the other side.
River turned and swam a slow circle around him, then stopped at the hollow boulder and waited. Zaid waded over. The hole was lower on the rock than it had been at the start of the evening; he could see the wet line where the water had reached, and the drier line above it, and the paler band further up where it would reach by morning. Stone kept a record of the whole business. He put his hand over the hole. Air pushed out warm against his palm, then stopped, then pushed again. Tomorrow the water would leave again, a little later, a little further, and the island would come up out of it with the green pebble still in the sand, waiting to be dug up with two fingers.
They swam back together, Zaid on his front with his arms out, River looping under him and surfacing on the other side. Where his hands pushed through the shallows, the water lit up. Small cold sparks, blue-white, turning over with the sand and going out. He swept one arm, then the other, to see it happen again, and River rolled through the glow like someone turning over in bed. On the beach his lantern stood where he had left it on the flat rock, one small flame behind glass, patient about being left. Zaid sat down in the dry sand beside it, and River came up out of the sea and shook, and lay down heavy and damp against his side, smelling of salt.
The warm air dried him slowly. Behind them the sea was doing what it does, taking back what it had lent out, bringing it round again. Hoo, came the stone, far off now, with long room between one note and the next. Zaid rested his hand on River's back, on the thick wet fur that was already warming, and felt it go up and down. He thought about forty-one steps of sand lying quiet under all that water. "Hear that? The sea is still breathing," he said, almost not out loud. River made a small sound that was mostly air. The flame in the lantern leaned, shrank to a bead, and went out, and the dark came in soft, and neither of them moved.
