Only The Sea

There is a man lying on the shore, eyes closed with white and blue noise pounding in his ears, sweet and deafening. The wind blows across his skin so gentle that he can almost feel the turning of the earth beneath him, dragging its waters through the caress of the moon so that salt warm blue creeps up around his feet. The work of the moon, as ever, is gentle, and irresistible, and inexorable, all the immensity of gravity that binds galaxies together and rips stars apart, all the fury of the cosmos's ancient dance, poured into water that carries little shells up onto the beach to the delight of little hands and sends eddies swirling around the legs of little birds with needle-keen beaks. He hears their cries, old and high, voices of creatures whose mothers and mothers' kin have swept the skies time immemorial since the youth of birds. The man's son feeds them crumbs, and they squabble for bread with an echo of talons and beaks that rent flesh like dune grass. They look to the same moon, farther away, orbiting around an earth that spins slower for the dragging of eons, and the land and the waves remember.

The man remembers that the tide is coming in, and climbs up beyond the reach of the waves, feeling silly for the fear that pricks his breast. It's only the tide. Only the sea.

A little girl, chubby and pigtailed, heaps sand against the rushing water, cheeks pink from the touch of the sun and the intensity of her concentration. Her mother smears lotion across her shoulders, clucking in disapproval at the flush that has already arisen there. The sun has kissed; it will bite. It is unblinking above, heedless, an inferno of such vastness that it pulls worlds along in its wake and bakes them to cinders, piles tall clouds over the tropics and stirs them into hurricanes, fills the deep with every kind of life and burns its own heart in the darkness. The girl's shoulders, despite her mother's efforts, color deep red.

The woman watches the sun sink behind the earth, scattering color across the sky and fire over the waters. “Beautiful,” she thinks. She winces at the pinch of her own skin, burned like her daughter's, and laughs ruefully. It's only a sunburn.

Only after the last flush of dusk is gone and the last light has drained out of the horizon does she remember; only when a gale shakes the windows and the sea kicks up swells like mountains and her burns ache and ache; how the sun touches, and bites, and devours, draws the sea into the sky to crash back down again, crushes atoms together to gild her daughter's hair-

Hush, little girl. It's only the wind. It's only the storm.

It's only the sea.