Mr Fin woke up with an eye like a bag of wind, like a lotus. He had slept the night in his chair, and his muscles were bitter.

He walked. It was early, quiet. It must have been very early. Rosy fingertips, he said. Sing muse, he said.

He’d wandered all the way to the dock, where he admired the clicking of lines on the silvery pale masts dallying above the pier, wobbling on the purple waves below, proud, dumb ducks. Retreating back to land, he settled on one of his usual benches, looking out at the water. In the half-light, he was pressed against the world like his hand against a page, not reading. The tide brought line after line of foam.

When he felt a gravitational pull on his attention, on his body first, his mind and eyes trailed toward the water, toward an unwavelike, unloglike form sliding in on the ramshackle tide. Leaning forward, he tried to open his eyes, open again, really see.

If somehow one’s nerves could multiply and reach into all the miniature worlds of one’s organs and flesh, weaving among the molecules of fat and tissue, coursing ever more finely into the rush of blood and more still to weave into the non-places between protons, neutrons, and electrons, sending out excitable quantum whiskers, all charged with feeding the same storm of attention, one would seem to float, mist-like, more empty space than not, feeling not thicker but diffuse, light, feeling all the lack of contact within oneself and between oneself and the world, a phantom, an opening in space, a hovering idea.

When he saw the head, he knew. By his count, at that moment, knowing full well the day of the week and the week of the month, having counted in his head and many times worked things out on paper, he knew that it had taken twenty years, three months, and twelve days for his son’s body to wash ashore.

Mr Fin was little more than a perspective in space focused on the arrival of the head, the shoulder blades, appearing and disappearing in the unfolding water. He moved from the bench, not feeling his legs or his arms or his chest, susceptible only to the mutual tide of water and air, drawn to the coiling foam that gathered into itself, the infinite patience of the sea, until the sand broke the sway of his son’s body, and Mr Fin ran to the water’s lip.

He splashed into the water rushing up and back around his ankles, plying through loamy and sucking sand. He steadied himself, made himself strong, so he could reach down and hold the body still.

He lifted it into his arms and carried it up the hill…

(drawing by Meghan McNealy)