Then the noise, the demand, is coming from the other direction. The bell. Someone’s ringing the bell. It’s time.

At first I’m stumbling, almost crawling, my arms helping me keep moving along the little dirt road as my Tin Man joints ache. Soon I manage to get myself upright, and then to walk and almost run, looking like I’ve been in an earthquake or a war. Like my house has fallen down.

A glint of blue interrupts my peripheral vision, gagging blue and flecked with froth, and again I turn my face inland, straining, willing the chapel to come into view soon. The sea is the acid belly of a monster who eats dead bodies. We’ve been feeding it from coastlines and off the sides of boats forever. Walk the plank! Man overboard! Shark attacks, naval battles, plane crashes, tidal waves that take people who were minding their own business (sometimes pretty fucking far from the stupid ocean) and pound suction-cup muscles through the frames of their houses and drag them screaming through coughs of stinging salt water, groping for solid things to hold on to, crying without being able to know they’re crying because the salt water the stupid salt water is all over them and it’s too similar. Kids who go out too far because they don’t know yet what “too far” means and no one told them, not in a way they could understand—just “don’t go out too far” without any way to measure how far is “too far,” not even a word about how to judge it. It’s not like they didn’t try, these kids. They did everything right, they weren’t trying to be contrary, they just didn’t know, and got caught in the undertow. It’s not their fault but they’re the ones who suffer.

And people love the sea, love it, even though everyone knows it’s full of shit and garbage and toxic waste and thousands of years’ worth of dead bodies. They ride boats across it for fun. They get in it, let it touch their skin. They let it up their nose, open their eyes and let it graze their corneas. Well, they can have it. My lungs strain, my legs are a mess of bug bites and nettle stings. I’m sweating in the rising heat, but the sweat dissolves and that’s how I like it. Not big-fish-little-fish. Dog eat dog. On land.