He flattened out his newspaper to spread his gifts on it, but the wind flared, stole a page, and skipped it away toward me. As I put my foot out to stop it and pick it up, he turned. I don’t remember the page number. International. Something about Yemen. Something else about a man building playgrounds in refugee camps. I do remember the look on his face though, when he saw me, as captured as those sleepwalkers, as vigilant as those kids. I was something to him. I was already, definitely something. I just knew it. We watched each other as I walked across the sand to where he was sitting in his shadow-black clothes, no more likely to keep my distance than a marble is to stay at the top of a slope.

“It’s you,” he said, and I said, “Yes,” because what else could I say? And then I gave the page back.

He seemed to hesitate before he took it and for a moment we were both holding on to different edges of the same paper. I can’t say how long that moment was, I really can’t—a second, an hour, a year, they’d all work, I’d believe all of them, they could all be true.

And then I let go.

TEN

The boy lay back in the sand, and more pages cut and snapped across him in the breeze, but he didn’t try to stop them. He didn’t do anything. His eyes in the bright sun were black tunnels of pupil, flecks of dark and amber pressed out to the edges. I was still standing over him and I moved so his face was in my shade. The sea messed and churned behind us. I could hear its beat and pull and whisper.

One of the dogs started barking and somewhere a seagull squalled and the sand-digger kids ran toward us, around me and over him, shouting at each other, stomping down the sand, mouths open, wind stealing their words. The littlest one at the back of the group grinned at him, they grinned at each other, and as she jumped right over his body she froze, impossibly, in midair, and turned, smiling, to look straight at me. The boy lifted his arms toward her, and she caught another flying sheet of newspaper between her hands, like she was banging cymbals, and held herself still and proud in the air, still watching me, her eyes a bewitched sealskin-gray, cool and knowing. Then she landed, precise and taut as a gymnast, and her mother pounded over to collect her. “I flew,” the kid said, and her mother said, “How lovely,” and the boy sat back up, touched his fingers to his mouth, and watched them go.