You and I stood on the beach in front of the cottage at night looking into a sky Jackson Pollocked with stars. It was far enough from the city that I could see every one, even the ones that no longer existed, that had already exploded but were so far away they hadn’t yet conveyed that fact to Earth. I must have been six or seven. I was in my underwear for some reason, probably because it was bedtime. You held a flashlight, its beam barely reaching the water’s edge, let alone the moon, as I always hoped it might. You told me the Milky Way was the view of our galaxy from its edges, from one of its outlying arms. The suburbs of the galaxy. You said that, for you, the majesty of the cosmos was proof of a divine hand. That the night sky was pure mathematical elegance and that it was little wonder Einstein died a Christian. I remained quiet because I wasn’t sure what, if anything, the stars were proof of for me.

As we walked back towards the cottage, your flashlight an alien tractor-beam through the reeds, you told me scientists thought most grains of sand on earth had gone through the life cycle of being mountains, then boulders, then sand at least six times. As we walked, I thought about what this said about the age of things and my place among it all. Six times. Six eternities as a beach or a bit of dust blown off the baked desert, then compressed, heated, reforged, and erupted back into a mountain range to begin life again as a cliff, an avalanche, a boulder field, a pebble in a shoe, a grain of sand in a swimmer’s eye.

And as I was lost in this cyclical reverie I stepped and slid on something organic, pulpy. My foot shot up and I yelped, startled and disgusted before I could even register what it was. Your flashlight glanced down and in its gaze glistened back a dead fish, more bone than flesh, more hollow cavity than carcass. What was left of its gills was sloughed off its spine, pulled apart by my foot sliding through it.

“A fish husk,” you said.

“A what?”

“Husk.”