And now he has built a fence, a wall, in the hot sun, on the other side of the world, the side which will have no rain with the coming drought.

He considers the wall he has built. Is it a haven? No. Is it protection from the wind? No. He hates himself too much to seek protection. It is to keep dreams from crossing the ocean and coming to him. But nothing ever comes in from the water that isn’t polished away by the sea.

One morning Thomas gets up to answer the door. It’s Ruth. “You need me,” she says in as formal a manner as she can muster.

He laughs. “I don’t need anybody.”

“Let me in,” she says, walking past him. She opens the old curtains. She looks out the window to see the world, but there is only the wall.

At first he’s ashamed of his place. Books on the floor, a dirty towel on the doorknob. Food on the dirty counter. He moves aside because she is pushy. She passes him again and sets some food on the counter with tiles no longer grouted, having never been rightly finished. It is a kettle of stew.

“I won’t eat it.”

He swears to her again that he won’t.

“I’ll leave it just in case,” she says, trying not to look at his place, not to smell it.

“You are losing weight.”

She knows he doesn’t care.

“Do you need coffee?” She knows how he loves it. She has a thermos and places it beside the stew.

Behind her the waves are coming back in, but he doesn’t have to see them now that the wall is up. Still, there are the tide pools, he remembers again, the places he and Ruth used to look at with awe, happily, places of great mystery and discovery for them. He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to remember her or anyone.

She pulls one old curtain aside. “Come here and look, Thomas. Look out this window. Over here. Your fence hasn’t entirely worked. It hasn’t kept everything out. They’ve come up to rest in the shade. Those are your kin.”

He looks at her to see if she is kidding with him. He gets up to see. And then he sees a seal napping beside his door, waiting for its black-eyed mother. Two others on the other side of the house, their dark soft eyes, and the whiskers. One yawns. He has provided exactly the shade they need.

He looks at the seal, his cousin. Ruth is serious about the kinship. He’s forgotten all the old stories, although they will soon return to him, the octopus, the whale mother. And now he remembers the story of the woman who married the seal and her family rejected her when they found out that the man with beautiful eyes was a seal with winged, webbed feet. The seal is one of his clan ancestors.

“Marco was born with webbed feet, you know.” She is just talking, but she is also still grieving.