What her fingers find is something hard and slippery, and though she doesn’t want to, she grabs on with all her might and lets herself be carried, faster and faster, up towards the light, to where she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave, now. She wants to stay down there, to take the hand and let it take her home. But instead she is thrown into the air. She gasps, retches, breathes. The thing she is clutching is a long piece of smooth, varnished wood: part of a mast. She watches her hands scrabble like small, white creatures. They can’t be hers. Then she sees, just beyond her fingers, a piece of filmy cloth. A ripple catches it, and the girl sees a yellow rose and a swirl of red, but it is already blackening in the water, fluttering out of sight like a drowning butterfly.

She screams. One word: Mama. The mist takes her little voice and smothers it like a wet pillow pressed across her face. But she fights it. Panic makes her fight. She screams because of the hand that had pushed her up towards the shifting roof of the sea. She screams at her own hands, alien as crabs, that grip the slippery wood with a strength she doesn’t understand. She screams again, and again, at the empty sea.

Time must pass, because the mist melts into the sea and the sun rises to show the girl that she is a speck on a vast mirror. The light flashes off the water and blinds her. The sun burns a line into her scalp while the water turns her legs numb. She screams until she can taste blood in her mouth. When she closes her eyes she sees the plate, the napkin and the square of pie, Mama’s hand with its ring curved around the white china. She can’t really think but if she has a thought, it is that the world can’t end as long as she keeps calling for Mama, that she can’t be lost as long as Mama can hear her voice. Because Mama can hear her. Mama and Papa are somewhere behind the flash and shear of sunlight, waiting for her.