Colleen took her own bottle of beer from the refrigerator and headed out the back door, allowing the quick slap-slam of the screen door to echo across the yard. The grass was soft beneath her sandals and she tossed them from her feet to one side of the stairs. The loamy earth shifted beneath her toes and she ambled slowly to the dock. At its end stood a gray heron, his neck curved in a majestic C. His wings were tightly wrapped around his body as he stared to the horizon.

Colleen stepped carefully, playing a familiar childhood game—to see how close she could get before the bird flew away. She’d always envied the herons’ ability to be utterly themselves, and completely at one with their landscape.

“Each of us is unique,” her dad had said to her one afternoon in a reverential voice on the dock, as they watched a pod of dolphins swim by in an achingly beautiful choreography. “Who would choose to be anything but what they are created to be?”

And Colleen had vowed, all those years ago when she was twelve years old, to be only herself, exactly what she was meant to be. But that promise had been lost with all the others because she’d invented a new Colleen. And who was to say that this new version was exactly the one she was supposed to be? Maybe there were many selves she could be; maybe it wasn’t so static and unwavering. She could become someone new and then another someone new. There was no marble-cast Colleen, defined by someone else and then carved. And yet, and yet, there was a truth that had to be tapped, a real Colleen that needed her voice to be heard among the louder voices of expectation. What was that? Who was that?

She approached the dock on tiptoe, and made it only two steps before the great heron spread its wings and rose from the edge of the dock. Its feathers gray and speckled, white and dense, spread before her. A lump rose in her throat at the beauty. She swallowed it with a swig of beer and watched the heron skim across the river before settling on a sandbar exposed at low tide. The oyster shells created a crusted edge around tall summer-green spartina grass. The heron standing on its stick legs seemed to stare at Colleen with a message she would never understand.