No one saw as he bent the foil around the napkin ring so that it made a shiny little surface like the top of a drum.

No one saw him dump the last few precious grains of yellow dust onto the foil, or strike the first match to cook the stuff into fumes. Not even the birds yawned and peeked, and not even the most curious tide-pool residents winked up at him as he bent his head down low over the foil, held it firmly but gently in his fingers, closed his eyes, and lowered the glass stem.

In a rush of concentrated, sulfurous fog, the cobwebs in his head were blasted clean.

Urine-colored fire washed over his brain; brimstone and brine simmered and smoked, and in the wake of that first astonishing explosion (which never became less astonishing with time, or less painful, or less needful and joyful), a placid, pale nothingness dawned.

Rector privately suspected that this was what it felt like to die. First there’d be shock, an outburst of fear and sensation. Then would come this calm, this warmth and smoothness, and the pleasant apathy drawn from an ironclad knowledge that the world no longer mattered.

Given time for the powder to cool and the residue to blow away … given scorched fingertips and a nose that ran with pink and yellow mucus, blood, and Blight in a biological slime … this harmonious eggshell of bliss would … crack.

And shortly after that, Rector’s eyes also cracked.

All the light, all the darkness, all the rustling sounds of nearby water, the scuttling clicks of crabs and the tiny splurts of spitting clams half buried in the soggy sand … every soft noise scraped against the inside of his skull—loudly, but not quite unpleasantly, rather like a headache made of candy.

He was lying on his back, and he didn’t remember how he’d gotten that way—if he’d fallen over, or opted to lie down. An odd-shaped rock or starfish was wedged against one of his lower vertebrae, so he shifted his weight and clenched his fists, flexing his fingers and remembering that he needed to breathe even as he realized that his nose was too stuffy to help with the task. It was clogged with the flavor of copper (his own blood) and tin (from the foil) and whatever other salty gunk saw fit to occupy the great sloshing space behind his eyes.

Still high enough to not mind any pain very much, Rector struggled to a seated position. His few worldly possessions remained right where he left them, and the incoming tide was within a few yards of soaking the lot.