At noon every day, she climbs the spiral stairs to the top of the signal tower, pausing at the middle landing to catch her breath and feel the sun on her face from the grimy window. At the top, she walks the catwalk once around, gazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, towards the mainland coast, the rocky cusp of the blight continent. Sometimes she stops to look at the inverted hemisphere of the light itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered with a thousand square mirrors.

She can see her reflection there, clear and multifarious. An army of her.

Afternoons, she looks through the unrotted magazines she found lining some boxes of kerosene. The words mean nothing to her, but the pictures she likes. They evoke places she has never been crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of someone in a long black car, people in white suits reclining on couches in homes where theres no blood crusted on the walls, women in undergarments on backdrops of seamless white. Abstract heaven, that white where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, what would go untouched by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it.

It can be cold at night. She keeps the fire going and pulls her army jacket tighter around her torso and listens to the ocean wind whistling loud through the hollow flute of her tall home.

*

Miracle, or augury maybe because the morning after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach. She sees it during her morning walk around the island to check the nets; she finds it on the north point of the teardrop land mass, near the shoal.

At first it is a black shape against the white sand, and she studies it from a distance, measures it with her fingers up to her eye.

Too small to be a person, unless its folded double or half buried. Which it could be.

She looks around. The wind blowing through the grass above the shore makes a peaceful sound.

She sits and studies the thing and waits for movement.