I took the smell of the shrimps into my memory and again flexed my fingers through the air. The sea is close. I can hear the bay being rushed into by the insistent water and the defenseless pebbles chink in their stony resistance. The rock pools are filling. The timid razor shell and the tiny crab are exhausted after their long pause of wave on sand. Submerged they find one another in a salt embrace. “Delicious,” said mother after the morning’s delivery in such torment. “Hmm,” said father.
  When my father had finished his shrimps, he tidied the paper and forks, kissed mother goodbye, said cheerio to me and left. I fell asleep. I dreamt of shallow salt water. Then I dreamt of deeper water which made me move suddenly in my slumber, the cot shaking slightly at the foot of mother’s bed. I tried to fly above the deep water, get higher, escape the unknown. Then it was suddenly morning.
  Mother bathed me with some advice from a young nurse, dressed in the pure white of knowledge, and I took it all in, and with some minor crying and such, we accomplished the deed. I was cleansed of my panic with the deep unknown water. I was fed. A luxury I would gradually leave and then return to as sure as those gulls rest again on a capsized boat. The sea had receded. I could only hear the lonely oyster-catcher turning into the breeze on the hard shore.

 

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