We wanted to save ourselves, and we couldn't do that. Maybe we did, after all. I don't know.
The stuff made it hard to tell where anything was; ten feet looked like a hundred feet, two hundred feet looked like twenty feet, and sometimes things just disappeared from view until you walked into them. Planes crashed, even on instruments. Birds couldn't fly far. The bats and the bugs didn't seem bothered. Damn mosquitos. Even ships disappeared. Not at the same rate planes crashed, but they disappeared.
We had to leave the island.
The world disappeared a few hundred feet from land. I don't mean veiled, I mean it vanished. I could stand on the end of the dock, and the island would be gone, and there would be nothing in the world but water. There was the sound of the surf and the wind, but I was never sure that was really what it was, that it wasn't the sound of the darkness between heaven and earth.
My father couldn't bear it. There had to be noise - every household appliance, radios, everything that made sane noise had to be on all the time. The cat spent most of her time hiding under the bed.
The last night, I went to the beach. I stood there until I heard voices in the wind and the surf and whatever it was.
She told me later that I'd started walking, then running, and she'd barely swum fast enough to catch me. The water had already been to my shoulders when she reached me. She says I didn't want to go back to shore.
I don't remember. I don't remember anything very clearly until we reached the mainland.
Copr. ©2004 Sara A. Keating. This work will enter the public domain January 1st, 2034.