Broken Sky 1:2

We had to leave the island.

The stuff made it impossible to tell distance; ten feet looked like a hundred feet, two hundred feet like twenty, and things just disappeared sometimes, right until you walked into them. Birds flew like they were drunk, but the bats and the bugs were fine. Planes crashed, every time, sometimes just long enough you'd think it'd make it up this time. Even ships disappeared, not as constantly as planes crashed, and sometimes they turned up late with everybody aboard half-mad.

I could stand on the end of the dock and not see the island. It wasn't veiled in fog or clouds or hidden by rain; it just didn't exist anymore. At the end of the dock there was nothing but wind, water, and the dock itself, stretching out into nothingness, and under the wind and waves there was the sound of the stuff itself. I tried to tell myself there wasn't any sound but the surf and the wind, but there was.

Dad couldn't stand it, couldn't abide that noise at all. He had to have some other noise on all the time, fans or music or the radio, staticy and faint, mostly plaintive bewildered voices wanting to know where the hell the shore was. Mom sang to herself, snatches of songs she didn't really remember, and her cat wandered around mewing when she wasn't hiding under something. We - I don't know what they did. She walked outside for hours, dawn until sunset, and he stomped around, muttering to himself. I don't - I don't remember so well. I don't remember doing anything, even drinking.

The last night I went out to the beach on the other side of the island. I don't know how long I stood there, right on the edge where all I could see was beach and water and sky. There were voices in the noise under the surf and wind.

She told me later that I'd started walking, then running. By the time she'd swum out to me, the water was almost to my shoulders, and a few more steps would have taken me out where it's too deep to stand and the current's fierce. She said I didn't know her when she grabbed me to get me back.

I don't remember. I don't remember anything else until we reached the mainland.