Always Afternoon · the shallows
Everything down there washed in from somewhere else on this island. Pull one out and it will tell you where.
Nothing in your hand yet. Nine places on this island lose things into this water; take one out and you have found one of them.
Day 4. Walked to the orchard and left something on the wall at the gate. Felt better afterwards, which frightened me considerably more than feeling worse would have.
The rest of the book is under a flat stone on the upper terrace →
Asked Halloran how long we have been ashore. He thought about it seriously, which was worse than if he had not.
Somebody kept this carefully and then stopped. Read to the end →
Seven knots wet. Somebody surveyed this island properly once: the depths are honest and the compass rose is drawn with a confidence the surveyor did not keep for very long.
The chart itself is up at the point. You ink it in by going places →
A cube of blue glass paste with old grout still on three sides. There is a bathhouse floor being re-laid a few tiles at a time by whoever passes through. This one came out.
From the same floor. The picture it belonged to is only a ghost in the dust now; people stopped repairing it and started laying whatever they felt like over the top of it.
The water has taken most of the writing. What is left reads: the argument. Not taking that up the path.
It came off a low wall at the orchard gate, where you say one thing →
Small and completely fine. Everyone who lands here decides very quickly that the fruit is the trouble. The fruit is not the trouble. What holds people is duller than that, and harder to leave.
Up the path to the terraces, if you want to know what does →
Reason for departure: to be somewhere that has an evening. Preferred method: on the evening tide. Applications are processed at the end of the afternoon.
The office is a stone hut by the jetty. Nobody is behind the window →
Taken out of a bell and set down on the sill beside it, so that the bell is quiet and the clapper is not lost. Both of those were somebody's decision, made in the same afternoon.
There is a room of twenty-five of these further up, and somebody lights a few of them fresh every midnight, never in the same arrangement. People go in and put them out, and count their moves, and mind the count more than they meant to.
The lamps are the same for everyone today. Fewest moves wins nothing →
Off the machine at the jetty end, which came up out of a wreck and is honest the way nothing at home is: it says on its face that it keeps five point one per cent of everything, forever. People read that carefully, and pull anyway.
Snapped clean off at the foot, which is why the dial up on the high terrace has read four in the afternoon for as long as anyone here can remember. Seven lines are cut round its rim between the hour it stopped at and the hour it is going to.
Work out what they say and the shadow moves an hour, for everybody →
A tile chip, a bead, half a paper form. Everything anybody sets down anywhere on this island ends up on the west shore eventually. It is the only place you can see the whole of it at once.
Somebody stood where you are standing. The heavier things go on the orchard wall →
It becomes a bottle in these shallows. Plain text, no name on it, and anyone reaching in can pull it out.