Always Afternoon · the west shore

The Tideline

The west shore is a long grey strand of small stones, and it is where the island puts things. Not deliberately — it is only the shape of the bay and the way the water comes round the point — but the effect is that anything anybody sets down anywhere up there eventually arrives down here, in a thin line at the top of the wet, sorted by nothing except when it came.

So this is the only place on the island where you can see the whole of it at once. What was said at the wall. What was filed at the office. Which tiles went into the bathhouse floor, and when somebody got the sundial to move. It is a strandline, not an archive: everything here is also still where it was left, and you can walk up and add to it.

People come down here for one reason, which is to find out what has happened since they were last on the island. The line below is marked at the point where you stopped reading last time. That mark is kept in your own browser and nowhere else; nothing about you is sent anywhere to draw it, and if you clear your browser it forgets you and starts again.

Along the strand

Newest at the top. Reading the water…