the blood from them, when the hairs on his arms stand up. They sway briefly, like seaweed in the current. Then lie down again.
He looks up. A strange ruffle come across the surface.
The birds had lifted suddenly and gone away. As if there were some signal. They are flecks now, a hiatus disappearing against the light off the sea.
He is far enough out for the land to have paled in view.
The first lightning strikes out somewhere past the horizon. At first he thinks it some sudden glint. The thunder happens moments later, and he feels sick in his guts.
A metallic sheen comes to the water, like cutlery. Like metal much touched. The white clouds glow, go a sort of leaden at the edge.
There was a delay, he thinks. Enough delay. Sees the rain as a thick dark band, moving in. Starts to paddle.
Then there is a wire of electric brightness . . . Three. Four . . . A rumble that seems to echo off the surface of the water.
He counts automatically, assesses the distance to land. An-other throb of light. The coast still a thin, wood-colored line.
The wind picks up, cold air moving in front of the storm.
And then there is a basal roll. The sound of a great weight landing. A slow tearing in the sky.
One repeated word now. No, no, no.
When it hits him there is a bright white light.
• • •
He swings the fish from the water, a wild stripe flicking and flashing into the boat, and grabs the line, twisting the hook out, holding the fish down in the footrests. It gasps, thrashes. Drums. Something rapid and primal, ceremonial, in the shallow of the open boat.
Flecks of blood and scales loosen, as if turning to rainbows in his hands as he picks up the fish and breaks its neck, feels the minute rim of teeth inside its jaw on the pad of his forefinger, puts his thumb behind the head and snaps.
The jaw splits and the gills splay, like an opening flower.
He was sure he would catch fish. He left just a simple note, “Pick salad x.”
He looks briefly toward the inland cliffs, hoping the peregrine might be there, scanning as he patiently undoes the knot of traces, pares the feathers away from each other until they are free and feeds them out. The boat is flecked. Glittered. A heat come to the morning now, convincing and thick.
The kayak lilts. Weed floats. He thinks of her hair in water. The same darkened blond color.
It’s unusual to catch only one. Or it was just a straggler. The edge of the shoal.
He retrieves a plastic shopping bag from the drybag in back and puts the fish safe, the metal of it dulling immediately to cloth in his hands. Then he bails out the blood-rusted water that has come into the boat.
Fish don’t have eyelids, remember. In this bright water, it’s likely they are deeper out.
He’s been hearing his father’s voice for the last few weeks now.
I’ve got this one, though. That’s enough. That’s lunch anyway.
The bay lay just a little way north. It was a short paddle from the flat beach inland of him, with the vacation trailers on the low fields above, but it felt private.
His father long ago had told him that they were the only ones who knew about the bay, and that was a good thing between them to believe.
You’ll set the pan on a small fire and cook the mackerel as you used to do together, in the pats of butter you took from the roadside café. The butter will be liquid by now, and you will have to squeeze it from the wrapper like an ointment.
He smiled at catching the fish. That part of the day safe.
I should bring her here. All these years and I haven’t. It’s different now. I should bring her.
The bones in the cooling pan, fingers sticky with the toffee of burned butter.
He was not a talker. But he couldn’t imagine sitting in the bay and not talking to his father.
There was a strange gurgle, a razorbill appeared, shuddered off the water, flicked its head, and preened. It looked at him, head cocked, turned, looked over its shoulder as it paddled off a few yards. Then it dived again, was gone.
He took the plastic container from the front stow. It had warmed in the morning sun, and it seemed wrong and strange to him that it was warm. It was as if the ashes still had heat.
He unscrewed the lid partially, caught out by a sudden fear. That he would release some djinn, a ghost, the fatal germ. No. They’re sterile. He threw science at the fear.
He’d had to go through so many possessions, things that exploded smally with memories over the last few weeks; but it was the opposite with the ashes. He was trying to hold away the fact that they knew nothing of what they were.
Their value, he knew, was that they caused him to come out here. Something he had not done for a very long time. He found himself wanting to remind the ashes of events, things. He had to make them the physical thing of his father.
After the brief doubt he relaxed again. He could feel the current arc him out, its subtle shift away from shore. A strong draw to the seemingly still water.
He had a sense, out here, of peace. He could feel not only the proximity of the bay but a proximity to himself. He thought: Why do we stop doing the things we enjoy and the things we know are good for us?
When he had fetched the kayak out from under the tarp, there had been cobwebs, and earwigs were in amongst the hatch straps.
It’s not such a bad day.
He had not told her he was going. He’d expected it to be a weight he wanted to lift by himself.
There was a piping of oystercatchers, a clap of water as a fish jumped. He saw it for a moment, a silver nail. A thing deliberately, for a brief astounding moment, broken from its element.
He fades the kayak, lets it drift around the promontory, wiggling his ankles, working his feet loose with arrival. The water beneath him suddenly aglut. Sentinel somehow, with jellyfish. He wonders if they are a sign, of some increasing heat perhaps; but just as he feels a sense of settlement, the sound of music hits him.
A child knee-high in the water, slapping at the waves. Another coming tentatively down the stones. A mother changing inside a towel.
The ashes sit perfectly in the drinks holder by his legs.
Laid out farther off, a girl, at adolescent distance. The sound of her radio traveling. A pile of bright things.
The kayak jumps a little over the brief waves bouncing around the point, the sea seeming to goose-bump for a moment, as if cold air goes across it. A kick under his hand, the ocean of her stomach.
The child has found a whip of kelp and slaps at the waves.
It’s
