back when they’ve gone.
Out in the distance, a small cloud. A white flurry. A crowd of diving birds.
They won’t be here all day.
Then he paddles, the ashes by his legs, in a straight line out to sea.
*
He wakes floating on his back, caught on a cleat by the elastic toggle of his wetsuit shoe. Around him hailstones melt and sink. They are scattered on the kayak, roll off as it bobs on the slight waves. There is a hissing sound. The hailstones melting in the water.
He stares around, shell-shocked, trying to understand, a layer of ash on the surface of the water. He cannot move his arms. They are held out before him as if beseeching the sky.
Dead fish lie around him in the water.
He gets himself to the boat, the boat to him, drawing it with his leg, shaking until he frees the lace, turns, kicks, twists, trying to lever with his useless arms. Somehow tips himself into the boat. A primal instinct to make land.
Live, he’s thinking. Live.
A loud bell sounding in his head. The shock of an alarm.
His fishing rod on fire upon the water as he slips off the world again, and passes out.
His mouth is crusted with salt. He does not know where he is. There is a pyroclast of fine dried ash across his skin.
When he comes to, the strongest thing he feels is the tingling in his hands. It feels as if they are distant things, strange ringing bells. Finds out anew he cannot move his arms. He does not remember getting back into the kayak. Does not understand. The ground is moving. Is sure that if he moves he will abolish himself. Holds on to himself like a thought coming out of sleep.
He moves because he coughs, a cough made of glass. Slowly lifts himself. One eye closed with salt. Does not know why, why it will not open. His face has been on the deck of the kayak and the salt is from the evaporated water. The sun had come out hard after the storm and had evaporated the water, leaving the salt. It is in a crust on his eye. When he opens the other, the light blinds him.
It hurt to breathe because his whole body hurt. As if he had suffered a massive fall.
He blinked and struggled to raise himself a little more, the kayak shifting below him. The world slipping, rocking.
He felt the briefest flicker in his right arm, a wave of something, and it spasmed, smashed unfeelingly against the inside of the boat and went dead again, fell now against his side, a fish flicking after suffocating. The other arm still stood out in front of him as if waiting to receive something. The tingling remained, like the pain when you crack your knee.
There was a ringing in his ears, a high, insecty whine. He felt drunk. His head pumped full with something. He let the light in bit by bit, as if sipping it with his eye, raised his head and saw the water. For a moment he thought he was in some way blind; but then he understood: there was just the water, there was nothing else to see.
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