Meeting Cortes

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 September 23rd 2010

 i)   The tide was lower than Magritte had ever seen it.

  Perhaps ‘seen’ was the wrong word to use. The inky darkness of night swallowed the barren, stoney features of Smelt Bay, as well as the ocean that lapped distantly at its shore. Rather, she heard it; the white noise of the waves breaking unusually far away. All the better, honestly. She wasn’t here to swim. In fact, Smelt Bay was a terrible beach for swimming. It wasn’t just that the frigid coastline lacked in soft, warm sand; the uneven and slippery rockbed that composed the entire stretch of bay was covered, acre by acre, in countless oyster shells. They adorned almost every rock they could cling to, and their razor sharp edges could slice easily through hand and foot like a warm knife through butter. Which is why Magritte plodded along, slowly and carefully, in her brand new hiking boots.

  Raf had cautioned her against clambering around the beach so late at night and, usually, she heeded his anxieties about it. It wasn’t initially her intention to scramble down the bluff and onto the beach; she had only wanted to come out and watch the seafoam crash gently upon the stones. At night, under the moonlight, the contrast between white foam and inky water enchanted her with its otherworldly beauty. However, upon reaching the beach, the tide had been drawn out further than she could see. And so now, she was looking for it. 

  She had the good sense not to stumble forward in the dark, using her phone's flashlight to illuminate the path in front of her. She loved scouring the beach at low tide. Countless crabs of all sizes scuttled and scurried beneath the unnatural light of her phone. Her eyes met with the occasional, chubby pink and purple starfish that had been abandoned by the retreating ocean. Both the crabs and the brightly coloured starfish were a common sight on these beaches and, while she appreciated their company, they failed to make her pause. What did capture her attention was a fat, orange blob of a creature.

  What are you? Magritte stopped to crouch down for a better look, lifting her phone to shine upon it. Oh, just another starfish…   Well, no. Not really. It had one, two, three, four…eight…thirteen legs! She stared at it for a moment of deliberation before extending a tentative forefinger to poke its roughly textured, glistening surface. Before her finger could get within an inch of it, a gentle blanketing wave of frothy ocean fanned out between her and the creature, covering both it and her hiking boots in several inches of freezing water.

 With a startled yelp at the stabbing cold, Magritte bolted upright as she found herself soaked to the ankles.

  “Aw, shit-!” She lifted one foot out, and then the other in an awkward hopping skip, trying in vain to keep her feet up, out of the rogue wave. Apparently, the tide had been a lot closer than she thought. She continued her silly, wet, hop-scotchy walk back towards the bluffs with a self-depreciative chuckle. She expected the wave to recede.

  But it didn’t. 

  Instead, another wave layered itself on top, swallowing her calves, and then another that submerged her past the knee. The arresting shock of the cold was outcompeted by the jolt of fear that kicked her into a frantic scramble. As she abandoned caution, the forceful current of the tide rose past her waistline, shoving her forward and off her feet. The water’s piercing chill bit through her chest, squeezing a sharp gasp from her just as her head was pulled beneath the waves.

  Primal terror possessed her to reach forward with her hands and find purchase on any surface she could grab. Her fingers closed around fists full of jagged oyster shells that held like cement to the stones they were anchored to. As the ripping current suddenly dragged Magritte back, the soft flesh of her grasping palms may as well have been wet tissue for how well they maintained their structure. What little air she held her lungs escaped with the muffled scream that boiled out from her throat. She tumbled like a rag doll as she was pulled backward by the powerful riptide. Her knees and elbows painfully scraped across the oyster-laiden ground in intervals that only served to further disorient her.

  Panic crescendoed, blackening the edges of her vision just in time for her head to break through the surface of the waves. She treaded water with wild, unevenly flailing limbs, drawing in a sharp gasp that was quickly strangled by a fit of wet coughing. Chest, hands, arms, knees, everything burned. And what didn’t burn felt as though it were being needled by cold knives. She couldn’t stop coughing. She couldn’t draw a proper breath. Her head rushed with the sound of waves. Or blood. Her eyes were useless as strangled tears obscured her vision.

  Until, at last, her coughing subsided, and she drew in one…two…three shaky, shallow breaths. She held it for a moment, the best she could.

  And…it was quiet.

  The sound of water lapping at her jawline and behind her ears outcompeted the volume of waves across the distant shore.

 The very distant shore.

 She released her breath, surrendering to over-exerted panting. But, even her starving lungs were too constricted by the freezing water to draw in proper gulps of air. Her breaths were short, sharp, and uneven as she attempted to scan the landscape for signs of the shore.

  She could not see land; not even the light of distant houses. Beneath the starry sky, the world around her seemed unnaturally dark.

  A nervous laugh broke out of her throat, accompanied with a teeth-clattering, quiet little chant. “F-fuck, fuck, f-fuck, fuck.” 

  The searing hot pain of her oyster-inflicted wounds had, at least, subsided rather quickly. She didn’t attempt to move her fingers, let alone ball her hands into fists. She didn’t even dare to look at them. She could barely feel them at all.

  Experimentally, she drew in as deep a breath as she could, and stopped treading water. She felt herself begin to sink, and with more effort than it was worth, she shrugged off her jacket and kicked off her boots. Or rather, her boot, singular. Apparently, she had lost the other one already. Her feet were so numb that she couldn’t feel the difference. Shedding the remaining boot hardly made her more buoyant, but it felt like it helped.

  She attempted to curl her lips into a smile. “O-okay, w…well…If I had to choose…between f-freezing to d-eath or drowning, I’d rather freeze. S-so let's focus on that, I g-uess.”

  Bleak.

  Was there any point in swimming when she couldn’t see the shore? How long could someone survive in water like this? Was she afraid of dying?

  Not nearly as afraid as I was just a few moments ago.

  She should have felt…more upset than this. It seemed strange. Maybe she was just too cold to think properly, but most likely, the reality of her situation hadn’t set in yet. After all, the situation was salvageable. A boat could come along and haul her out of the water. The tide could wash her up onto the shore. There were lots of different little islands around here, she was bound to wash up on the shore of one, right? What were the chances of that happening before she could freeze to death? 

  …How long would it take for the hopelessness to set in? If she could keep making light of the situation, it couldn’t be that bad, right?

  “And, yan-n-no…it’s been a g-good run.”

  …Hasn’t it?

  Truth be told, things had only just started getting really good.   Well, kinda.   This year was a rough patch. Uncle Bill’s passing in late April had really…thrown things askew. But the island was a perfect escape from the fake sympathies, the incessant phone calls, the social obligations…all the stress… It was gonna give them the peace, quiet, and space to properly grieve.   We were gonna start playing music again.   They had only been on the island for a week. The cottage Bill had left to Raf was so nice. It had a piano. It was cute. Warm.

  Of all things, it was the thought of the cottage’s little black wood stove that made Magritte’s eyes water with a sudden stab of helpless dismay. 

  No, why? That’s so stupid.

  Why the stove? Why not the grief of her parents? Why not the fact that she’d never be able to play music again? Why not–

  “Raf.” It came out as a croak that she barely even recognized as her own voice. “S-shit. I’m sorry, Raf. M-man. This was my s-stupid idea. It was my id-dea to come here, it was s-s-supposed to be so good. B-but…th-this is r-really…gonna…wreck you, isn’t it.” 

  There was a long pause as Magritte bobbed uselessly with the waves, trying to will her numb, sluggish limbs to move in a manner that allowed her to survey her surroundings once again for any sign of land. Maybe she should just start swimming in a direction, would that have been better? Would it make her feel warmer? Or…would it just exhaust her faster?

  She was already so tired.

  I don’t want to be anyone’s traumatic loss, I just want to be warm.

  How the hell did this even happen? What caused the ocean to hit her so suddenly, like a river?

 It doesn’t make sense. What if this is just a really bad dream? I could wake up in bed, soft and warm, and held…coffee...and…eggs. Over easy in front of the wood stove. Pyjamas…slippers, but like…not the linoleum kind, it needs to have enough structural integrity for breakfast…to support the…workload and drive me to the–

-PIFFF-

  Magritte hadn’t realised that her eyelids were closed, but the sudden explosive hissing that erupted right beside her caused them to snap wide open. For a second, she thought that something had fallen off the top shelf of her closet. But almost as quickly as she imagined that, the biting cold water encroaching on the corners of her nose and eyes reminded her of where she was. 

-FIFFFFF-

  The same sound again, slightly further away. Panic rejuvenated her for a brief moment until she saw the source of the noise. A jet of pale mist erupted from the surface of the water, and in its wake, a dark, triangular silhouette glided smoothly downward. The wet, rubbery flesh glistened in the moonlight before sinking beneath the rolling waves.

   Whales.

  Magritte attempted to lift her head enough to see if she could spot them again. Sure enough, three or four more of the creatures surfaced silently. The ghostly silhouettes of their dorsal fins were all that gave away their position. These must have been the orcas the neighbours had mentioned. Even Raf once managed to catch a glimpse of them from the shore, but Magritte hadn’t been with him to see it. She had wanted so badly to look at them…

  “Oh…well, thanks for showing up, guys.” Her teeth weren’t clattering anymore, but she could hardly bring her voice above a whisper. For some reason, her throat felt so tight. “Please don’t toss me around like a seal… I’ve seen what you do to them…on t.v.”

  The whales responded with a series of loud, spouting breaths; some nearby, others further away. As she recalled the image of a half flayed seal rag-dolling through the air, anxiety blossomed in the pit of her stomach, Magritte turned her gaze upward and hung it on the three bright stars of Orion’s belt. 

  If making noise is encouraged as a way of deterring bears from harassing hikers, maybe the same was true for whales and swimmers. I can be weird and loud, can’t I?

  She attempted to sing a song. Her strangled voice rasped, fruitlessly struggling to be heard above the sounds around her.

  “What are you hunting up there in the stars?

  Is it beasts, or demons, or old battle scars?

  Do you remember the warmth of my palm in yours

  Is it buried in rubble from all of those wars?

  You’ve lost yourself so far, far away

  Searching for ghosts and impossible prey.

  You’ve flown too far from the earth and the sea,

  Please come back…come back…

  …Come back to…”

  As her words drifted, so too did she; down, down, into the cold, quiet void.

  And it embraced her, lovingly.

 ii)

  Raf’s eyes opened to the sound of ocean waves and a dull ache in his neck. Light poured out from the cottage windows, pooling warmly across the sprucewood deck and the white, woven hammock that cradled him. An earbud filled his left ear, but no music played. Either his iphone had come to the end of his playlist, or it had run out its battery life while he slept.

  With a tired groan, he sat up and stretched, gingerly tilting his head to loosen the painful knot in his neck. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep, but he should have expected it after a relaxing joint and some quality tunes. He wasn’t sure what had woken him up. Perhaps it was the chill. It wasn’t cold enough for his breath to hang in the air, but it was chilly enough for him to wish for a sweater–rather than a t-shirt–beneath his jacket.

  Or maybe it was the concussive sound of the waves.

  The ocean wasn’t visible from his cottage. There was a strip of dense forest that lined the property and separated it from the bluffs. Still, the white noise of the ocean could always be heard through the trees. The salt could be smelled on the breeze, and it could be felt collecting in his hair. It must have been exceptionally turbulent out there tonight, for he could hear the waves crashing with an unusually loud clarity.

  Raf lifted his phone and turned on the LED screen to check the time. Its battery life was still good, but as he had suspected, his playlist had played through to the last track. 

  1:34 a.m.

  The corners of Raf’s mouth twitched.

  Magritte hadn’t woken him up to herd him into bed when she came home. Was she pissed off at him for declining to walk with her? 

  In fairness, he had been…difficult to manage the past half year. And it became increasingly obvious that Magritte’s bountiful patience had been running thin over the past month or two. She had begun to adopt his defensive snippiness–not at him, but at the things she knew infringed upon him. Phone calls, text messages, the gestures of concerned friends and colleagues reaching out to see if he was okay. The cold, prying interrogations–thinly veiled by hollow sympathies–querying for available pieces of his uncle’s estate.

  The man’s body hardly had time to grow cold before Ephrem representatives began hounding Raf about the company shares he had inherited. His family in Monaco had gone so far as to request the retrieval of Uncle Bill’s body. “He should be put to rest on home soil”–but his will had detailed what was to be done. By his request, Uncle Bill’s body was kept here, in British Columbia. Raf had to take care of it all; the estate, the funeral, and the vultures.

  All he wanted to do was hide.

  And, in a way, that’s mostly what he did. He managed as much as he could, but once the funeral had been concluded, his energy and willingness to keep on top of things dissolved. He just couldn’t…deal…with the people. Any of them. At some point, they had all stopped resembling human beings, and felt more like a pack of feral dogs with no purpose greater than to sate their gluttony. Every interaction bloodied him with clawing, hungry teeth.

  Magritte picked up the slack for him. It was…beyond her ability, honestly. But she did her best, at the expense of indulging her passions. While he isolated and avoided the torrent of his unwanted responsibilities, Magritte had lived those months constantly on the backfoot, attempting to hold things together and never quite managing to see any of it through properly. It was simply too many balls for her poor little arms to carry, and as she tried to pick up the ones she had dropped, more always spilled out. 

  Last month, it had finally driven her to tears.

  Raf had been woefully inadequate at showing his appreciation for her efforts and, even as he watched her sob in frustration, he found it difficult to provide any meaningful comfort. Nothing broke his heart quite like seeing her cry, but he couldn’t muster up the energy to promise any fun distractions. He couldn’t tell her, in earnest, that things were fine. He couldn’t give her the reward of knowing that she had been able to make everything right and good for him. He could only tell her that he knew she was doing her best, that he was glad to have her with him, and that he loved her. 

  More than anything, he loved her.

  Talk was cheap. He knew that better than anyone. But living in ‘survival mode’ left very little in the way of emotional resources, and he had become very cold, irritable, and distant. Still, Magritte sought out his company. She wished to share good experiences with him and did her best to take care of him despite his diminishing reciprocation over the past few months.

  Retreating to Cortes Island had been her idea. She had never visited the place before, but when Raf described it as a tiny, isolated little community with no supermarkets nor chain restaurants, no hospitals nor police stations, and with the population of a small school, her eyes lit up.

  “It’s perfect! We could just disappear there and take a year–or five–to just…recover from everything!” Her tone had taken on a conspiratorial tone when she added, “We don’t have to tell anyone.”

  She had underestimated the scope of work that accompanied ‘disappearing to a small island for a year’. In contrast, the workload was all his mind could fixate on. But– a body of water separating him from the relentless chaos of the mainland was appealing enough for him to commit to the move. And so, they made their hasty preparations, packed up, and left without a word.

  A week had passed since they moved into the small cottage, and Raf had to admit that the quiet calm of the island was…a relief. 

  He had asked Magritte for a month. A month of nothing; no outings, no plans, no obligations–just rest. It was the closest thing to hibernation he was ever going to experience, and she had agreed to it. It didn’t stop her, though, from inviting him out for walks, and to see the ocean with her. It was the bare minimum, and he should have obliged her more often than he did. But truly, all he wanted to do was stay home, smoke weed, listen to music, and sleep.

  And that’s what he had chosen to do when she invited him to watch the waves with her, some time after 10pm. She didn’t seem bothered when he lazily declined to accompany her, but perhaps she had grown cranky about it during her time out. Seeing him passed out in the hammock, she probably left him to endure the natural consequences of his poor choices, and went to bed without him.

  Honestly, catching a chill and a sore neck was negligible punishment compared to the guilt of disappointing Margie. On the other hand, he had asked her for a month–just one month–to be as lazy and absent as he wanted to be, and she had agreed to it. So if she was pissed off at him–

  Her shoes were not at the front door.

  Usually, Magritte kicked her boots off before entering the house, and rarely brought them inside. Raf opened the door, expecting to see them on the shoe rack, but they weren’t there either. Nor was her jacket strewn over the back of the couch as it should have been.

  He stepped inside, closing the door behind him, and marched quietly up the steep, narrow little staircase to the second floor. Down the short corridor, his bedroom door was still open and he could see through to his window and the night sky that overlooked the foot of his bed. Peeking his head in, the blankets laid smooth and undisturbed across the mattress, folded over to expose the neatly arranged pillows.

  Raf pulled himself back into the tiny corridor with a bewildered frown.   “Margie?” It wasn’t a yell, but his voice projected loudly enough to be heard throughout the small cottage.

  There was no answer, only the gentle hum of the fridge downstairs, accompanied by the rustling of leaves in the breeze outside. And the crashing of waves upon the unseen shore.

  With an agitated groan Raf dropped back down the stairs, towards the front door, and hastily put on his sneakers. Something at the beach must have captivated her. Maybe some weird sealife, maybe partying campers. Either way, she had lost track of time, and now he had to go find her. At least she couldn’t be disappointed with him if she had chosen to stay  out at a worryingly late hour.

  The beach wasn’t more than a fifteen minute walk away, and all he had to do was follow the gravel road down the slope, onto Potlatch Road, and then down to Smelt Bay. There were no lamps lining the street, and so Raf found himself relying on his phone torch to light the path ahead of him. Despite the darkness, it wasn’t an eerie nor dangerous walk by any means. Accompanied by the singing of crickets, he was comfortably familiar enough with these streets, trusting them even with a lone, wandering Margie. 

  As he made his way briskly down the long, paved length of Potlatch road, his curiosity was tickled by just how close the sound of lapping ocean waves seemed to be. Perhaps it was the way it echoed off the treeline, but it sounded as though it were almost right in front of him.

 Raf rounded the broad corner towards Smelt Bay–and stopped.

  The pavement directly beneath his feet had become gradually more wet, as though a heavy rain had passed through recently. That would have been strange enough on its own. He’d have definitely noticed if it had been raining, and there wouldn’t have been such a clear,  sudden border between dry ground and waterlogged asphalt. He lifted his phone light to shine it further down the road, and frowned.

  Ahead of him, the street was covered in a thin layer of water, seafoam lapping over concrete and into the grassy ditch. As he continued a tentative pace forward, the water wasn’t quite high enough to spill over the rubber soles of his shoes. He walked until Potlatch met with Smelt Bay Road, where he was granted an unobscured view of the beach. The ocean’s waves broke over the bluffs, flooding the street and the grassy plots of land that faced the open bay. 

  “...The hell?” He muttered, barely above a whisper. 

  The ocean had to have risen a fair few feet in order for it to breach the bluffs. Was it possible for the tide to get this high? He watched as an empty bottle, tangled within a plastic bag, washed across the street alongside a random toque and a mess of uprooted reeds. Debris, both natural and unnatural, lined the waterlogged road. An enormous, sea weathered piece of driftwood that had spent years as a reliable landmark on the stony beach–now sat wedged askew in the ditch. A flash flood?

  Tsunami.

  Wait–

  Anxiety closed its claws around his gut, and twisted.

  “Margie?!” He barked out her name in the direction of the beach.

  He took a few automatic strides towards the submerged bluff before halting, and he turned his phone over in his hand. Opening his contact list, he hit Magritte’s number and pressed the phone to his ear. Cell coverage on the island was spotty at best, but to his relief, the call connected. As it rang, he paced, his feet kicking up cold water into his shoes.

  “Come on, answer your phone. I’m not gonna be mad at you, just answer your damn phone.”

  He let it ring until the robotic voice of the phone operator made him hang up.

  And then he tried again, to the same result.

  What the hell could he do?

  What was he supposed to do?

  Don’t catastrophize, it’s not the worst case scenario, it never is.

  Immediately, his brain had filled him with thoughts of Margie getting bowled over by enormous waves and dragged to sea. But, based on the fact that no one else was out inspecting damages or lamenting their losses, things probably hadn’t happened as suddenly nor as violently as his imagination pictured it. Realistically, she likely saw the tide start to come in and watched it from a distance, perhaps with some other folks who were hanging around the area. Plausibly, she was at a campsite somewhere, talking about it over smores and cheap booze. Or something like that.

  But then, why didn’t she answer her phone?

  Raf had already turned around and began walking in the direction of the camping lots. All he had to do was find one that still had a fire going at this time of night. But, as his feet left solid pavement and marched onto the dirt road of the Smelt Bay campsites, he found that the tide had flooded this area as well. The inch of water blanketing the ground turned it into a muddy mess. There were no tents pitched in any of the lots. No campfires, either. Two or three of the lots housed a parked RV, elevated off the ground. Dry, and oblivious to the seawater beneath their tires. None of them showed any signs of waking life.   Magritte wasn’t here.

  Coming upon one of the empty lots, Raf found a sturdy tree stump that had clearly been fashioned for seating, and dropped himself down on it. He buried his face into his hands with a fraught sigh. There had been tents here, he knew that much. The inhabitants likely packed up and abandoned the lots in favour of finding a dry place to spend the night. If the RVs and trailers were still here, clearly there couldn’t have been much of a panic. The waterline hadn’t risen catastrophically.

  Still, Magritte was missing.

  He tried to call her one more time, and was greeted unhelpfully by the operating system once again.

  What if she had gotten home after he had left to find her?

  The thought pulled Raf back onto his feet, and what started as a swift walk home hastened into an anxious jog. 

  The tide, he noted, was slowly receding. A length of road that had been submerged when he first arrived was exposed once again to dry off in the chilly night air. For some reason, the sight of it relieved his anxiety somewhat. There was nothing inherently dangerous about the strange tide; it wasn’t any kind of disaster. Likely, Margie was at home, worried and waiting for him. Her phone battery must have depleted. It would explain why she wasn’t calling him back. 

  It wasn’t long before he was walking down the long, rough, unpaved driveway; under the boughs of spruce and cedar trees and into the clearing of the cottage's wild, grassy property.

  Approaching the house, he called out her name across the yard to no answer. The lights were still on in the living room and kitchen. He climbed the two steps of the porch up to the front door and, calling her name once more, he opened it.

  No response.

  Before stepping inside, he kicked off his muddy shoes and then closed the door behind him. 

  “Margie.” His volume was conversational as he scaled the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor and diligently checked each of the bedrooms. 

  No. She wasn’t here.

  Then…where was she?

  Not the ocean. Not the ocean.   Not in the ocean.

  Sitting down on the foot of the bed, Raf stared at the floor and tried to fight off a wave of despair.

  There was no way.

  There was no fucking way. It would have been beyond cruelty to leave him like this. He wasn’t gonna be able to…it wasn’t something he could handle.

 Steadying himself with a deep breath, he scooted over to his side of the bed, took his laptop up off his night table, and unfolded it on his lap. A phone jack tethered it to the wall behind the nightstand and provided a serviceable internet connection. He opened a browser and typed into the search bar; “How long to wait before making a missing person report?” 

  Apparently the answer was “not at all”.

  Raf looked up the appropriate number to call, picked up the phone, and dialed.

iii)

 Cold, dark, and vacuous as space; the environment was unaccommodating to a flesh like this. Blissfully, it could not feel what there was to be felt. It did not experience the depths to which it sank. It could no longer survive the womb from whence it came.

  It could no longer survive. 

  But it was so tenderly embraced. Admired. Loved.

  This flesh, warm and beating, required exposure to the rose and violet hues of morning, and to convalesce beneath the heat of charitable blood. Only then could it feel again. Only then could it survive. 

  When it felt again, it felt discomfort. Ache roused it; sharp and dull, tender and tingling, stiff and burning. It sweated and shivered beneath that which compressed it; a warm, knobby mass. Flesh, but unlike itself; covered in fields of tawny bristles. Fur.

  A rush of hot, moist air preceded an explosion of movement that jostled it painfully. The weight was lifted, the fur, and so too was its warmth. All was carried away on percussive beating; cloven hooves against packed earth. All that remained was aching flesh, slowly cooling atop a bed of needling bister reeds. It could not stay here long. And so, gingerly, it rose and walked.

  Its shadow, tarry and black over reeds, stone, and into the sea–

  Did not immediately follow.

iv)

  Raf was unable to sleep while anxiety gnawed holes through him.

  Hearing his own voice as he described Margie over the phone, and explained the details surrounding the last time he had seen her, made the whole thing feel like an overreaction on his part. It didn’t make sense that she was just–gone, much less that she had been swallowed by some kind of freak tsunami. What’s more, the woman on the other end of the line assured him that no other reports had been made matching his description of the tidal flooding. She suggested that he search around the island, in case Magritte had simply gotten lost and wandered down the wrong road. And then she gave him a reference number. 

  It had left him feeling…unassured. Though she had done her best to sound patient and courteous with him, the nature of her suggestions and the unnecessary detail of “there’ve been no other reports of flooding” bode poorly for him. He wanted to have someone looking for Margie at sea, but now he was unsure that anyone would be dispatched at all. If the lady on the other end of the line hadn’t taken him seriously, would she have even bothered to forward the report through to the appropriate channels?

  No, probably not.

  Why did she have to say anything disparaging about his concerns regarding the water? He knew what he saw. He walked through it. Anger twisted alongside anxiety in his gut.

  By the time he had gotten into his old, little sedan and drove back down to the beach, the ocean had receded beneath the bluffs. Even so, the stony shoreline remained wholly submerged beneath the tide. It might have been easy to convince himself that he had imagined what he saw before. However, though the road was above water now, the tide could never have been able to reach the bluffs under normal conditions.

  He pulled to the side of the road, held his phone out the window of his car, and took a photo. Looking at the picture on his screen, the tide was evident even despite the low-lighting gamma noise that obscured the shot. The entire visible length of the stony shoreline was under water. It wasn’t normal, and he wasn’t crazy.

  It made the landscape look so dramatically different, in honesty, that it wasn’t unreasonable to think Magritte might have easily gotten turned around by it. It was entirely likely that, with certain landmarks missing, she’d have headed in the wrong direction and gotten lost. And, knowing how averse she was to bothering strangers, she likely wouldn’t have been able to gather the courage to knock on anyone’s door so late at night. As Raf drove his car at a crawling pace over the vacant, silent roads, he allowed himself the comfort of believing he could find her sooner rather than later. 

  His certainty waned as one hour bled into another, and then into another. It was in Squirrel Cove, on the other side of the island, where Raf had to contend with the fact that Magritte might actually, really, be missing. And, at 4:30 in the morning, he finally felt fully justified in making the missing person report.

  To be certain, though, he took advantage of Squirrel Cove’s cellular signal and gave the cottage a call. He’d been out looking for over three hours. Perhaps she had found her way back home while he was out.

  No. She didn’t pick up the phone.

  On the doleful drive back, Raf continued searching for her, taking every hopeful detour he came across. And then, he turned around and scoured the same streets again.

  He couldn’t go back to the cottage. Not without her. If he returned to the empty house and sat down, the reality–the true reality–of the situation would paralyse him. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want to consider if it were a malevolent stranger or some natural catastrophe that had taken Magritte from him. He didn’t want to contend with the overwhelming suspicion that the strange tide was no coincidence; that she had been swept to sea. She had walked to the beach and, when he went to find her, both she and the beach were gone.

  She would have drowned hours ago and, if that were true, it was unlikely that Raf would ever receive the closure of knowing for sure. He tried not to think of how cold the water was, and he tried not to deliberate whether or not she’d have fallen asleep before the exhaustion made her sink. He tried not to imagine how frightening it must have been, nor how heavily the dread would have weighed. He tried not to. 

  He kept driving.

  The events of the past year might have destroyed a younger version of himself. His uncle had been the only solid foundation upon which he could stand to rely on. Uncle Bill’s passing had torn the very ground out from beneath Raf’s feet and, in the wake of it all, he clung to Magritte every single night as though she were a liferaft. Her buoyant optimism and unsinkable love granted him the space to wallow in grief-stricken overwhelm without falling into the familiar pits of self-loathing, despair, and deafening loneliness. 

  It hadn’t been a good time. Not for either of them. But it had been survivable. He knew that it would all eventually come to pass, and he looked forward to it. He looked forward to having the energy to enjoy things again, and he looked forward to waking up each morning without dread. He looked forward to getting back on his feet, so that he could make it all up to her. He looked forward to treating her again, and to being a source of joy in her life. She hadn’t merely stuck with him; she helped him carry his burdens. All the while, she had given no indication that she wished for an escape. From their situation, yes–but not from him. 

  And she had done so well to convince him that they’d get through it together; that she’d be there as the one constant he could always fall back on. He believed her.

  Despite everything, he believed her.

  Perhaps it would still be true if he hadn’t neglected her company in favour of underwhelming weed and the same twelve songs he had been listening to for the past three months.

  Oh. Fuck. He hated that.

  She hadn’t lied, he just fucking abandoned her.

  Raf’s eyes had stopped scanning the sides of the road, staring numbly ahead. The stars were fading from the sky as it paled into the indigos of early sunrise. His thoughts turned quiet as the unremarkable hum of the car’s engine filled his brain. For the first time that night, rather suddenly, he felt nothing.

  And so, it was a bit jarring when his arms automatically veered his sedan to the side of the road and his foot slammed hard on the brakes. As he got out of the car, he became aware of the intense, strangling heartbeat in his throat. Raf had reacted before his consciousness registered what his eyes had seen. His legs were already carrying him in long, hasty strides by the time he realised he had driven past–and parked in front of–Magritte.

  “Jesus Christ. Fuck me.” As soon as she was within reach, Raf pulled her into him and closed his arms around her. His vision splotched as an overwhelming wave of relief displaced the blood in his head. The weak laugh that escaped him wobbled with faint delirium. “C…Christ.” 

  Burying his face into her wild, tangled hair, the smell of sea rot and wet animal musk assaulted his senses. He didn’t care--he couldn't care. He smoothed her coarse, salt-crisp curls beneath his palm with heavy strokes, too frenetic to be soothing. It was the sharp pain of burs needling into his fingers that brought him tenuously back to his senses.

  Reluctantly, he pulled back to inspect her. Wisps of her frizzy auburn hair clung wetly to her face. Her cheeks were flushed red and hot. As he held her gently by the shoulders, he became aware of how her body trembled in his grasp. Her shirt was as damp and stained as the rest of her, in mud and grass.

  And blood.

  There was blood.

  Most concerning of all, her stare remained distant and unfocused even as he looked her over.

  Raf gently cupped the back of her head with a caress much more gentle and deliberate. His hand pulled away unstained, and what he thought might have been a clot tangled in her hair turned out only to be a decaying piece of leaf that broke apart between his fingers. 

  "Margie, what the hell happened to you?" The hand that wasn't hooked gingerly around the back of her head closed around one of her wrists and gently coaxed her arm away from her chest. She had been holding both arms tightly to her body, hands curled inward. As Raf turned her palm over to inspect it, he understood why. What met his eye resembled sliced beef.

 He immediately turned her hand back towards her. "Okay."

 The same kind of gashes, though less severe, carved her elbows, knees and shins.

 "Okay, okay. Margie." He smoothed her hair back, out of her face. "Can you look at me, please?"

 There was a moment of delay, but to his relief, her gaze did sluggishly turn up towards him.

  She drew in a small breath. "Sorry I'm late… Can we still play music together?"

  Raf's eyes shut automatically against what felt like a punch to his gut, and he clasped a hand over them reflexively, inhaling sharply. "Y-yeah." A weakly sighed laugh dissolved into a strangled sob. "We can do what ever the fuck you want." Holding himself together with an abrupt, wet sniff through his nose, he reached an arm around Magritte's shoulders, intending to walk her to the car. And then he realized she had no fucking shoes.

 He paused, unsure that his knees could support his own weight, much less hers. His legs had threatened to give out from under him the moment he stepped out of the car. With a steadying breath, he took his chances. Magritte continued to hold her hands protectively to her chest as Raf dropped his other arm down behind her knees and lifted her off the ground.

  "We gotta…take care of you first, alright?" With arms full of Magritte, he fumbled to open the door to the passenger seat before placing her down as carefully as he could manage. "Can–can you tell me if you're okay?"

  Slowly, she turned her head to look up at him before providing a small, uneven nod. "My hands hurt. And my throat…cold." She was trembling visibly, now. Much more than she had been before.

  "Alright." The quiet vapidity of her voice and the vagueness of her response was unencouraging. This wasn't the vibrant, vivacious Magritte that had invited him to walk with her last night. This was a shadow.

  Raf gently closed the car door before walking around to the driver's side and dropping himself into the seat. He cranked the heat up as high as it would go.

  They were on Potlatch already. Without realising it, Raf had been driving himself back to the cottage before he came upon Magritte on the side of the road. Home was scarcely a minute away. Still, it was a minute of concerning silence.

  6:48am.

  The clock on his dash told him that if he wanted to catch the next ferry to Quadra, there wasn't much time to spare. He parked the car in front of the cottage, but left it running.

  "Margie, I'm taking you to the hospital. I just need to grab some things first, alright?"

  She nodded. This time without too much of a delay.

  "Good, good, good." Raf placed a kiss on her forehead and almost recoiled from the heat and sweat that met his lips.

  Despite it, she still curled into herself and shivered. 

  Was it shock? A fever? Both? Would her skin be so hot to the touch if it were hypothermia?

  He smoothed back her hair in one more soothing gesture before leaving the car and darting into the cottage.

v)

  It had been a blur.

  Faintly, Magritte recalled being told something by someone–and nodding. She remembered a warm, dry sweater being fitted over her head, and having her arms carefully–carefully–pulled through the sleeves. When her fingers strained to push past the enclosing fabric, her yelp of pain had been answered by a purr of soothing consolations. That same voice encouraged her to drink water from a bottle held to her lips; as much water as possible. She recalled the feeling of being gently tucked under a blanket–and the feeling of being lovingly kissed, at random intervals, on her forehead, her cheeks, and her nose.

  She hadn’t realised that this had all taken place in the passenger seat of Raf’s car.

  In fact, Margie only became aware of the vehicle some time after it had loaded onto the small ferry, off the docks of Mason’s Landing. Its engine was off and the air inside the car had slowly cooled while the heater was unable to run. Bundled warmly in her blanket and slightly reclined, Margie was finally cognizant enough to recognize the dashboard of Raf’s sedan–as well as the cradling darkness of the ferry’s car deck. And, as she turned her head towards the driver’s seat, she found Raf beside her; fully reclined, his eyes closed, and his lips slightly parted in light slumber. His hand rested limply, palm down, across her knee.

  How did she get here?

  Where were they going?

 As the hardworking boat engine filled her ears with its loud, steady hum, Magritte felt a distinct déjà vu in how the ferry rocked and swayed over the ocean waves.

  Closing her eyes, she recalled the last time she took the ferry. It was just a week ago, on the way to Cortes Island. But it wasn’t spent in darkness like this. She and Raf had both abandoned the car to watch the ocean from the upper deck. The breeze had been salty and chilly, but not freezing.

  She remembered the sound of rushing wind. The sound of a giant’s gasp breaking the surface of the water. She remembered ghostly dorsal fins dancing atop of inky waves.

  Magritte’s eyes snapped open. “I saw the orcas! Raf-!”

  Raf’s eyelids rose with an ease that suggested he hadn’t been fully asleep. Without lifting his head, he let out a groggy, “Huh?”

  “Last night! I was surrounded by them!” Magritte beamed at the memory of it, but as she said it outloud, it sounded a little silly. “...I think?”

  “Orcas?” Blinking tiredly, Raf sat up and searched her eyes with a worried stare. “Do you…remember what happened?”

  Her smile faltered, and then faded entirely as her brain pulled up a string of fragmented images and feelings. The muscles in her arms felt stiff and tired for how they were tucked so tensely against her chest. But more than that, her hands had plagued her with a terrible, consistent burning the entire time.

  She remembered grasping at the rocks.

  Slowly, nervously, Magritte lifted her arms out from under the blanket to assess her aching palms. The moment her vision filled with more red than she had anticipated, she turned her hands quickly away. Oh, it looked worse–way worse–than it felt. And it felt bad. 

  Automatically, she turned her wide eyes to Raf. “I fucked up my hands.” Her voice was a panicked whisper.

  Raf sat up and readjusted the backrest of his seat before carefully enveloping his hands overtop of hers. Gently, he pressed down, lowering them to her lap. “We’re going to the hospital. Your hands are going to be fine–”

  “It was oysters,” she cut him off, “I grabbed a bunch of oysters.” Her attempt to pull up her hands for reinspection was firmly halted by Raf’s steadying grasp.

  “The doctor will look at them, it’ll be fine.” He leaned in closer and assessed her face with an expression of tender concern. “What about the rest of you? How are you feeling?”

  She swallowed back a painful lump in her throat. It went down like blistering lava. “Confused. I feel like I got hit by a bus and the things I remember from last night suck in a weird nightmare kinda way. And it hurts to swallow.” That’s not what concerned her, though. “Raf, how fucked are my hands? Can I still play piano?”

  “Margie.” Raf, who had been watching her from under a tightly knitted brow, diffused his tension with a deep, bodily, exhausted sigh. “Sorry, Margie, I’m not–” He cut himself off by massaging his eyes with his thumb and fingertips. And then he dropped his face into both of his palms, pressing them upward towards his hairline so that his fingers raked through his bangs. “I thought you were fucking dead, man. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I’m sorry, I’m not worried about piano right now. I just–I want to know you’re alright.”

  He didn’t pull his head out of his hands, but from behind his palms, Magritte heard him inhale a wet sniff through his nose; a sob.

  “Oh–what?” Magritte’s fear was bowled over by a sudden wave of guilt. “Wait, what!?”

  “You were gone,” Raf rubbed his eyes once more before removing his hands from his face and allowing his heavy, lethargic stare to fall onto her, “all night.” He swallowed. “I haven’t slept. I spent hours driving across the island looking for you. The tide was up past the road, and so I thought that maybe a tsunami took you out. I don’t fucking know. You’ve been like–catatonic for the past hour and a half. I don’t care about your hands, Margie, I just want you to tell me you’re not gonna pass out and die on me before we get to the hospital. That’s all.”

  Margie wilted as he spoke. She had been reckless and, as always, he suffered unfairly for it. He was pissed off at her, and rightly so. She couldn't even hug him the way she wanted to. Her aching body loathed to move. “Y-yeah! I’m alright, I promise I’m alright! Sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to.” Her voice meekly tapered off.

  “I’m not–” Raf groaned. “I’m not mad at you.” He exhaled another deep sigh that ended in a humourless huff of laughter. “It’s just been a stressful night and I just kinda want it to be over. Your hands…are gonna be taken care of, I promise. And whatever happens, we’ll still make music together, yeah?”

  “Yeah…”

  “Are you alright?”

  Magritte nodded, cradling her hands against her chest once again.

  “Actually?”

  She nodded again. “Just sick…and scared.”

  Magritte had broken eye contact to stare dolefully at her feet beneath the dashboard. She’d have curled up into that tiny dark space, if she could. She felt Raf’s gaze hang on her for a moment longer before he reached over to cup her face and press a weighty, lingering kiss against her left temple.

  “I love you,” his voice was soft in her ear, “so fuckin’ much.”

  Buoyed by the gesture, Magritte sat up to look at him again, warm sincerity lighting her guilty features. “I love you too! I really didn’t mean to vanish on you like that.”

  “Of course you didn’t.” There was no sarcasm tainting his affirmation. “But…what actually happened?”

  Margie sunk back under the blanket as she tried to string memories together in her head. “I don’t…really know. I remember being in the water, it was cold…orcas… Oh-!” Her thoughtful frown deepened. “I couldn’t see anything, no islands, no lights, not from boats or houses. Nothing. Just water and stars. I don’t know how I got back to shore.”

  “Did you wake up on the beach?”

  “I can’t remember.” She glanced up at him apologetically. “I don’t even remember getting into the car.” It felt like recalling a vivid dream. No memory of falling asleep, no memory of waking up…just a disorganised cluster of…experiences. They all bled into one another, but at the same time, there were so many missing pieces.

  Raf nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “The tide was low when I got to the beach. Like–really low. I couldn’t see the waves. So I went looking at starfishies and stuff”

  She watched him shut his eyes as she said this, and he sucked in a tortured breath. “Margie,” he let his breath go, “in the future, if the ocean just…disappears like that–go…get off the beach, alright? That’s–that’s tsunami shit.”

  She turned her eyes forward once again, with a sheepish little, “Oh.” She’d never heard anything of that sort before. “You’d think that’d be common knowledge.”

  Raf paused to cast her a condolatory look before professing, “I’m just so…so glad you’re back.”

 Magritte opened her mouth to respond, but was cut off by the ferry’s PA system announcing their arrival into Quadra Island’s Heriot Bay. 

  Leaning back in his seat, Raf dropped his hands onto the steering wheel. “A bit behind schedule, but…I’ll bet we can still make the 9:30 ferry to Campbell River before it leaves.”

  Warmth softened his features, but as he stared dully out the windshield of his car Magritte could see the dark circles of fatigue bruising his lower eyelids–and the irritated, dry redness that coloured the corners of his eyes. His whole body slumped as his posture slowly lost the battle against gravity.

  Oh, my poor man needs some proper sleep…

  And so did she.

  As long as she didn’t have to move, she was mostly fine. But her joints ached and the muscles in her legs felt sickly. Magritte dreaded the idea of prying herself out of the car to drag through the fluorescently lit hallways and stairwells of a hospital. Blisters on her feet served as additional discouragement. The blanket Raf had provided her did its job in keeping her cosy and warm–but her hot, sensitive skin was keen to make her shudder and shiver at any manner of change in the air. It was a fever that begged for bedrest.

  “We could just…nap, instead.”

  That won a small, lopsided smile out of him as he let out a bemused snort. Wistfully, he replied, “No.” Maintaining his little smirk, Raf rolled an affectionate gaze towards her.  “When we get back home, though, I’m gonna slam dunk you into bed. And then we’ll sleep for a whole god damn year.”

vi)

  Rafael was running on fumes.

  In retrospect, driving to and from Vancouver Island on only two distant hours of sleep was probably not the wisest choice he had ever made. But it had been the only choice. At least, that’s what he had felt. When he found her, Magritte was not herself. Her stare was vacant, and her words were vague and distant…he wasn’t even sure that she had recognized him.

  That scared him the most.

  It had taken him every ounce of self restraint not to smother her in a crushing, unending hug, not to kiss every inch of her face until she finally said his name–either in bemusement or irritation, he wouldn’t have cared which. The impulse to overwhelm her back to her senses almost robbed him of his own. But, he had managed. He had gotten her warm, dry, and hydrated and he kept his own shit together all the while. The euphoric relief of finding her–clashed with the disheartening terror of finding her unwell. He couldn’t, for the life of him, find any assurance that she was going to be alright.

  Until, finally, she mentioned something about orcas.

  Raf had been attempting to steal a wink of sleep in the cardeck of the Heriot Bay ferry when Magritte’s voice chimed energetically about having seen orcas. It was hoarse and raspy, yes, but it was her. The broad, open mouthed smile he saw on her face when he opened his eyes–it was her. And then, they had a conversation. A proper conversation. As they did, all the adrenaline that had been keeping him alert and awake slowly evaporated out of his body.

  Margie was okay.

  And he–

  He was so, so…so fucking tired.

  The car ride across Quadra Island had been alright. He kept Magritte awake by telling her about the flooding he saw, how it had even waterlogged the campsite. He told her about calling in the missing person report, and about sheepishly calling again while waiting for the ferry–to inform that he had found her. He told her about the weird, disjointed conversations they had, before she had fully come-to…how it was a lot like the funny little conversations he’d sometimes have with her while she was fast, fast asleep in the middle of the night. 

  In turn, Magritte told him about more of her memories as they came to her. She asked if he knew anything about a kind of orange starfish with thirteen legs. She told him what it felt like to be suddenly whisked away by the tide, and boasted to him about how nonchalanty she had managed to compose herself afterward.

  “I thanked the orcas for showing up, and then I was like ‘please don’t flay me, l-m-a-o’.”

  Apparently, that was the last thing she remembered. 

  The lack of closure provided by the gaps in her recollection didn’t seem to bother Margie much–but it gnawed at Raf. Even if the tide had somehow pushed her back onto shore, Magritte should have been hypothermic. She had been shivering from the cold when he found her, but her body was hot–feverish. Raf couldn’t conjure an explanation in his mind for how she had survived, or how he had found her walking back home. He hoped to get some answers at the hospital.

  When he and Magritte both cited the tidal swell as the cause of Magritte's injuries, the doctor cleaning her wounds seemed dismissive. The same way the lady who had received Raf’s missing person report seemed dismissive. Upon meeting the doctor’s subtle incredulity, both Raf and Margie dropped mention of the tidal event in favour of simply agreeing that she had been swimming irresponsibly and was dragged out by a riptide in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a detail they had planned to abandon together, but operating on the same exhausted wavelength, they simultaneously agreed that vying for the doctor’s belief wasn’t worth the energy. 

  Raf might have been a lot more bothered by the doctor’s impersonal aloofness–if he wasn’t so damn tired. Whether the doctor genuinely cared about Margie’s wellbeing or not didn’t terribly matter. Raf oversaw the man as he worked, confident that the doctor would be less likely to disregard Magritte’s comfort while he was being watched.

  Despite receiving a local anaesthetic that numbed her hands, Magritte kept her head turned away–her eyes wrenched shut–as the doctor flushed saline solution through the gashes carved into her palms and fingers. Raf, on the other hand, took the opportunity to observe the full extent of damage that had been done. The deeper lacerations appeared to have been filled with some manner of black, tarry silt. The saline that went into those wounds came out faintly red at first, and then ran suddenly black and thick with mud. Once the tarry mud had been flushed, the solution flowed deep crimson with blood for a brief while, until it cleared up again–but never as faintly as it had begun. The mud had been…almost scab-like in how it suppressed the bleeding.

  The doctor muttered; more to himself than to his deliberately inattentive patient. “How’d you pack so much dirt into these..? Must have been one hell of a current.”

  Within at least one of the freshly cleaned wounds on her palms, Raf caught a glimpse of white beneath the thick layer of pink and bleeding flesh–bone or cartilage, he couldn’t tell. It bothered him enough, though, that he felt compelled to ask something on Magritte’s behalf. But…

  Raf cleared his throat. “"Pardon, pouvez-vous parler français?"

  Whether it was because he was focused on his task, or because the question struck him as strange, the doctor was slow to answer. “Je peux, pourquoi?” 

  “Au cas où la réponse est mauvaise, je ne veux pas la contrarier.” Raf said, plainly, with an alleviating smile to avoid piquing Magritte’s concern.

  “Qu'est-ce qu'il y a?”

  Performing a lighthearted shrug and a sheepish grin, Raf replied, “Elle est musicienne–pianiste. Est-ce que ses blessures vont affecter son jeu au piano?”

  Raf watched the doctor hesitate before sighing through his nose. Unfortunately, he wasn’t interested in playing along with Raf’s diversionary nonchalantness. “C'est dur à dire. Des dommages aux nerfs sont bien possibles. Ce genre d'abrasions ont tendance à s'infecter.” The doctor then looked at Magritte rather sternly. “You’re going to need to keep your hands clean and–importantly–keep them dry. If you want them to make a full recovery, don’t use them until the stitches come out.” He nodded to Raf. “Make him do everything around the house, doctor’s orders.”

  Raf set his jaw in annoyance.

  Magritte, apparently surprised at being addressed, turned to the doctor with wide eyes. “He already does!”

  Her candid defence disarmed Raf completely, and won a genuine smirk from him. He straightened his back with a small surge of pride.

  “Good, that means you’ll have no excuse the next time I see you.” The doctor stepped back from her, having completed the task of cleaning her abrasions. “Let’s get you stitched up, then.”

  Magritte’s complexion was naturally very pale, and the chill she had caught made her paler yet. Raf hadn’t thought it possible for living flesh to be wholly devoid of colour–but any hue left on Magritte’s face ghosted away as she watched the doctor ready his suturing instruments. Raf could scarcely provide more than a pitying smile. He moved in closer to her, and caressed her hair as a way of distraction. Unfortunately, the tried and true ‘hold my hand and squeeze as hard as you need’ was, well…Her hands wouldn’t be holding anything anytime soon.

  Thankfully, the doctor worked quickly, and Raf had kept Magritte’s mind occupied by talking about ice cream, pretending to forget what her favourite flavours were so that she’d tell him about all of them. Mint chip, cookie dough, and around-the-world chocolate, all absolute bangers, by Magritte’s tastes. 

  “Also,” Raf reminded her, “strawberry rhubarb, no? The homemade stuff sold out the back of that one house on the bay, specifically.”

  “Yeah, but that one’s obscene! It’s so good, it’s not even fair to count it as ice cream!”

  When all was said and done, the hospital sent Magritte home with sutures in both hands, as well as her left elbow, knee, shin, and the underside of her right forearm. Each area was lightly dressed and well wrapped. Raf had received a sizable little goodie bag of gauze, bandages, polysporin, and naproxen, as well as antibiotics for her sore throat and fever. The dazed state he had found Magritte in was, apparently, the symptom of a concussion. Aside from instructing Raf to wake her up every few hours and assess her condition, the doctor seemed to have no real concern about her head. Raf just had to trust him on that.

  Magritte was alive and well…ish. She wasn’t in any danger. Her health had been seen to and confirmed by a medical professional–he had no choice but to trust that she was going to be just fine. Finally liberated from panicked urgency, Raf was left vulnerable to a nearly debilitating fatigue, and it settled upon him like a stone. 

  The same oppressive exhaustion seemed to have burdened Margie, as well. Soon after they had turned out of the hospital parking lot, she fell fast asleep in the passenger seat next to him. He let her. Though he would have appreciated a conversation to keep his own consciousness from drifting, she needed the rest more badly than he did, and a sleepy Magritte never made for very rousing conversation anyways. As a little treat to himself, he picked up a coffee from a drive-through, on the way out of Campbell River. It was a poor replacement for Margie’s adorable chatter but it was certainly better than nothing.  

 The final ferry off of Quadra was, by far, the greatest test of his resolve, and he finally forfeited to sleep during the forty-five minute ride. The PA system had failed to wake him, but the loud diesel engine of the truck parked next to him did the job just fine when it roared to life in preparation of departing. 

  Thankfully, the road from there was as empty and uneventful as the island’s roads always were. At 4:12pm, Raf’s little sedan finally rolled down the long, uneven driveway to the cottage. Parking his car and turning off the engine, he dropped his head back against his seat and let out a long, alleviated sigh.

  Without lifting his head, Raf cast his gaze towards the prodigal goblin passed out beside him. She’d be the ruin of his life; all because she was what made it worth living. Eventually, he’d find his own legs to stand on in that regard. But the events of the past twenty-four hours laid bare to him just how much work yet needed to be done towards that end.

  Be patient with yourself. It’s been…a rough fucking year.

  A rough year, but things were okay. Margie was okay. He was okay.

  “Margie, hun.” Raf reached over to smooth back her hair and gave her neck a gentle rub. “We’re home.”

  “...Already?” Slowly, Magritte sat up and pried her eyes open. Her brow furrowed deeply over a squinted gaze and she looked so…pained.

  “Yeah.” Raf unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the car door. “Hang on.” He grabbed the bag of medical goodies from the back seat before coming around to Magritte’s side of the car and opening the door for her. 

  All he had to contend with was the fatigue of a sleepless, stressful night–and it had hit him hard on the ride home. Magritte had the night’s fatigue as well, no doubt, but she also had the additional delight of physical trauma. Much like the exhaustion, the pain of being pummelled by Poseidon’s angry fists undoubtedly made itself fully apparent to her as the adrenaline, local anaesthetic, and pain medication waned. It showed in the wary stiffness of her slow, careful movements.

  One of her flip-flop adorned feet emerged from the car, and then another. Raf helped her up, careful to grab hold of her right elbow and not graze the minefield of fresh sutures hidden beneath the loose sleeves of her sweater. She crawled up the porch stairs with little more than a limp, and patiently waited as Raf unlocked the front door. 

  She was sluggish getting up the narrow, steep flight of stairs to the second floor, but otherwise had no trouble making the climb. Somewhat reluctantly, Raf had to stop her from b-lining to the bedroom at the end of the hall.

  “Hold up, hang on. Over here, first.” Hands on her waist, he gently–somewhat playfully–pulled her back and steered her towards the bathroom. She immediately knew what it was about.

  “Y-yeah…okay. S’fair. I gotta destink.”

  “That, and if we want any hope of combing these tangles out, it’s gonna require an entire bottle of conditioner.” As Magritte was in the careful process of removing her sweater, Raf managed to excavate a piece of foliage out of her matted curls before helping her pull the garment over her head. “You’ve got like…a whole cluster of burs stuck in there somehow.”

  For the first time since leaving the hospital, Raf realised the extent of the work ahead of him. Literally everything about preparing for–and taking–a shower required the use of hands. And, unfortunately, Magritte wasn’t the sort to wait on him for something as simple as turning on the faucet. She jumped ahead to carry out the task, and winced through the pain of it.

  “Margie…”

  “Wait, no…what? No…” Her words were drawn out in a whine as she came to Raf’s same realisation. “I don’t want to be treated like a decrepit old lady until my hands are better. It’s probably okay to do like…little stuff, right?”

  “Little stuff, very infrequently, I'm sure is fine” Raf relented. “But you heard the doctor as well as I did.” He removed the shower head from its bracket. “Anyways, let’s try to keep soap and water away from your stitches for now. Sit on the side of the tub, and I’ll wash your hair.”  

  Magritte did as he asked, sitting down and holding her bandaged hands limply between her knees. Raf had to bring the heat of the water up to near scalding before the shuddering from her feverish chills relented. Once the water ran nice and hot, however, she closed her eyes and melted beneath his fingertips as he massaged shampoo into her scalp.

  Getting all the detritus out of her hair was a task and a half. The leaves, twigs, and grass came out easily enough, but the burs required copious amounts of conditioner and patience. Until then, her hair had felt brittle and harsh, like dry hay. Thankfully, the conditioner pulled through in rehydrating her thick, curly locks, imparting it with a tropical coconut scent that was far more pleasant than ‘shoreline rot’. Employing the help of a comb, Raf was able to brush out the burs and tangles with a very gentle hand. 

  It took Raf the better part of an hour to scrub the reek of sea decay off Margie and clear her hair of knots and debris. She seemed even more relieved than he was when he reached for the towel after one last rinse. Equal parts boredom, ache, and sleepiness likely contributed to that. He threw the towel over her soggy nest of hair and tousled it vigorously, knowing he had no more than ten seconds to get her dried off before she felt compelled to get up and leave.

  Sure enough, he’d only just started to pat the towel down her back before she picked herself restlessly up off the side of the tub and began limping eagerly out the bathroom door.

  “You’re not dry yet,” he called fruitlessly after her.

  “I’ll put a towel under my head, don’t worry.” Her answer arrived after she had disappeared into the hall, but Magritte poked her head back into the bathroom again to make a plain request. “Come nap with me.”

  With a sigh, Raf pulled himself to his feet, and grabbed a dry towel off the rack before joining her in the hall. She scurried into the bedroom with haste motivated by feverish chill and, as he watched her, Raf took inventory of the scrapes and bruises he could see discolouring her skin. The ocean had thoroughly battered her…but it returned her to him, alive.

  A burning ember or resentment seared his mood for a brief moment before being smothered by thankfulness–with a conscious and very deliberate effort.

  In the bedroom, Magritte had already begun shimmying under the blankets before Raf reached over to lay the fresh towel neatly over her pillow. At least this way, once her hair was properly dry, she could just shove the towel off the bed and not have to suffer a damp cushion under her head.

  Even with the exciting prospect of comfortable sleep motivating her, Magritte's movements were as restrained as she was capable of making them; cautious not to aggravate her sore muscles, tender bruises, or painful stitches. Still, she winced and let out a whine that dissolved into a self-depreciative little chuckle as she failed to navigate her injuries carefully.

  Raf was too tired to oblige the impulse of asking her to slow down. She wouldn’t have listened to him anyway. Magritte was very intent on nestling into bed, wearing only the bandaged dressings that covered the worst of her lacerations. He couldn’t blame her. As he tucked her underneath the thick, heavy duvet in an automatic gesture of habit, his entire body begged him to join her. He removed his sweater jacket and shirt–and intended to leave his jeans on until he considered what the coarse denim would do if it managed to graze any one of the raw, red scrapes on Magritte’s legs. There were still a number of things he needed to take care of around the house before he passed out for the evening, and so he didn’t plan on napping for very long–but regardless of that, the jeans came off before he crawled into bed.

  He sank into the mattress, beneath the large duvet and next to Magritte. Laying with her back to him, she favoured the left side of her body and rested all her weight onto the right side. Raf reached over to caress her damp, clean locks of hair before leaning over to plant a small kiss just above her ear.

  “You can cuddle me, if you’re brave.” Her eyes were already closed, but a coy smile warmed her face. “I know I’m literally being held together by threads, but I promise I won’t fall apart if you hug me.”

  Raf hesitated for a moment as he considered the logistics, and then answered Magritte by gently, carefully snaking an arm around her waist. As he closed the space between them, he gingerly tucked his knees between hers, mindful of the bandaging on her left leg. Suddenly, he was happy to have shed most of his clothes. Magritte’s body temperature was running so hot, it threatened to cook him.

  She provided a little wiggle as she nestled comfortably into his arms. A content little hum escaped her. “Are you in your own head right now?”

  “Not really. Trying not to be,” Raf replied honestly.

  “Okay. You’re just kinda quiet.”

  “Tired.”

  She turned her head towards him, but couldn’t move enough to meet his gaze. “Are you gonna be alright?”

  “Yeah.” He had already determined that much for himself.

  He buried his nose into her coconut-scented curls and lightly squeezed his arms around her in an appreciatively reassuring gesture. She was the one who had spent the past twenty four hours being violently tossed around by the sea, freezing, narrowly avoiding death, and getting stitched back together again–but naturally, she was concerned to know if he was alright. Because he was being quiet.

  “You know…” He recalled something she had said to him one evening.

  It had been after one of the more difficult days the year had doled out to him and it made him especially despondent and not at all pleasant to sit with. He had received an email from his mother. In it, she had outlined her disappointment for the way he handled the matter of his uncle’s body and funeral. Her wording was–as always–carefully crafted to wring as much guilt and anger out of him as humanly possible. Apparently, choosing to honour his uncle’s wishes–by following the clear instructions written in his will–had done a great deal of emotional harm to his father and his grandmother, both who’d have loved the closure of seeing him one last time. It was, in her words, a betrayal of love and trust that she never imagined him capable of. This, despite the fact that he couldn’t have stopped them from attending the funeral if they had actually cared enough to show up for it. That shitty email had coloured his mood for the rest of the week, but the way his misery affected Margie had been especially clear to him that evening. She had remained quiet in his company, and made herself as small as she could–as though she were being punished by him just feeling his own damn feelings. It had bothered him to the point of asking why she wouldn’t go somewhere else for a while. If shit was so difficult for her, why didn’t she just leave?

 She had looked him squarely in the eyes, with an expression of frustrated conviction so intensely uncharacteristic of her–it seared into his brain.

  Raf sighed into her hair. “When you told me that you’d stick with me ‘through hell or high water’, I thought you were being hyperbolic.”

  “Hah-!” Magritte’s weak, but triumphant laugh was accompanied by a little wiggle. “Joke’s on you, nerd. You’re stuck with me. Absolutely poached.” There was a long pause before her hoarse, groggy voice added one last, conclusive, “...Sucker.” 

  “Mmh.” It was yet another little piece of proof he could add to his growing arsenal of defence against the inevitable cycle of paranoid musings. “You know what’s kinda neat?”

  “...Hm?”

  “I love you a whole heck of a lot.” He replied.

  Or, rather–he thought he replied. In truth, he barely managed to mutter the first three words before sleep took him.

  –

  Raf’s eyes snapped open at the sudden sound of…something very near to his ear; some manner of organic clicking. An owl just outside the window? Or–

  A snore rose up from the source of heat between his arms, followed by the sound of lips smacking quietly. 

  Ah.

  Magritte was not usually a loud sleeper. Unless she was sick, her breath usually emerged as little sighs that purred very lightly in her throat; audible, but by no means disruptive. Her illness, however, was apparent in more than just her snores. The heat that radiated off her body had roasted him while he napped. The stubborn euphoria of being able to hold her close after fearing he’d never have the chance to do so again–struggled to compete with the humid discomfort of sweating flesh and damp bed sheets.

  Still, he hesitated to move. Margie, who had the compulsive tendency to fidget, wiggle, and shift restlessly, had apparently remained perfectly still in his arms. She laid with her back flush against him, her knees and elbows exactly where they had been before he had fallen asleep. Raf figured that once she settled into a position that wasn’t painful, she simply refused to comprise it by moving even an inch. 

  Reluctantly, slowly, he withdrew his legs from between hers, uncoiled his arm from around her waist, and sat up. The chilly air outside of the blankets met him as a relief. The sun had fully set, and the cold glow of the moon outside blended with the warm light from the downstairs kitchen window, dimly lighting his bedroom. He turned his gaze to the digital clock on his nightstand.

  7:08pm.

  He rubbed his face, feeling more awake than he ought to after less than two hours of sleep. Remembering the doctor’s instruction, Raf performed the unconscionable task of waking Magritte up. First, he ran fingers through her hair and, when that failed to stir her, he leaned over to kiss the exposed side of her face.

  Finally, he gave her shoulder a gentle shake. “Margie.”

  She inhaled sharply, curling into herself. As the deep breath turned into a yawn, she began unfurling into a stretch. A quiet whimper of pain escaped her as she abruptly halted the gesture, and Raf winced for her. Curling back into her original position, Margie let out a disgruntled hum. She had no intention of pandering to consciousness.

  “Margie.” Raf’s voice took on an apologetic tone. He got to his feet, sliding off his side of the bed, and rounded to her side. Crouching to be at eye level with her, he smoothed back her hair in gentle but deliberately rousing strokes. “How are you feeling? How’s your head?” 

  “...S’fine.” She didn’t open her eyes.

  “Yeah? Can you look at me?”

  Reluctantly, she obliged him, forcing her eyes open. “No concussion stuff happening.”

  Raf rewarded her with a smile. “How about everything else? How’s the naproxen holding up?” 

  “Oh,” Magritte closed her eyes again and swallowed, “yeah–no, I could use more of that.”

  “Alright.” Raf stood up and looked for his pants. “Are you hungry?”

  “No, no…” 

  “Can I make you some tea?”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you drink it?”

  Magritte lifted her head just enough to look at him as he buttoned his jeans. “What kind of tea?”

  Raf provided a sheepish grin that she couldn’t see as he turned to pick his t-shirt up off the floor. “Neocitran.” 

  As he expected, Margie dropped her head back onto her pillow with a dissatisfied groan. “I guess.” 

  “You’re sweating buckets and you haven’t eaten anything all day.”

  “It tastes like stomach acid.”

  “Yeah, well…electrolytes.” He pulled his shirt on, over his head, and smoothed it down. “Try not to crash too hard, I’ll be back in a few.”

 “...Okay.” But sleep had clearly already won her.

  Standing in the open bedroom doorway, Raf hesitated for a moment before deciding not to pester her further. He exited into the hall and quietly closed the door behind him.

  Downstairs, the little black wood stove–who’s chimney pipe ran through the very centre of the cottage–had burned its wood down to embers. Raf’s first order of business was to stoke it back up into a fire that’d last the night. He opened the front of the stove slowly, careful to avoid receiving a face full of smoke. Using a fire poker, he smoothed out the coals before layering blocks of firewood atop them, as far back as he could manage. He let it burn, leaving the stove door slightly ajar while he turned his attention towards preparing Magritte’s tea.

  In the kitchen, Raf filled an electric kettle with water and plugged it in before rummaging the cupboards for a coffee mug and the box of Neocitran. As he emptied a packet of the medicinal tea powder into the cup, he heard Magritte near him.

  “...Raf.”

  Her voice had been hoarse and raspy since he found her, but just then–the way it seemed to waver, tremble, and barely find purchase in her throat–she sounded like hell.

  “Hun,” Raf furrowed his brow in concern as he turned to look at her, “you should be in–”

  He paused, staring across the empty room behind him. “...Bed.”

  Curiously, he doubled back to look into the living room and towards the stairs. Margie wasn’t there.

  Chalking it up to his imagination, Raf took the opportunity to fully close the front of the wood stove before stepping back into the kitchen. It’d be a while before the water in the kettle started boiling.

  “...Raf.” Her voice, again.

  He paused again, trying to discern where it was coming from.

  “...Raf.”

  His gaze followed the sound of Magritte’s voice, to the left and…out the kitchen window.

  “I’m sorry…Raf.”

  Across the small grassy clearing in front of the porch, at the shadowy edge of the treeline, two large pupils reflected moonlight towards him. The eyes could have belonged to a deer, except the silhouette that broke through the boughs of spruce and cedar trees was distinctly un-deerlike in shape. It stared at him, unblinking, one dark, impossibly long and slender arm lifting a bough over its head, the other arm hanging past its knee. Impossibly long and slender; the entire shape of it.

  “...Raf.” It had Margie’s voice.

  Raf watched it for a moment longer, his expression no different than if he were observing some manner of common wildlife. As the sound of boiling water met his ear, he returned his attention to the task at hand with a long sigh.

  This better not be how I discover I’m schizophrenic. He unplugged the kettle and poured hot water into the mug.

  “...it was….supposed to be…” Margie’s awful sounding voice trailed off before returning to its favourite word again, “...Raf.”

  Grabbing a spoon from the drawer, Raf began to stir the contents of the medicinal drink, watching the powder dissolve. Ages ago, a psychiatrist had once cautioned him to the non-zero chance that he could, eventually, find himself experiencing hallucinations; a lovely piece of genetic inheritance from the grandfather on his mother’s side–a man who had thrown himself into traffic decades before Raf was ever born.  

  With half-lidded disinterest, he watched the last of the powder dissolve away before pulling a second mug out of the overhead cabinet. He poured hot water into this one, too, but elected to forgo the Neocitran in favour of a chamomile tea bag. As he added a small splash of milk and a spoon of honey, the ghostly ill sound of Magritte’s voice continued to beckon him from the yard. The flash of moonlight reflecting off the two large, unblinking eyes still glinted at him in the periphery of his vision. 

  He had to admit, if he did carry a genetic predisposition for something like schizophrenia, the environment was exceptionally ripe for it to finally rear its head. He had just lived through the most stressful twenty-four hours of his life–at the tail end of the most stressful year of his life.

  He measured that thought for a second. Was it as stressful as Juilliard? As stressful as the year prior to Juilliard?

  Perhaps not…but as hellish as those years had been, they didn’t carry nearly as much heartache. Juilliard and the three ring circus shit-show his mother had put him through were stresses that he could wish and plan to escape from. The untimely death of his loved ones, on the other hand–the two unconditional beacons of trust, warmth, and guidance he had grown to depend on–wasn’t something he could claw himself away from. The scars of their absence would be a permanent wound he simply had to live though. His uncle was a permanent wound.

  But Magritte–

  “...Raf.”

  Raf groaned, a touch irritated at having his thoughts interrupted by the not-Margie thing goading him from the side yard.

  Having stirred milk and honey into the chamomile tea, he took the mug up in his hands and carried it out the side door, onto the porch. He walked up to the railing, overlooking the small clearing.

  “Well, if you want your tea, you’re gonna have to come out from under the trees.” His voice was as plain as though he were addressing a neighbour. 

  The long, slender silhouette stood unmoving, its moony gaze unblinking. It said nothing in response.

  “Yeah, alright.” He placed the mug of tea down on the lowest porch step leading into the side yard. “Well, I’m not going out there, so… It’s here if you want it. I’d have appreciated…you know…some confirmation that you’re real. But sure, whatever. This is chill too, I guess.”

  Raf turned back into the cottage, closing and locking the door behind him. If this was a hallucination, then he’d deal with it later. It could wait until Margie got better, until he had gotten a proper time away from the city…until he was good and ready to return. Until then, he’d manage it on his own terms, the way that felt right.

 With chamomile, milk, and honey.

vii)

  Three whole days passed Margie by in a painful, sleep-drunken haze.

  Thankfully, she remembered all of it. Or rather, she remembered the parts of it that she had been awake for. Vastly more hours had been spent in an uneasy slumber than had been spent consciously awake–perhaps because her painful throat and stitches compromised the quality of her sleep. As uncomfortable as the days had been, however, they were made as cosy as humanly possible by Raf’s tireless efforts.

  Any time she had opened her eyes, Raf was never long to check in on her. If he wasn’t downstairs doing some manner of chore, he was in the bedroom with her. Sometimes, he’d be on the laptop or listening to music, other times, she'd wake up with his arm draped carefully around her. At least once, Magritte had woken up to the pleasing trills and long-drawn vibratos of a violin being played in the tiny make-shift music room down the other end of the hall. She hadn’t stayed awake long to appreciate it. The melodic lines had lulled her pleasantly back to sleep.

  Raf had been an attentive caretaker, keeping her fed, hydrated, and warm. He made sure she had access to her painkillers, and diligently checked on her sutures, changing their dressings when needed. She had been so gratefully needy of any and all relief she could get–that she had been unable to conjure any earnest protest for his sake. She’d have liked to tell him to relax, but…it was just so nice to have someone there for her whenever consciousness dragged her painfully out of fever dreams. 

  On the fourth day, Margie woke up to the smell of coffee sometime after 10 a.m., and she felt something she hadn’t felt since arriving home from the hospital; restlessness. Her body complained with a new soreness that wasn’t from her fever, nor from her sea inflicted injuries. She ached from laying too long. Her back and hips, especially, felt strained in a way that begged to be stretched like taffy.

  Carefully, cautiously, Magritte slid her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Looking out the window, at the trees that lined the property, she felt an overwhelming desire to get dressed and go outside. Raf had told her about the flooding that occurred the night she was dragged to sea, and curiosity chewed at her. Did the bay look any different, now? Was there property damage to the houses on the other side of the road? What about the little mom-and-pop ice cream place, was it okay? 

  As she sat there, there was no sign of her fever. Her skin didn’t break out in goosebumps, nor did a chill force her body to shudder and tremble. Her throat was still sore, as was the rest of her–but her fever was gone.

  She heard the bedroom door open behind her, and turned her head to watch Raf walk in with a mug of coffee in hand. His eyebrows lifted at the sight of Margie, perched awake, alert, and bare-assed, basking in the rosy morning sunlight that flooded through the window.

  She smiled at him. “Mornin’.”

  “Good morning.” His inflection mirrored the surprise on his face, and he took a sip of coffee. “Were you too warm?” 

  “No, but my chill’s gone! And,” she stood up, stretching to the extent that sutures on her knees and elbows would allow, “I’m tired of being in bed.”

  Her inflamed muscles and bruised skin protested against the unsanctioned display of vigour, and it must have been apparent on her face because Raf patted the air in front of him in a warily pacifying gesture.

  “Okay, easy, easy.” He offered her an appeasing grin from under a fretfully knitted brow. “Want some coffee?”

  “Yeah, please! Can I drink it downstairs?”

  Raf put his mug down on top of the dresser before opening up one of the drawers. “I mean, yeah, if that’s what you want. Gotta put your tits away, though.” He held up two different garments in his hands, “Sweater? Or t-shirt?”

  “Sweater,” Margie decided without hesitation.

  The sweater that Raf presented to her was one of his own, and covered her to the knees when she put it on. He knew better than to expect her to wear pants, no matter how soft and comfy the selection. When it came to Margie’s incautious habit of passing by windows buck naked, whether it was within a downtown city apartment, or inside an isolated island cottage, Raf was forced to contend with a corner of his paranoia that rarely troubled him. An oversized sweater was a fair compromise to assuage his surveilling anxieties–and more than that, it served well to keep her warm against the autumn cold. As hardworking as the cabin’s little wood stove was, the morning chill always seemed to find its way in through the poorly insulated windows.

  With her tits safely tucked away, Magritte led the charge down stairs. Raf grabbed his cup of coffee and dutifully followed her towards the kitchen, where she took up a seat at the tiny table set between a window overlooking the side yard, and the couch that denoted the boundary of the living room.

  In the kitchen, Raf produced a mug from the cupboards and began pouring Margie’s coffee. “I finally got someone to come take a look at the roof, and they’re supposed to be stopping by today, but…in typical island fashion, they could show up any time between now and tomorrow night. Apparently, the snow comes down pretty heavy in the winters here, and I’ll feel a lot better if I know that our roof is good for it.”

  Margie listened half attentive, while the other half travelled with her gaze out the window. Past the trees was an ocean that had attempted to swallow her. She tried to imagine what the beach had looked like, fully submerged, as Raf had described. She hadn’t been awake when Raf drove off the island and then back onto it, and missed the chance to scope out the tsunami’s effect on the landscape. Raf had mentioned that, if it was a tsunami, it had been a small one. But still, something like that ought to have rearranged some things, no? She wanted to go for a walk, she wanted to go out there and see what had changed. She felt a sense of urgency about it, as though…if she waited any longer, she would lose the opportunity. She would miss it. It would be gone. She needed…to go to it. She needed to–

  “–That was the day before yesterday, though. So it might have already been removed.” The gentle thud of Raf placing a cup of coffee in front of Magritte brought her focus back to the fact that he had been talking to her.

  “Huh?” The small flinch she provided was enough to illustrate that she…hadn’t been paying attention. “What was removed? From where?”

  He took a seat across from her with a lightly admonishing smile, but there was no trace of exasperation in it. “A whale, from the beach. I ran into Mrs. Durant at the store the other day and she told me there was an enormous carcass not far from the boulder. It seems like one of your orca friends didn’t fare so well against the weird tidal swell.”

  “An orca!?” Magritte attempted to jump to her feet, but the stitches in her knee protested painfully against being suddenly crumpled, forcing her to abort the gesture early. Trying to conceal a wince, she asked, “Can we go see it?”

  Raf recoiled with a scrunched nose. “What? Why? If it’s still there, I can’t imagine what the smell would be like. Unique for sure, but I’m not keen on experiencing it.”

  “I want to take a photo.” She took a deep, hurried gulp of coffee. “We can hold our breath!”

  “We’ve got a guy coming to the house, though.” Raf impassively pointed a limp finger upward. “I’m kinda stuck here until he decides to show up. And you should be staying warm and resting.”

  Magritte frowned behind her coffee cup. “I’ve been in bed for three days. Can we please just see if we can spot it from the road?”

  Raf leaned back in his seat, and his expression pleaded to her. She knew she was, perhaps, being a bit insensitive to his anxieties by insisting on returning to the beach that had nearly stolen her from him just a few days prior, but her burning curiosity won out against placating concessions.

  “Just a picture. Please?”

  He threw his gaze to some other corner of the room with a capitulating shrug. Now, exasperation did paint his features. “You can do what you want, I’m not your dad. I just don’t think it’s a…”

  Magritte watched a shadow pass behind his eyes. It hardened his expression in a manner that may have been imperceptible to almost anyone else, but she could recognize it. She straightened her back nervously as Raf turned his gaze back towards her.

  “Hey, did Ms. Durant talk to you about the beach?”

  “What?” Magritte blinked, trying to decipher the question in combination with his subtle shift in tone.

  “The day before you got swept out, you were talking to her out front. Did you visit the beach because of something she told you?”

  “Oh, no.” Magritte exhaled a laugh and melted into her chair with visible relief. “She did tell me about the skunk in her shed, though.” She held him with an honest smile. “Ms. Durant is a sweet lady, Raf. She’s a good egg.”

  She watched him chase away his suspicions with a small nod, a thoughtful pause, and then another more certain nod. “She…is, yeah.”

  If there were any buts wanting to follow that sentiment out of his mouth, Raf swallowed them down with a gulp of coffee.

  She mirrored him, taking a sip of her own coffee and allowing Raf the space to wrestle both his thoughts and his mood back under control. She didn’t envy him the struggle. His brain could make an easy villain out of anyone if he let it. She often wondered what he had been like, back before he realised that his perception of the world was made so terrifyingly hostile by a cruel trick of his brain. For Raf, trust was’t a gift he could effortlessly provide out of kindness or respect to those who earned it. Trust was an injurious sacrifice he needed to make in order to avoid a loneliness he couldn’t survive.   “It’s like living in a world full of illusionary dangers, walking over blades but feeling soft grass beneath my feet. Hoping, praying with each step I take, that none of those blades ever turn out to be real. They’ve been real before. I know they hurt. There’s grass beneath my feet, I can feel it, but the old cuts still bleed sometimes and it startles me. I feel betrayed, and then I’m not myself for a while.”   His description was a vivid one that she played in her head any time his tone of voice grew a bit colder, any time his words carried a defensive bite. The perspective gave her patience. She had a low constitution for enduring meanness and, though he was often upset, Raf was never mean. Not to her. Not to anyone. But, by his own admission, that hadn’t always been the case. She believed him. After all, his feet bled from old cuts and, back then, he hadn’t yet learned that the blades he walked on were an illusion.

  As a reward for her patience, Raf relented. “Let’s take a shower first, before you go frolicking back onto the beach that tried to murder you.”

  Margie drained the last bit of her coffee before replying, “Right-o! Need to be minty fresh for the big rotting whale carcass.”

  “I mean, listen.” His tone started wary, but quickly dissolved into jest. “Can’t be too safe. For all we know, out-stinking a dead orca might be akin to wearing white at a wedding. Orca etiquette is weird like that.”

  Magritte failed to suppress a laugh and it escaped her as an undignified snort. “What?”

  He simply shrugged, turning his eyes down to his cup. “Orcas, man. Weird culture.”

  She couldn’t even pretend to be offended at the insinuation that she stank; Margie didn’t need to lift her arms to get a whiff of herself. She was three days ripe, and her sweat-brined hair felt oily enough that she was certain it could hold any shape she moulded it into.

  “Okay, okay, okay.” She put down her empty mug, pushed out of her chair, and began making quick strides towards the stairs–before turning heel back towards the table, picking up the mug, and bringing it to the sink.

  An automatic but genuine little “Thank you” from Raf met her as she scooted past the table once more. His voice followed her up as she scaled the stairs towards the bathroom.

  “Don’t get your hands wet. Don’t–uh, hm. Hang on, wait for me!”

  Once she reached the bathroom, she mostly obliged him. She carefully pulled off her oversized sweater before gingerly turning on the faucet of the shower to wait for the water to run hot. While her hands still ached in protest at any small gesture she made with them, they were not nearly as painful as they had been on the first day. Pausing to look at them, the tips of her fingers were all that peeked out from the tidy, taut gauze wrappings.

  “Here.” Raf’s voice from the doorway pulled her gaze away with a small startle. The white noise of the water had obscured the sound of his arrival. In the same single gesture, he pointed and reached towards her hands.

  Margie watched with anxious curiosity as he gently unwound the bandages. Her right hand went first, and as soon as it was free of its bindings, she turned her palm over to inspect it.

  It wasn’t the bruised, bloody mess she had expected to see. The lacerations ran down her palms like jagged valleys, darkened by sutures that resembled decaying train tracks. While there were several cuts and scrapes that marred her hand, only three required stitches. One ran long over the inner length of her forefinger, all the way down to her wrist. Another began at the webbing between her pinky and ring finger, but stopped very abruptly, just short of reaching the middle of her palm. The last one was the smallest, but most painful, cutting thickly across the base of her thumb. Despite the unsightliness of it, the injuries were clean and dry.

  As Raf unwrapped her left hand, Margie flexed the fingers on her right experimentally–and failed to stifle the yelp that escaped her when a sharp bolt of pain punished her. It was alarm enough for Raf to redirect his attention and reach haltingly with an instinctive flinch.

  His fingers closed protectively over the back of her hand. “Don’t do that!” The chiding remark warbled with a laugh that had been startled out of him. “Jeeze, leave it be.”

 “I barely–!” Margie withdrew her hand more out of irritation than protectiveness. She had hardly splayed the fingers at all, yet they immediately felt like they were being torn apart. She had absolutely no range of side-to-side motion, they wouldn’t even be able to form a chord on the piano. If it healed like that, and the scar tissue–or whatever–prevented her from fully splaying her fingers, she’d never be able to–

  “Don’t.” Raf repeated. “Not until the stitches come out, remember? Be patient, or it won’t heal properly.”

  “What if it’s already super fucked?” As her left hand was freed, she turned that one over to inspect it as well.

  Raf tossed the used dressings into the bin. “Then fucking it up more isn’t gonna help any.”

  He was right, of course. But that didn’t assuage her anxieties. As she looked over her left hand, there were only two lacerations that were stitched up. Both of them raked across the entire length of her palm, imperfectly parallel to one another. Along with the assortment of other small scrapes, there were two gashes along the length of her two centre digits that looked–and felt–exceptionally nasty, but apparently hadn’t been dramatic enough to warrant sutures. She refrained from indulging the urge to stretch her fingers on this hand as well.

  “Come on,” Raf began taking off his shirt. “Shower’s hot and we’re wasting water.”

Margie had no qualms letting Raf manage the soap and shampoo for her, and not just for the sake of sparing her hands. She was happy for any excuse to be touched and handled with the kind of gentleness that Raf always afforded to her. In exchange, she rewarded him with kisses at random intervals, placed wherever her lips could easily reach.

  He hadn’t attempted to make reassuring platitudes about her hands, and while she understood why, she found herself wishing he did. But lies, even the whitest of them, ranked among the most bitter transgressions in Raf’s mind. He was steadfast in treating others the way he wished to be treated, and dishonesty was as injurious to him as a bullet. He wasn’t a doctor, he had no idea how her hands would heal. And so he didn’t pretend to know that she would get her full range of motion–or even some of it–back. He could only tell her what he did know; if she wanted her hands to heal as well as they possibly could, she shouldn’t use them. Because that’s what the doctor had advised.

  Following that advice, she let him comb her hair and help her get dressed. Electing for a sleeveless dress with another of Raf’s sweaters thrown overtop for warmth, the stitches on her legs had nothing to chafe against. The outfit wasn’t winning any points for fashion, but the beached whale she looked forward to meeting wasn’t going to judge her for it.

  Downstairs, she eagerly slipped into her well-worn knockoff uggs, and carefully shrugged on a heavy wool-knit coat that hadn’t seen much use. The jacket she usually wore was somewhere in the middle of the ocean, now…or washed up on a nearby beach.

  Maybe the whale brought my jacket to shore with it. Margie smiled inwardly at the vivid mental image her mind conjured of an orca failing to fit into the tiny garment.

  Raf seized her moment of spaciness to swiftly button up the front of her coat. “If you…can’t see the whale from the road, come back, alright? You shouldn’t be out too long, anyways. You might not have a fever, but you’re still sick.”

  “Unless something wildly supernatural happens, I’ll be like–half an hour, max! Ten minutes to walk down there, ten minutes to snap a photo of the whale and marvel at its rotting majesty, ten minutes to walk back!” She provided a wet sniff and a reassuring grin.

  A sigh preceded the smile he mirrored, and he placed a little kiss atop her forehead. “Just–don’t dump me for the ocean, alright? I can’t compete with its bounty, or its alluring charm, or its depth of character, but I’ve got my own good qualities. I’ve got…thumbs.” He held up his hands to wiggle his thumbs in front of her. “What’s the ocean got on these, huh?” 

  Margie opened her mouth to volley a response, but Raf cut her off before she could even draw in a breath. “That’s right, nothing.”

  “Oh boy, that orca, though…” Margie turned her gaze up in mock thoughtfulness and bit her lip.  

  “Doesn’t have thumbs, either! Don’t–it’s dead! You can’t leave me for a corpse!”

  “I mean, I’m about to, just not in the context you’re–”

  “But Margie, Margie! Th-thumbs!” Raf’s faux panicked voice cracked with a laugh as Magritte dissolved into giggles.

  “Wh-why are you pitching thumbs as your only redeeming quality?” She placed her bandaged hands over his and doubled over them with laughter. “Like–really!?”

  “You’re gonna go, look at the ocean, see a dead whale, and feel real enchanted, just super enthralled for like…point five seconds before you remember, ‘oh shit, Raf’s got thumbs though’. And then you’re gonna come back home.”

  “Because of your thumbs.”

  “I mean, yeah. Why else?”

  Margie pretended to chew on that thought for a second, nodding slowly. “Okay, yeah. I’ll take my photos and come back…but only because of your thumbs.”

  “Here, I’ve also got,” Raf pulled his phone out of his pocket, “a camera you can use. Because the ocean swallowed yours. See, I’m not like that. I got thumbs, and I don’t use ‘em to steal your shit.”

  “Oh-!” She’d have completely forgotten that her phone was no longer with her. It decorated the sea floor as a lost, expensive paperweight, now. She carefully took Raf’s from his hands. “Well, I won’t lose this one, I promise!”

  “I know.” He gave her another quick kiss before opening the front door for her. “Bring it back, and I’ll let you see my cool thumbs again.” 

  Margie creased her brow over an incredulous grin. “Oh-ho, okay I’ll be real quick, then. Promise!” A little wave and an ‘I love you’ saw her off the cottage property and towards the ocean.

  The sweater and jacket combo might have been overkill. Though the weather was overcast with clouds, the temperature was perfectly mild and the breeze was gentle. Still, so long as she didn’t do anything strenuous, she was unlikely to sweat. Her walk to the bay road was uneventful, and the lack of spectacle followed her even once the beach was in sight. She had hoped to see all kinds of obvious signs that the tide had flooded the road and nearby properties, but aside from some debris here and there, things looked more or less the same.

  Oh, but there’s that old, giant piece of driftwood…It’s on the wrong side of the road, now!

  Turning her gaze down the length of the stony shore, no tall, dark dorsal fin flagged her attention. She could see the bend of the bay for a few hundred yards before it became obscured by the trees lining the bluff. The innumerous rocks that spangled the beach were obscured instead by a large cluster of…tar splatters? Or, perhaps that was oil punching black, irregular holes into the stone bed. 

  Whatever it was, there was…a lot of it.

  I wonder if that’s what killed the orca…

  Perhaps the tsunami had caused some manner of oil spill, and the whale had fallen victim to it. Whatever the case, there was no whale to be seen from where she stood. What she could see was that the tide was reasonably high, and the ocean looked agreeably calm. 

  Margie held up Raf’s phone with the intention of snapping a photo, but sighed at the way the camera’s lens failed to pick up on the distant details. The foreboding black smears and splotches across the beach didn’t look nearly as dramatic on the little phone screen as it should have. Through the phone’s lens, the patches of oil could have just as well been mistaken for water, by trick of the lighting.

  “Well, that’s boring.” She had really, genuinely expected to see a beached whale.

  Glancing back towards the direction of the cottage, the corner of Magritte’s mouth twitched nervously. She had told Raf that she’d come right back home if she didn’t see the orca, but…she also wanted to get a better photo of the oil spill. Maybe, if she got close enough and angled the shot right, she could get a photo of the waves washing over a pitch black beach. That would be cool as hell.

  No sooner did the thought go through her head than she began carefully descending the bluff towards the shoreline. There were very few oyster shells this high up the beach, and the cheap, eroded soles of her boots had little to worry about so long as she stuck close to the bluff. Brisk strides brought her to the black washed stones within a quick minute, but as she approached, the dark globs began resembling thick piles of tar more than a slick, oily fluid. As she slowed her steps to stand beside the first inky blob in her path, it appeared to ripple and quiver ever so slightly. 

  It looks like…liquorice jello.

  Some unseen, imperceptible tremor was causing it to jiggle, surely. The ocean waves, maybe. Or, perhaps, the slight breeze  coming off the water was enough to disturb it in such a manner. Staring down at it, Magritte’s reflection stared back; pale faced with large, dark splotches for eyes, cartoonishly distorted by the uneven, rippling curvature of the obsidian, jelly-like mass.

  Margie crouched down to get a better look at the stuff. It was too…wiggly to be tar, and it certainly wasn’t oil. As she considered finding a stick to poke it with, she watched her strange reflection reach forward with a tentative, curiously outstretched finger. For a confusing moment, Magritte thought the reflection was mirroring her as she reached out to poke the blob with a bare hand. But both of her hands were curled on top of her lap, not reaching to touch anything.

 Before she had time to react, her ‘reflection’ booped her on the nose with its long, cold, rubbery, black finger.

 Magritte's shock took the form of a sharp gasp and a backwards stagger that knocked her butt off her heels and flat onto the hard beach stones. She watched as a long, gangly body pulled itself out of the tarry jello to gaze with large, black, watery eyes down at her. When its feet found the ground, the blob it had emerged from was entirely gone.

  Margie stared, slack jawed and stupefied. “Oh, woah.”   There were no coherent thoughts that arranged themselves in her mind as she gazed upon the figure, trying to make sense of it. It was simultaneously human and unlike anything she had ever seen before in her life.

  As it stooped to crouch over her, it drew its face close enough that Magritte could see her reflection–her actual reflection–in the person’s enormous, glistening black pupils. The rest of its face was as long and narrow as its other features; a pale white visage with practically no lips, a flat, dark, narrow nose, marred by a criss-crossing of old, deep scars. It looked like a stark mask framed by black hair. Or, rather, framed by a slick mat that resembled hair. It frayed slightly into individual strands in several places, as though it were an incomplete sculpture attempting to create hair’s texture.

  It gently cupped her face between dark, slender hands that were large enough to envelop her entire head.

  And then it kissed her.

  The cold moisture of its rubbery flesh quickly gave way to a comforting heat that warmed Margie's face, reddening her cheeks, and filling her chest with energetic giddiness. Though her eyes were wide open, darkness engulfed her vision.   Magritte saw herself. Not a reflection this time. A memory. A view of herself from beneath the waves, surrounded by inky ocean and the cacophonous sounds of orca whistles and clicks. Moonlight haloed her tiny body as two large black hands reached out from the depths to curl its fingers lovingly around her. So much love, so much fascination, so much curious wonder.

It did not hold the kiss long, and as quickly as the euphoria washed over Margie, it pulled away from her to read her features with its large-eyed gaze. 

  “Wh–hah!” Margie held her fingertips to her cheeks and rubbed them, “Amazing! You’re–amazing! You’re–you! I–!” She was incoherent. Words abandoned her the very moment she tried to open her mouth to speak.

  While she sat there stammering, the tall, dark person before her rose to its feet and turned away from her to plunge itself into another nearby patch of tar-like jelly. A moment of delirious panic washed over her as she worried for a second that it was going to disappear and leave. But instead, it pulled itself back out of the amorphous mass and turned around to present Margie’s hiking boots in one hand, and her jacket in the other; both completely soaked through, but salvageable. 

  “O-oh…that’s…mine.” The words fell dully out of her mouth as her brain struggled to come back online. “Y..you need a jacket, too. Wear that one.”

  The jacket had been long enough to cover Margie's knees. On this person, however, the garment would barely reach past its thighs. Still, some cover was better than none at all, if it was going to walk back home with her.

  It’s going to walk back home with me?

  That seemed a strange assumption to make, but as Margie watched the person slip its long arms into the jacket’s sleeves, the peculiar assumption rooted itself as fact in Margie’s mind. 

  Enough sense returned to her that she was able to pull herself up off the ground, to her feet. “Do you have a name? Mine’s Margie.”

  It only stared at her as it pulled the front of the coat closed around itself. 

  “No? Okay, well we can find one for you eventually. No rush.”

  It leaned forward in a gesture that felt like agreement, but when it spoke, a broken, raspy version of her own voice emerged from its mouth. “I’m sorry, Raf.”

  Margie felt the hair on her arms raise, and her expression mirrored the way her stomach dropped. “Oooh, oh, nope. Uh, no thank you. Maybe we uh–let's not talk like that. Is that okay?” She let out a nervously apologetic laugh, “You’ll ruin Raf’s day, sounding like that.”

  It straightened its posture, pulling the jacket tighter around its body.

  “I don’t mean to be discouraging! I just–that’s gonna bother him a lot. And he’s not gonna wanna let you stay over if, yanno…He’s a bit skittish around new people.”

  As if to prove it was unbothered by Margie’s request, it took three quiet, confident strides to stand beside Margie. She provided it with a reassuring smile, and linked her arm with its.  “He’s a sweetheart though, I’m sure you’ll see. For some reason, I have a feeling that he’ll be really happy to meet you.” 

  The short walk back to the cottage was just as quiet and uneventful as her walk to the beach had been. They passed no pedestrians or cars along the way and, as Margie and her new friend walked beneath the tree boughs and up the driveway, it seemed that the roofers Raf waited on hadn’t yet arrived, either.

  Margie kicked off her shoes and opened the front door into the cottage. Raf, who was in the middle of tending to the stove, immediately turned to see her enter.

  “Oh, hey!” He welcomed her with a surprised, but warm smile. “I was actually just about to go find you. The roof guy called to postpone the…” His voice trailed off as his gaze drifted to settle upon the new guest taking its first tentative steps into their home. “Uh…postpone the assessment.” He continued to wear his smile as his eyes returned to her–but tension replaced its warmth.

  “Oh, cool!” Margie let out a defusing chuckle. “I made a new friend. I hope it’s okay, I invited it over.”

 Raf’s eyebrows rose higher than Magritte would have ever thought possible, and his smile dissolved completely from the slackening of his jaw. He pointed to it. “That one?”

  “Yeah!” Margie wrapped affectionate arms around it and pressed her cheek against its shoulder. “It’s the reason I’m still alive! So I figured we probably owe it lunch or something, at the very least.”   

viii)

  Raf watched Margie hug the thing that, until then, he had assumed was a hallucination. Its impossibly long, slender features, pitch black flesh, and enormous eyes–as big and round as the moon, and as unfathomable as the sea–were unmistakable to him. This was the same creature that had called his name from the treeline every night while Margie was bedridden.

  “Oh, thank god.” The words escaped him on a sigh before they even registered as a thought in his brain. He brought a hand over his eyes and smiled with relief.   “I thought,” he laughed, “I thought I was going nuts.” He jabbed an accusatory finger at the visitor. “You’ve been haunting me every night since Margie came home, and I even asked you to give me some kind of confirmation that you were real.” He turned up his palms in exasperation. “What the hell, man?”

 Margie withdrew from it enough to turn an inquiring gaze up at it, but the visitor simply stood there, clutching the front of its–Margie’s–jacket closed.

  Raf dropped his hands and shoulders with a capitulating sigh. “Did you at least enjoy the tea?”

  It nodded.

  “Well, good.” He turned his eyes to Magritte, who glanced between him and her new friend with growing uncertainty. “Margie, this is a problem.”

  “Why?” Her tone was torn between defensive and apologetic. “Wh–what happened?” 

  “It’s got longer thumbs than mine.”

  There was a moment of stunned silence as she looked down at the visitor’s hands, brow knit in genuine concern, before the tension eased off her face. She closed her eyes and let out a snort. “Oh.”

  “Does it have a name?”

  Margie and the visitor both shook their heads in unison, and Margie replied, “Not yet, I don’t think. But maybe soon?”

  Raf felt himself frown as he measured their new visitor more sincerely. On one hand, it all felt like an unexpected, but not peculiar, situation. Even when it had beckoned him from the trees, he knew as a matter of fact that it posed no danger to him. Cautious and curious was all he could gather from it. And now, as it stood in the entrance of their cottage, he could determine that there was also a certain kind of affection; a desire to stick around and exist here with them.

  On the other hand, it was a stranger to him and, despite that, he couldn’t convince himself that it carried any malicious intent–even as he tried to think of the possibilities. He couldn’t imagine it wanting anything more than to simply…hang out with them.

  And that was fucking weird.

  “So…what are you?” As the words fell out of his mouth, it felt like he was rubbing against an invisible grain. He wasn’t supposed to ask that question, the answer was so obvious. 

  Margie’s response reinforced that feeling. “A person!” She beamed at him, not admonishing his lack of tact.

  “Okay, right…” His eyes hung on the visitor, hoping for some kind of response from it, specifically. “Are you, uh…New? To that?”

  There was a pause as it trapped him in its gaze, and he could almost feel it rotating him in its mind like some kind of rubik’s cube puzzle. It nodded once, slowly, and then again, more enthusiastically.

  Margie’s attention ping ponged between the two of them as she tried to decipher the conversation taking place. “Th-that’s why it doesn’t have a name. It’s a person, but it doesn’t quite know who, yet.”

 “That’s, uh…” Raf rubbed his eyes wearily, “that’s the feeling I’m getting, too.”

  A corner of his brain thrashed against the ease of his understanding. Yet, even as he was aware of that furious rogue gear, it spun ineffectively–disquieting him only for how desperately it whirred. 

  He hadn’t noticed that the visitor closed the space between them, and it gently closed its hands over his ears.

  The noise stopped.

  Never would he have thought to describe tranquillity as a ‘painful shock’, but the sudden calm that washed over him felt as though it spilled out from something like a cyst that burst deep within the very core of his being. It had taken up so much space, and crowded out so many other things. It was a white noise that had been so loud for so long, he had grown numb to it.

  As the visitor withdrew its hands, he had a sense that–just like a cyst–it would return to fill the ethereal space within him again. The background noise of fear, distrust, and anxiety would slowly return to fill his head. But for now, it was calm. He was calm.

  He stood very still, gaze unfocused, processing what he felt–and what he didn’t feel. “H-huh.” 

  Relief. He felt relief.   

  And then he felt tears well up in his eyes.   Pressing the heels of his palms against them, he let out a bewildered laugh. “Wh…what the hell did you do to me?”

  “Raf?”

  He lifted his hands to see Margie standing between him and the new visitor, an arm extended backwards to gently put more space between him and their strange friend. Her eyebrows were tensely knit over an anxious frown.

  “It’s good, it’s good, I’m fine. It was just…” He gave his head a little shake, “weird.”

  The bizarre quiet of his mind allowed him to behold her wide-eyed gaze and the crease of her furrowed brow. He could see the nervous clenching of her jaw, and the downturned corners of her mouth. He could look at all of these small details that composed the expression of an objectively negative emotion–and instantly, easily understand the positive implications they carried. She was concerned for him, because he was crying. Because she loved him.   There was nothing else to it; no shame or disappointment in him, no impatient tone to indicate that she valued her time over his well being, no hidden sign of exasperation over the fact that he wasn’t performing Rafael to her standards. No, the expression was crystal clear to him, unmuddied by the distracting background noise of doubt and suspicion. The lines were still there to read between, if he wanted to. But he didn’t want to.

  He could choose not to. 

  “It’s weird, it’s so fucking weird,” was all he could say as he closed his arms around her and buried his face into her shoulder. “It’s been…it’s been a hell of a week, holy christ.” His voice was muffled as he spoke into her thickly knit coat.

  “Y-yeah.” Margie’s fingertips caressed the back of his head as well as they could manage, despite the bandages. “It has.”

  Without lifting his head, he continued his muttering. “You guys want like…hot chocolate? We got uh…cookies…or soup left over from last night. Or, uh…”

  A light tap on his shoulder encouraged him to lift his gaze and see the tall, dark visitor leaning over him with a sense of curious inquiry. Though its expression was vague at best, Raf could guess what had piqued its interest.

  “Never had chocolate before?”

  That caused Margie to stiffen and squirm with restless excitement between his arms, and he let her go as she piped up. “It’s the tits, it’s so good! Oh my god, imagine tasting chocolate for the first time!”   She reached over to nudge and shake their friend’s arm. “Come upstairs! You can borrow some of my clothes, and then we can help Raf melt the chocolate and stuff. He makes the real shit, like actual chocolate! It’s gonna blow your mind!!”

  “Right, yeah,” Raf agreed a bit weakly before turning a pointed gaze towards their friend. “Only fair. If it does blow your mind, I’ll call us even.”

  Though its expression remained unmoved and vacant, Raf got the brief impression of a smile before Magritte energetically whisked it up the stairs for a change of clothes.  No, he admitted to himself, I owe that thing a lot more than chocolate.   There was no ‘getting even’ with the creature–person–that brought Magritte back to him.  Peace of mind. In all that it did, it brought him peace of mind. For that, it could stick around and do whatever it wanted; Raf was happy to host.