Just After the Wave

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Louie bent down to pick up the little wet thing the sea had brought to the shore. It lay there motionless, scarcely touched by the water, inching forward onto the earth. It was a blue tit, one of those they’d been trying to protect, before, because they were becoming rare. He picked it up and handed it to his father.

“Here, Pata. Another one.”

His father nodded and held it close. The others looked on in silence. They would go and bury it later, in the place where they had put the dead birds. This was number one hundred and thirty-four: Louie knew the tally by heart.

And like the others, he went back to staring at the raging sea.

They were like drowned kittens in the rain, clinging to each other with their stunned gazes, their eyes blinking in the gusting wind and the warm downpours. That was the sea there before them, but not only before them. Behind them, to the left and to the right, there was also the sea. They hadn’t had time, in six days, to become accustomed, but they’d understood that the world would never be the same. They did not speak. They just held hands, all eleven of them, father, mother, and the nine children, their faces lashed by the demented weather, the near-constant deluge that obliged them to stay close to the house.

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