Chapter One
Shark • Penny’s Goggles • The Signs • Granny Pearl • “When the time is right” • Urgent Message
Penny peered through her goggles into the turquoise world below. The water was clear as crystal and there was movement everywhere—swaying, darting, nibbling, tugging. Even the light pulsed in veins across the sandy floor. A school of yellowtail jacks circled restlessly and a spiny lobster crossed an open patch between reefs. With its jointed legs and long, wavering antennae, it looked like a big orange insect. It disturbed a snoozing flounder, which lifted its pancake body briefly and, with a puff of sand, wriggled down deeper.
In the distance, she saw a shark cruise out from behind the rocks. Its belly was white as fresh snow; the rest of it gleamed like sunlit steel. Two unblinking eyes sat on either side of the crude spade of its head. It glided effortlessly, as if unbound by gravity. With only the barest flick of its tail, its rubbery body bent and the creature switched direction, swimming a wide, purposeful circle before disappearing around the other side of the rocks.
As Penny floated there, the sun went behind a cloud, and the water grew suddenly murky. Tiny neon fish that had been zipping around the waving sea rods vanished into a hole, and the school of yellowtail jacks swerved away, re-forming as a spinning, glittering ball in the distance. Penny’s lungs began to burn. She’d need to take a breath soon. The shark emerged again from behind the rocks. Its shadow passed over the lobster, which froze for a moment, detecting the disturbance with its sensitive antennae. As the shark came closer, Penny concentrated on keeping her heart rate slow, just as Simon had taught her.
The animal began to rise and bring its circle deliberately in. Its eye was trained on Penny. With each pass, it closed the distance between them. Its skin, somewhere between metal and velvet, shimmered in the dim light.
Penny!
Her name was being called at the surface. Underwater, the sound was muffled.
Penelope Nelson!
The shark passed her, just feet away this time. Then, as if sensing the intent in the voice above, it abandoned its slowly narrowing circles and, with a barely perceptible shift of its sinewy tail, turned and picked up speed and headed straight for Penny. At the last instant, it veered off, a flick of its tail at the surface releasing a curtain of quivering, pearly bubbles, and Penny felt herself being hauled up by the back of her shirt. She was deposited on the ground outside the tank, just as the shark disappeared into the shadows.
“What were you thinking!” shouted Cab, the aquarist. “Do you know how foolish that is—what could happen? I felt sick when I saw you there! For the last time—stay OUT of the tank!”
“But I wasn’t swimming this time,” said Penny, pushing her faded black goggles up over her head, water streaming down from her wet hair and shirt. “I was just leaning in. And,” she said confidently, “you know people think sharks are way more dangerous than they really are. You’re more likely to die in the bathtub than you are in a shark attack.”
“You’re not supposed to be in the staff area,” said Cab, exasperated. “No one else would come up here, let alone put their head in a tank with a six-foot shark!”
“But,” said Penny, “I just…” She trailed off. She looked for the shark, as if the sight of it would prove to Cab how she just hadn’t been able to help herself, but the big fish was hidden behind the reef.
“Penny, are you up there?” A moment later her mother appeared on the platform.
“I found her in the tank,” said Cab.
“Not all the way in,” said Penny quickly. “Just leaning in a little.”
“Again, Penny?” cried her mother. “I’m so sorry, Cab,” she said. “That’s the last time.”
“It had better be,” said Cab self-righteously as he shuffled off.
The open-air platform above the tanks at the Bermuda Aquarium, where Penny’s parents were marine biologists, had been declared strictly off-limits to Penny ever since she had been caught swimming in the tank last month. But today, after walking to the aquarium after school, Penny had grown restless as she’d waited for her mother in the main hall, watching Oscar the shark circle. In the end she couldn’t resist sneaking up to the platform above the tank.
“Why do you have to be so reckless?” said her mother after Cab had left. “There are rules for a reason—why don’t you think you have to follow them just like anyone else?”
“I follow rules that make sense,” said Penny, water dripping on the concrete as she wrung out her wet hair. “But come on, Mami, Oscar won’t hurt me. You know he’s hand-fed—he’s not like a wild shark.” She looked longingly down at the beautiful dusky shark swimming peacefully. She had come so close to reaching out and brushing his dorsal fin with her fingertips.
In the tank, the lobster had safely ended his stiff-legged venture. A pair of parrotfish scraped algae from the reef, their fused beaks leaving tiny white crosses on the rock. Purple sea fans bowed in the current and fluted sponges reached up toward the fading light. As Penny watched, a lettuce-green eel emerged from its cave and—like a long scarf set loose by the wind—stretched to its full length and billowed across the water.
She couldn’t explain to people like Cab, or even her mother, the powerful pull she felt to be in that other world, close to such a magnificent creature that moved so flawlessly through its element. She couldn’t describe how, when she was near the shark, she felt not fear but a deep, potent sense of being alive, a feeling more vivid and real than anything else in her day, in her whole life, even. But already the sensation was fading. The clouds thickened, transforming the reef and its creatures into shadows.
Her mother sighed. “I’m going to talk to your father about this,” she said. “But right now let’s go. I want to get home to Granny Pearl.”
Hearing the urgency in her mother’s voice, Penny grabbed her school backpack. She felt suddenly chilly in her damp shirt, and a familiar nervous feeling quickened her step. Leaving the darkened tank behind, she hurried after her mother down the staff stairs.
* * *
In the car, Penny wound down her window and let the wind dry her hair. She used to take the bus home. Her mother driving her was a new thing; ever since Granny Pearl had been having what Penny’s parents called “the episodes,” at least one of them tried to come home early. After so long without them being there, Penny found it strange to have them around all the time. She was still thinking about floating in the cool blue world of the tank, remembering how close she had been to the shark, when Mami nodded at the road up ahead.
“Looks like girls from your school,” she said.
Penny looked up to see a group of girls walking along the shady verge under the oleander. She shrugged and hunched down in her seat.
“Isn’t that Angela with them?” asked Mami, squinting. “It is. Should I offer them a lift?”
“No,” said Penny quickly. “They’re going the other way!”
“I haven’t seen Angela in ages,” said Mami. “Are you two still arguing?”
“We’re not arguing,” muttered Penny. “We’re just not friends anymore.”
“That’s a shame,” said her mother. “You’ve been friends since you were little kids. Don’t you think you can try getting along again? Angela probably misses you, too, you know.”
Penny didn’t answer. It was typical that her mother had no idea what was going on in her life. As if Angela missed her! She had a whole other group of friends now. It wasn’t as if Penny had wanted things to change—Angela was the one who had turned into a different person overnight. Penny looked the other way as they drove past the girls.
She told herself she didn’t care, anyway. She didn’t have time to worry about problems at school now, not when things at home—important things—needed her attention.
For weeks now, strange signs had been appearing around Granny Pearl’s house.
First, a dozen harbor conches had appeared overnight in a perfect circle on the shore of the cove.
They were followed, days later, by the leaves of the orange tree turning silver.
Then, deep within her plumage, the parrot Seagrape’s quills had begun to glimmer.
There were other things, too: little things in the garden and the cove, just out of the ordinary enough to be notable. Granny Pearl said they were like warnings that appeared in the days before a big storm—in the same way that silk spiders moved their thick yellow webs from high in the treetops to low in the trunks of the spice trees to escape the rain, or the way your ears popped from subtle pressure changes in the atmosphere.
“On their own they don’t mean much,” said Granny Pearl. “But all together like this … It’s been seven years since I’ve seen anything like it. Something is on its way, Penny; some big change is about to happen. I can feel it.”
“Should we tell Mami and Papi?” Penny had whispered as she looked wonderingly at the pewter luster of a leaf cradled in Granny Pearl’s palm.
“Better not,” said Granny Pearl. “I don’t think they’d understand.”
“No, probably not,” Penny had agreed.
To be honest, Penny wouldn’t have paid much attention to any of the signs if her grandmother hadn’t seen them and been so sure. But Granny Pearl had always been attuned to things in the natural world that no one else noticed. She knew what the shapes and tints of the evening clouds predicted for the next day’s weather. She knew that monarchs spun their cocoons in milkweed and that cloudless sulfurs flocked to cassia trees. On summer evenings, after a full moon, she would take Penny down to the shore, where she could time to the minute when the glowworms would shimmy up to the surface—first one, then two, then dozens of little whirring, bioluminescent spirits, before one by one they’d ebb and sink back down into the silt. Darkness would have seeped in unnoticed in their wake and the last of the sunset drained away, so that when the spectacle was over, the world would have transformed, leaving the cove a glossy black disc beneath the moonlight.
So, when she told Penny that the signs meant that something important was on its way, Penny believed her.
What that something might be, Granny Pearl refused to say.
“When the time is right,” she’d tell Penny. “When I’m sure.”
It seemed to Penny that since the signs had begun appearing, Granny Pearl had been growing weaker. It was as though the mysterious thing approaching was sapping her strength, making her forgetful and confused, inclined to leave faucets running, or to wander and forget where she was. At the rate things were going, Penny thought that whatever was happening had to happen soon. Maybe, she thought, looking out of the car window at the eerie, sallow sky, maybe even today.
She and her mother had reached the pampas grass, which meant they were almost home. A breeze rustled restlessly through the razor-sharp blades. Dingy plumes shook on long stalks above the grass, like surf kicked up by a roiling sea, and released fluffy, dirty-white seedpods that whirled thickly in the air. Penny had never seen so many. She twisted around in her seat to see out of the window behind them as her mother turned the car down the bumpy dirt road through the trees to Granny Pearl’s house. The gray afternoon dimmed further as the trees met in a roof over the road, forging a gloomy green tunnel. Seedpods from the pampas blew in and were held aloft like tiny parachutes on currents of breeze, eventually coming to lie in yellowed drifts in the hollows of the earth.
“Do you see them all?” asked Penny. “They’re never out like this until late summer! And I’ve never seen so many before!”
“You mean the pampas seeds?” Mami asked. She glanced out the window. “They’re the same as always, aren’t they? They always make a huge mess.”
One blew in the window and landed on Penny’s knee. Her heart quickened. She picked it up and examined it. It looked perfectly ordinary—a tiny, soft hook with a shock of blond fluff at the end—but she knew it wasn’t. She looked back outside. Her mother was wrong. They were everywhere, more numerous than she had ever known, falling like dirty snow, obscuring the day.
She would have to tell Granny Pearl right away.
* * *
The green parrot was waiting.
The old yellow-hulled sailboat, the Pamela Jane, lay on her mooring in the sea at the foot of the garden. Perched atop the mast as it knocked gently back and forth in the salty breeze was Seagrape the parrot, in the post she kept every day from three o’clock until Penny got home. Far below, tangled in the mooring chain, burned-looking clumps of sargassum drifted dreamily in the tide. The school of snappers that lived below the hull was off at the other end of the cove. A sign hung from the stern, squeaking in the breeze: CLUBHOUSE—KEEP OUT!
At the rumble of wheels, Seagrape cocked her head, then dropped down from the mast and flew, faster than usual, to meet Penny. Penny jumped out before the car had fully stopped, ignoring her mother’s irritated shout. She stretched out her arm, and Seagrape landed heavily. Agitated, the bird shuffled from talon to talon, muttering and ruffling her feathers.
“What are you so excited about?” Penny asked. She stroked the parrot’s silky wings, looking for the glimmer that Granny Pearl had seen in her quills, deep within the glossy green plumage. But in the sallow light of the overcast afternoon it was hard to discern.
With a squawk Seagrape flew ahead to the porch. Penny kicked off her shoes and peeled off her socks, muddy from the field at school, and ran barefoot the rest of the way to the house.
“Granny Pearl!” she called, dashing up the porch steps, past the row of conch shells.
“I’m home!” she shouted, barging through the screen door into the kitchen.
No one answered.
“Granny Pearl!” Penny sang as the screen door banged shut. But the kitchen was empty. Her parents’ lab coats from earlier in the week lay rumpled and soiled in a heap on the floor by the laundry, waiting to be washed. Penny dropped her shoes inside the door.
“Hello!” she shouted again. “I’m home!”
Seagrape flew in through the open kitchen window. The house was dim. The living room, with its faded old furniture and stacks of marine biology journals, was empty, too. The creaky ceiling fan was off, but the faint breeze coming from outside turned it, so slowly it barely moved at all. Penny ran down the hallway, tossing her backpack in her room as she went, but no one was in the bathroom or in her grandmother’s small and tidy bedroom. The violet, its leaves fuzzy as bumblebees, sat silent on the windowsill. Across the hall, Simon and Helix’s old room, nearly bare now, was quiet.
All of a sudden the house felt hollow, but the musty, undisturbed air closed in claustrophobically. Penny hurried back through the living room, past her parents’ bedroom to her father’s study. The eyes of sea creatures preserved in jars of alcohol—unblinking year in and year out throughout Penny’s childhood—stared down at her from the shelves, and a few ophalla stones from Tamarind glowed stubbornly on the desk, but they were the only things there. Granny Pearl wasn’t in the house. The uneasiness building these past weeks rushed to the surface. Seagrape landed with a thump in the doorway.
Penny ran back to the kitchen when she heard her mother come in.
“She’s probably just down in the garden,” said Mami, but beneath her mother’s calm Penny could detect the same sharp fear they all felt these days.
She bolted out the screen door, took the porch steps in a single leap, and raced down the hill. Seagrape ducked out the open kitchen window and flew after her.
* * *
When Penny reached the vegetable garden, she saw her grandmother’s basket, half full and abandoned in between the rows, but no Granny Pearl. She kept running down the hill to the cove at the end of the garden, where the Pamela Jane was moored. It wasn’t until she saw her grandmother standing on the rocks near the cove’s entrance, looking out to sea through a pair of binoculars, that Penny slowed down. Granny Pearl had shrunk in the past months and her cotton housedress billowed like a mainsail in the breeze, its pattern faded from hundreds of sunny afternoons spent drying on the line. Penny looked back to see her mother standing at the top of the hill and waved to indicate that everything was okay. Her mother returned to the house and Penny ran the rest of the way down the hill.
“There you are!” said Penny, drawing up breathlessly alongside her grandmother.
“Oh good, you’re home,” said Granny Pearl, not lifting her gaze from the binoculars.
“I didn’t know where you were,” said Penny.
“It’s not like you had many places to look,” said Granny Pearl after a moment. “I don’t go very far these days, do I?” She lowered the binoculars and sighed impatiently. “Have you been listening to your parents again? They worry too much! Don’t do this, don’t do that! I’m eighty-six years old and I can tell you—they don’t know everything!”
Penny was in hearty agreement that her parents didn’t know everything. She felt foolish and somehow guilty for having been frightened. Solidarity with her grandmother reaffirmed, she took the binoculars that Granny Pearl handed to her.
“Here, you look,” said Granny Pearl. “My eyes aren’t good enough anymore. Tell me what you see.”
“Where am I supposed to look?”
“I don’t know exactly; I’d try near the far reefs.”
Penny squinted at the ragged cuffs of surf along the breakers half a mile out. A few seagulls wheeled in the sky and the horizon was stacked with dirty-looking clouds.
“Well?”
“Some gulls,” said Penny. “A rain cloud on the horizon. Doesn’t look like it’s coming in. It might just pass us.”
“What else?”
“I don’t see anything else.”
“You’re sure?”
Penny looked out to sea again. “Nothing,” she said.
“Hmm,” said Granny Pearl. “It’s still too bright. We’ll have to wait until it’s dark.”
“How are we going to see anything in the dark?” Penny asked. “And what am I even looking for, anyway?”
Her grandmother didn’t answer. Penny scanned the water once more, slowly. There was nothing there. The rain cloud was tracking along the horizon, not coming to shore. She followed the waves all the way in to the cove, where the Pamela Jane lay lonely on her mooring, and lowered the binoculars.
Penny had been just a year old when her family had left life on the sea, living aboard the Pamela Jane, sailing from port to port, and had moved in with Granny Pearl. Her grandmother had already been an old lady then, but now she was magnificently old, her hair white as cotton and her face a mass of soft, deep wrinkles. Penny was twelve now. She had a sister, Maya, and a brother, Simon, who were much older than she was.
When Penny was young, her parents had been so deeply immersed in their work, noses in their microscopes, skin pale from so many hours logged in their lab, that Penny had been left in Granny Pearl’s care. Her siblings—and Helix, too, when he had lived with them—had always been off doing their own thing, so most afternoons it was just Penny, Granny Pearl, and Seagrape in the little house by the sea. That was fine with Penny. She loved her grandmother more than anyone. Unlike the others, she always had time for Penny. Granny Pearl never got irritated with her or scolded her or treated her like a pesky little kid to be shaken off. She enjoyed Penny’s company, always.
When Penny was old enough, she joined Granny Pearl on her early-morning swim out to the big anvil rock and back. They’d garden together and feed fish in the cove, watching out for the one big greedy snapper who always stole from the chubs. It hadn’t been that many years ago that Granny Pearl had built the tree house for Penny in the great, broad-armed old poinciana tree. She’d climbed a ladder with planks of wood on her shoulder, hammering them into the branches herself. Penny’s parents had tried to stop her, but she had done it anyway. It wasn’t like either of them had time to build Penny a tree house. They didn’t even have time to cook dinner. Until recently Granny Pearl had done that, too, with potatoes and carrots and onions fresh from the garden, the kitchen windows fogging with steam from the pots, the house smelling like the handfuls of oregano and chives and mint, warm from the sun, that she rinsed in the cool tap and lay, beaded and dazzling, on the countertop.
In those days, come dinnertime the kitchen would be crowded, full of noise and life. Penny’s parents’ lab coats would have been washed and crisply ironed and left on the backs of their chairs for the next day. But eventually Maya had left for college and then to work in a city in America, and Simon was right behind her. Now they only came home for brief visits once or twice a year.
A swell came through the mouth of the cove, and the Pamela Jane strained on her mooring, as if she would have gladly broken free if she could. Penny’s gaze roved over the seashore and up the garden. On such a gloomy day, certain things seemed to cast their own light, a soft burnished glow, as though illuminated from within—a bright-leafed bush, fruit glowing on the end of a branch, the hard curve of Seagrape’s beak. Granny Pearl’s hairpins, the ones she washed in vinegar, gleamed softly in the bleached-out light.
Seagrape was a few feet away, perched on a rock. A gravelly, discontented rumble stirred deep in her throat, like thunder in the distance.
“You feel it in your quills, don’t you, old lady?” murmured Granny Pearl. “It’s on its way, isn’t it?”
Penny’s shoulders stiffened. “What is it, Granny Pearl?” she asked. “What’s on its way?”
But her grandmother seemed to have forgotten she was there. Penny was reminded of how you’re never supposed to wake a sleepwalker. Out on the water, the Pamela Jane creaked uneasily, bow into the wind. Her brass portholes caught the low light, making perfect golden circles. Inside the boat it was dark. The day felt like it was pressing in around Penny, suffocating her.
“Granny Pearl,” she repeated softly. “What is it? What’s on its way?”
Suddenly the garden looked wild, its shadows damp and unpleasant, and the sea cold, creased by mean currents. A strange menace had entered the afternoon, but it wasn’t from the light or the sea. It was something inside Granny Pearl herself, as if she were being erased from within.
There was little that frightened Penny. Not sharks, not teachers, not cranky old Cab at the aquarium, not diving off cliffs, or swimming into the shallow cave at the far end of the cove. But there in the familiar garden of her home, with her grandmother beside her and her mother just up the hill in the house, Penny suddenly felt deeply afraid.
Another swell surged into the inlet, rocking the Pamela Jane, and for several seconds Penny thought she saw something reflected in the portholes, not the clouds, not the garden, but some strange scene: tangled vines in a great canopy of trees, creatures crossing on branches high above the earth, bell-shaped flowers trembling beneath their paws, turtles lumbering on a hot shore below. The boat swung to face the breeze, and the brass portholes once again became opaque. Granny Pearl snapped back, brisk and ordinary once more, and turned abruptly from the sea.
“Come up to the garden with me,” she said. “We need to get a few more things for dinner. I want you to have a good meal tonight. You’re going to need your strength.”
“Strength for what?” asked Penny.
“You’ll find out soon enough,” said Granny Pearl. “Now,” she said, firmly changing the subject, “tell me about your day.”
Whatever had happened was over. If anything had even happened. Penny wanted to believe that she had just imagined it. They walked slowly up the hill.
“I scored two goals at lunch,” said Penny. She was eager to put the strange feeling in the garden out of her mind and happily summoned the satisfying sensation of running with the soccer ball down the field, the wind on her face, the ground blurring beneath her feet. “That was great. After that…” After that it had been as awful as every other day that year, full of tiny humiliations and spells of profound boredom. “It’s another girl’s birthday and they’re all going to her house. Angela, too, of course. Since she’s one of them now. Mami wanted to know why I wasn’t invited.”
Penny knew that Angela was right—they were too old for the things they used to do. Even Penny couldn’t muster the enthusiasm for the games that once came so naturally. But she was certain there was more to life than sitting around giggling about boys and combing her hair. She was sure there was something else, something bigger. Something that felt truly important. Still, she couldn’t escape the feeling that something bigger was happening for everyone else, and she was the one being left behind.
It had been a shock when Angela stopped being friends with Penny, but when Penny looked back, she could see it had been happening slowly for a while. They seemed to have lost the ability to play, but nothing else had come along to fill the space. Angela wasn’t interested in dares, like seeing how far down the coast they could swim, or in just riding around on their bikes. She had started making excuses not to come over. She no longer cared about how much fun they’d had playing pirates with the yellow flags that Granny Pearl had sewn for them, or camping out on the Pamela Jane on summer evenings, when Granny Pearl would wave a white dish towel on the shore before she rowed a picnic basket of dinner out to the boat. It was as if those times had never even happened.
Penny saw Angela with her new friends each day, sitting under the shade tree at lunch, giggling and whispering about boys. Stupid boys, too—show-offs who did everything for attention. Penny couldn’t believe that Angela might really like any of them. Or like any of the boring girls she hung out with now. It made no sense how everything had changed so much from just last year. Then, all the girls still played ball at lunch. Now they spent the whole time combing their hair and secretly putting on makeup, and when they got in trouble, they smirked and only pretended to wipe off their lipstick.
Granny Pearl was the only one Penny confided in about their final argument, tearfully on the porch one afternoon before her parents came home.
“She said, ‘Don’t you see, I don’t want to play stupid games—we’re not little kids anymore, Penny. You’re embarrassing me!’ She told me I was embarrassing her.”
Granny Pearl had hugged Penny and kissed the top of her head. She always comforted Penny, less by what she said, which was usually something mild like, It won’t always be this way, or No one ever looks back and wishes they grew up any faster, and more because she was the one person who seemed to really know what was going on in Penny’s life and to understand how she felt. She was the only one who knew how hurt and bewildered Penny felt this year, how much she hated going to school every day.
Penny’s feelings were hurt on Granny Pearl’s behalf, too. If Angela didn’t want to hang out with her anymore, at least once in a while she could have visited Granny Pearl, who had practically been like her own grandmother, after all. Penny consoled herself with the thought that Granny Pearl and Seagrape were all the friends she really needed—even if the latter was inclined to get grumpy and nip.
“It isn’t even like I want to go to their dumb party,” she said. “All they’re going to do is sit around and talk about boys and clothes. It’s so boring!”
But today Granny Pearl didn’t comfort her.
“You need other people, Penny,” she said. She sounded tired. “You need to find a way to get along with people.”
“I have you,” said Penny. “I’d rather be with you than with anyone else.”
But Granny Pearl shook her head. “Not me,” she said. “You need people your own age.”
Hurt, Penny fell quiet. Was Granny Pearl mad at her? They were halfway up the hill now, almost at the garden. They passed Penny’s bike leaning against a tree. It was Simon’s old bike, which he had painted and polished for her on a previous visit home. For a moment Penny imagined jumping on it and riding as far away as she could. That reminded her of what she had seen on the drive home earlier.
“I forgot to tell you,” she said to her grandmother, eager to bring back the good feeling between them. “I saw thousands of pampas seedpods on the way home today. They aren’t usually out for months, and there are so many of them—I’m sure they’re another sign.”
“Pampas?” asked Granny Pearl. “You mean on the lane? I don’t remember that from before … but maybe. It’s possible.” She paused, leaning on her cane as she considered. “And your brother and sister coming home in a couple of days … that may be part of it.”
“What do they have to do with anything?” asked Penny.
“I don’t know for sure yet,” said Granny Pearl. “But,” she muttered, “it tells me that there isn’t much time.” She would say nothing further.
It took a long time to make it up the hill. Seagrape flutter-hopped along behind them. They stopped at the garden to pick up the basket.
Penny bent down to pluck a few sage leaves, velvety soft as rabbits’ ears. Granny Pearl seldom made it down to the garden anymore, and it wasn’t the bountiful, shipshape plot it used to be. It was shrinking, its edges scraggly, caterpillars chomping their way through the tomatoes with new brazenness. A few rows at the end had been lost to the saw grass. Penny picked up the basket to carry to the house, feeling the familiar weight of carrots and muddy potatoes against her hip. Foamy leaves of parsley tickled her leg, and the bristles of the basket pricked her every now and then. She had been carrying the basket up from the garden for as long as she could remember. When Penny was very small, Granny Pearl had just pretended to let her help, then they had taken it together, and now Penny carried it on her own, walking slowly alongside her grandmother, who moved stiffly, pausing to rest a few times as they went up the last bit of the hill.
Across the garden, from the dark mouth of the lane, Penny saw a breeze blowing seedpods out of the trees, buoying them into the sky where they swirled, a mute flock of messengers bearing their urgent, secret message into the dull afternoon.
Chapter Two
The Drawer • Maya’s Journal • A Frightening Episode • “All of these things have explanations” • A Mission
Penny left the basket with her mother and grandmother in the kitchen and sneaked down the hallway to her bedroom.
Something that Granny Pearl had said in the garden had stuck in Penny’s mind. She said that Seagrape knew something. You feel it in your quills, don’t you? It was true that Seagrape had been temperamental lately, agitated and restless and more intolerant than usual. Penny’s fingers bore the scars of impatient nips. But what the parrot might know Penny had no idea.
Granny Pearl had also said that Maya’s and Simon’s visit home might have something to do with what was happening.
Simon hadn’t been home in close to a year now, but Maya had last been home six months ago. The city had made her sister elegant, and Penny had felt a little shy of her for the first few hours after she was back. She felt newly aware of her own tangled hair, her chin scabbed from a tumble on the soccer field, a fresh bump on her forehead from when she had tried to jump from the railing of the Pamela Jane through the hatch into the cabin earlier that week. Angela was right—she looked like a little kid.
Penny had helped her sister lug her suitcase down the hallway.
“Everything always looks so small when you come back,” Maya said.
“It’s the same size it always was,” said Penny.
“Well, your perspective changes,” said Maya.
Whatever that means, Penny had thought, with a flicker of irritation. She had sat swinging her legs on Simon’s old bed while Maya unpacked. Maya had been showing off in her city clothes, but the humidity was already making her dress limp and curling her hair. Soon enough her feet were bare, like they always used to be.
No mention was made of Maya’s boyfriend—James or Julian, no one could seem to remember his name—who had been in the wings for the past year. Though he had come to visit the family once—and, as they all said, he was perfectly nice—none of them warmed to him. Even Maya herself didn’t seem thrilled about him. Seagrape had brayed rudely at him anytime he came near until eventually Mami made Penny shut the parrot in her room, an act of betrayal that Seagrape rewarded by shredding a blanket with her beak.
“You two are still inseparable,” Maya had said, pausing from unpacking to reach out to Seagrape on Penny’s shoulder, letting the parrot gnaw her knuckles gently. “Helix knew you’d take good care of her.” A soft, wistful glimmer came into her eyes. Through the window the breeze had sighed in the darkening orange grove.
“It seems like forever since we’ve seen him,” said Penny.
“Seven years,” said Maya. “It’s been seven years.”
She had been about to say something else but stopped herself.
In that moment, even with her sister right there, Penny had the sensation of missing her, or as if part of Maya was missing. When Maya was just a girl herself, she had carried Penny through the jungle in a sling and kept her and Simon safe. She had crossed mountains, lived in the treetops, and escaped from pirates—she had been brave and free and done all these amazing things in Tamarind. Now she was restless and preoccupied with a mysterious life far away and thoughts she never shared with Penny.
The old Maya would have wanted to know about the signs. She might have even known about them already. So that was where Penny was going to go: to the old Maya.
Penny went into the room she had once shared with her sister. She waited until Seagrape ducked in, then shut the door behind her. Penny slid a chair against it. She didn’t want to get caught.
Furtively, she felt under the dresser’s ledge until she found the tiny key, then jiggled it in the lock of the top drawer of Maya’s old dresser. When Penny was little, she’d loved snooping through Maya’s things. The contents of the locked drawer had been especially irresistible. Sometimes Maya would catch her and then Papi would say that anyone would think a murder was under way, with all the hollering that would break out. Penny liked Simon’s things, too—a compass, books about insects, fossils, a math kit in a tin, random scientific gadgetry—but they were never intriguing to her in the way that her sister’s treasures were.
It had been a long time since Penny had even thought about the drawer, but now, slowly, she opened it.
She inhaled its musty, botanical smell of old cedar and leaves, a whiff of Tamarind that reminded her of long walks through the jungle. She had been to Tamarind twice before. The first time she had been a baby, and Maya and Simon took turns carrying her in a sling. She didn’t remember anything from that time, but she’d heard the others’ stories so often that they felt like her own memories. But the second time—that she could recall vividly. She had been five years old. She remembered a lake where houseboats had come together like a jigsaw puzzle on different currents into a village that formed every night and disbanded every morning, and she remembered the strange old woman, Milagros, with bird droppings white as ice on her shoes, who had known many of Tamarind’s oldest secrets. She could still picture Helix’s feuding aunts, the señoras, whose ferocious quarrel they had witnessed, and she remembered how she had kicked the general’s trunklike shins when she thought he had been hurting Simon. And she would never forget Helix quietly asking her to take care of Seagrape right before he jumped overboard and swam back to shore as the Pamela Jane headed across the Blue Line toward home. She could almost hear the surprising splash, like the sound of something breaking.
She rummaged gently through objects with secret meanings, castoffs no longer useful but too precious to throw out—old fishing weights, pressed flowers, an ostrillo feather—until her fingers touched something cool. A tooth. It was smooth, its serrated edges blunted by time. It was attached to a worn leather strap. Helix’s shark’s tooth necklace, the one he had been wearing the first time they had seen him, the day they had landed in Tamarind and gone trekking in circles through the jungle, getting more and more lost until he had dropped down out of a tree—literally—and rescued them. Years later, when he had stayed behind in Tamarind, he had left it in the cabin on the Pamela Jane for Maya. For a very long time, Maya had worn it, even when she went to sleep at night, but eventually she had abandoned it in the drawer.
Penny heard her mother’s voice down the hall and froze, ready to slam the drawer shut, but her mother’s voice grew distant again. She was still in the kitchen with Granny Pearl.
Penny took out the necklace and turned it over in her hand. Seagrape came over and nibbled the leather.
“Shall I put it on?” Penny whispered. The parrot didn’t answer, just cocked her head and looked at Penny. Maya had given up her claim to the necklace when she left it here—it belonged just as much to Penny by now. Penny slipped it over her head. The tooth was cool against her throat, as though it had been deep underwater all this time. She felt some strange power, as if she were Helix, a hunter in the shadowy light of the jungle, adept and sure.
But what Penny was looking for was still inside.
Carefully, she reached in and withdrew one of Maya’s old journals from the back. Penny heard footsteps and paused to listen, but no one came down the hall.
The journal’s spine was cracked, its glue melted from the humidity, and it creaked as she opened it. The paper was mustard yellow with age.
I keep expecting him to show up one day, to just walk through the door, barefoot. It just doesn’t seem real to me that he’s gone and won’t be coming back.…
Maya was the one who had pined most openly for Helix (though it was obvious she had thought it was secretly). But Penny had missed him, too. She was little enough that the memories she did have got lost in the shuffle, squashed by the others’ noisier and more powerful ones. Sometimes her family even corrected her. Since she’d been so young when he had left, no one thought she could miss him as much as they did, which wasn’t true. Reading what Maya had written about Helix made him feel close, and had been worth risking her sister’s wrath.
There were letters to him, too, written on pages that had never been torn out. Penny knew they weren’t the type of letters that ever got sent, even if there were an address to send them to.
Dear Helix,
I miss you more each day, not less. It’s been three years since I last saw you, and I would think it would be the other way around, but the more time passes the more I miss you.
Fearful of being discovered, Penny scanned the pages quickly. Maya was not a faithful journal keeper. There were often long lapses between entries. Once, a whole year was skipped. Penny put the book back, shuffled through the books until she found the one she wanted, written seven years ago, when Granny Pearl had last seen the signs. Penny skimmed the pages, waiting for some detail to jog her memory, for something her sister had written to shed light. But if there had been signs then, too, Maya had been oblivious to them. There was nothing here to help Penny.
Seagrape began to grouse under her breath.
“She left it here, didn’t she?” said Penny. “That means it doesn’t really even belong to her anymore. If it was that important, she would have taken it with her. Anyway,” she said, “I thought there might be something in here about the signs, but there isn’t, so I’m putting it back now.”
Seagrape did that thing where she gazed at Penny without blinking. When Penny was younger, she had been convinced that Seagrape could talk but simply refused to.
Penny heard the murmur of voices in the kitchen. Her father was home. She sighed, knowing she was about to get in trouble about the tank. Reluctantly she closed the journal and returned it to the drawer.
* * *
When Penny reached the kitchen, she realized that there would be no lecture about the tank this night. Granny Pearl was in the middle of one of her episodes. She was sitting at the kitchen table, muttering under her breath, kneading her knuckles. Penny couldn’t make out what she was saying, but there was an undercurrent of urgency in her tone. Penny’s parents sat across from her, looking distressed. Evening had fallen and it had begun raining. The wind was blowing the rain around, and everything solid in the garden had merged into a single silhouette. The smell of wet earth crept in under the door. Penny stood in the doorway for a second, then tiptoed in and joined them.
Seagrape flew in behind Penny and landed on the back of a chair. Granny Pearl’s gaze drifted to the bird.
“There you are,” she said. “Is Helix here? Is he with you?”
“Helix?” said Mami calmly. “Pearl, Helix isn’t here. He hasn’t been in a long time.”
Penny was frightened. Helix was in Tamarind. The Blue Line had sealed behind them years ago—surely Granny Pearl remembered that. She looked down at her grandmother’s hands. They worked restlessly. Her knuckles were like burls, her skin thin and papery, a faint bluish cast in the hollows between bones. These strange spells had happened several times now. Scared, Penny had let her parents do the talking, but this time she felt desperate to do something to make her grandmother return to normal right away.
“Granny Pearl,” she said cautiously.
“Maya?” asked Granny Pearl, looking right at Penny with a glazed, faraway look. “I thought that perhaps you’d be there, too, but Penny has to do this on her own.”
Penny felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. It took a few seconds before she could get her breath back.
“It’s me, Granny Pearl,” she said in a small voice.
But Granny Pearl had slipped into the past, where Maya and Helix still were, and the world she was seeing was invisible to other people.
A sudden wind funneled up from the sea, through the garden, and howled through the few inches of open window over the kitchen sink, spraying droplets of rain across the counter and floor. Seagrape squawked and flapped her wings.
Mami got up and closed the window, shutting out the menace in the evening and closing the family in together.
The sound of the window broke the spell. Granny Pearl was fully with them again. She blinked a few times and looked around, as if she had just realized where she was. “I’m going to bed,” she said abruptly, and stood up from the table. “No, stop fussing, I don’t need help.”
But Penny’s mother went with her. Penny stood up to go, too, but her father told her to sit down. They waited in unhappy silence.
“Take your goggles off at the table,” he said at last.
Penny had forgotten that they were still on her forehead. She didn’t take them off, but pushed them up higher. Her hair still had a whiff of the aquarium water. She picked up her fork, but the sight of the food on her plate turned her stomach. Granny Pearl had looked straight at her and not known who she was. Nothing like that had ever happened before, and the awful moment replayed over and over in Penny’s mind.
Mami came back into the room. “She’s in bed,” she said, joining them at the table. “She’ll be better after some sleep.”
Her parents began to eat, but Penny had lost her appetite. She sneaked a glance at them. Recently Papi had shaved the snowy-white beard he’d had most of Penny’s life, revealing a face that was gaunt and surprisingly foreign to her. Her mother’s nails were short, her hair briskly brushed. She always looked like she got ready in a hurry, which she did. Their faces were lined from years of living on the boat, but tonight they looked older and wearier than usual. Suddenly Penny had an overwhelming urge to talk to them, to confide Granny Pearl’s secret, even though she knew what they would say.
“It’s because of the signs,” she said at last, taking a bite at the same time so her voice was deliberately muffled. She took a deep breath. “I think they make her really tired. She’ll be herself again once they’re over.”
“What signs?” asked Mami, only half listening.
“Things have been happening,” said Penny. “In the garden, in the water. Granny Pearl says it’s like signs that happen before a storm—you know, like spiders building their webs lower, that kind of thing. She says they mean that something big is about to happen.”
Mami stopped eating and listened.
“What’s about to happen?” asked Papi.
“I don’t know,” said Penny truthfully. “Granny Pearl won’t tell me yet. But even Seagrape’s quills are changing color.”
“Seagrape’s quills?” asked her mother, frowning and looking over at Seagrape, perched on the top rung of Granny Pearl’s empty chair.
“They’ve started to shimmer,” said Penny. “See?”
“Not really,” said her mother.
“You need to be in the right light,” said Penny. “But it’s true.”
Penny’s mother looked at her father. “What else?”
Penny knew they didn’t believe her—she had known that they wouldn’t. But now she was determined to convince them.
“Lots of things,” she said. “We found a bunch of harbor conchs lined up in a circle on the sand at the cove. That was the first thing. A wild cockatoo was sitting on the roof one day—he stayed there for an hour before he flew off. The leaves on the orange trees are turning silver—”
“I don’t see that the orange trees are a different color,” said Mami, looking out the window.
“It’s raining,” said Penny. “You can’t see properly. I saw them, though—Granny Pearl showed me. And she says there’s a cloud that forms right over the mouth of the cove every day at lunchtime. And today there were more pampas seedpods than ever before—”
“Penny, stop,” said her father, interrupting her. “Any clouds out there are just clouds. The seedpods are no different than any other year. And it’s probably a fungus that citrus trees get. I’ll take a look at them tomorrow.”
“There are other things,” said Penny desperately. “Seagrape, show them your quills.” But Seagrape wouldn’t let Penny lift her wing.
“Sweetheart, all of these things have explanations,” said Mami.
“Are you saying that Granny Pearl is making all this up?” said Penny indignantly. “If she says it’s real, it’s real!”
“Lower your voice,” said her father sharply.
Penny stared miserably down at the food that had grown cold. Why wouldn’t they listen?
Her mother put her hand on her father’s and spoke calmly to Penny.
“Everyone’s upset,” she said. “Penny, Granny Pearl is very old now. Her mind is wandering. She’s mixing things up—things from the past, imaginary things. Sometimes she believes things that aren’t real.”
Penny shook her head. “Maybe that happens to some people when they get old, but not Granny Pearl,” she said. “I spend more time with her than anyone. If something were wrong, I’d know. She made it all the way down to the cove today. She hasn’t done that in ages. It means that she’s getting stronger again. She’ll be like her old self as soon as the signs stop and whatever is going to happen happens.”
“Penny, nothing’s about to happen,” said Papi. Suddenly he no longer looked angry; he was just sad.
“You don’t know that,” said Penny. “I’m surprised you haven’t noticed any of the signs yourself. I thought scientists were supposed to be observant.”
“We all love Granny Pearl,” said Mami gently, moving to touch Penny’s shoulder, but Penny shrugged her off.
“Then believe her!” said Penny, glaring at her mother.
“Penny,” said her mother. “We think that what’s going on with Granny Pearl is serious enough that we asked Maya and Simon to come home to see her. We didn’t want to leave it any longer. Do you understand?”
It felt like a lump of food had stuck in Penny’s throat, except that she had barely touched anything on her plate.
“Nobody told me that’s why they’re coming,” she mumbled.
“I didn’t think we had to,” said her mother. “You already know that Granny Pearl hasn’t been herself lately … that she’s been spending more time in her own world.”
“What’s happening—what’s really happening here—is something we can’t stop,” said her father.
None of them had ever talked about what was happening with Granny Pearl so openly before, and doing so was making it all horribly real.
“But,” said Penny. “But she’s still okay. She’s still Granny Pearl.”
She looked at her parents. They looked sadly back at her.
“Of course she’s still Granny Pearl,” said her mother softly. “But…” She trailed off.
Penny couldn’t sit there any longer. She needed air. She stood up from the table quickly, the legs of her chair scraping noisily across the floor.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Granny Pearl is fine—she’s FINE. The signs mean something is going to happen—when it does, you’ll wish you had believed her!”
She stumbled down the dark hallway. She stopped outside Granny Pearl’s room and pressed her forehead to the wall. She felt sick and dizzy. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. The silver orange trees. Seagrape’s quills. The conch shells and the cloud and everything else. It was all real. She had seen all these things with her own eyes.
The only person who could reassure Penny now was her grandmother. Penny badly needed to hear her voice, to have her say something that would erase everything her parents had just said. Penny listened, but it was quiet behind Granny Pearl’s closed door. She must already be asleep. Penny waited there another moment, then continued unhappily down the hall.
In her room, the shutters were still open and pale moonlight spilled in through the window, lighting the windward side of the furniture and casting outsized shadows from the lees. Penny was about to step through the doorway when a shadow moved and a figure stood up in the moonlight.
* * *
“Granny Pearl,” said Penny when she had gotten over her fright. “What are you doing?”
“It’s time,” said Granny Pearl, getting creakily to her feet from the chair by the window. In the moonlight her hair was lit as white as surf. “I told you I’d let you know when I was sure. Come on, Penny, hurry—you have to catch the tide.”
“The tide?” said Penny. “What do you mean?”
Penny noticed her backpack on the ground beneath the window, a life jacket sitting on top of it. Seagrape perched on the open sill.
“The signs,” said Granny Pearl. “I saw them seven years ago, too, right before the four of you left for Tamarind. I thought that maybe the others would be with you, but now I can see you have to do this on your own.”
For the first time, Penny felt angry at her grandmother.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
Granny Pearl leaned closer, and Penny could see her eyes behind the moonlit lenses of her glasses.
“You have to go to Tamarind,” Granny Pearl whispered. “There’s something there you need to find, that only you can do.”
Penny’s heart began to pound. There was a low buzzing sound in her ears. She looked at her grandmother in disbelief.
“To Tamarind?” she asked.
“Shhh, whisper,” said Granny Pearl. She had been holding Penny’s raincoat, which now she pushed into Penny’s hands. “Yes, Tamarind.”
“B-but…” stuttered Penny. “It’s impossible—the Blue Line is sealed, we closed it when we left the last time. It goes all the way around the island. There’s no way back.…”
“There’s a way,” said Granny Pearl. “Take the rowboat. Row out of the cove, out past the anvil rock, out to the far boilers. Find the big brain coral, you know where it is, the biggest one, that leads to the crooked cut between the reefs. Wait there. I’ve packed everything you’ll need in your backpack.”
“You want me to leave now?” asked Penny. “But—I’m not allowed out in the rowboat at night.” She looked out at the darkness. “Can’t I go tomorrow instead?”
“No,” said Granny Pearl. “It has to be now or you’ll miss it.”
The darkness felt palpable, pushing like velvet through the salty white screen. A breeze carried in the troubled rumble of the surf out by the far breakers. Penny looked helplessly at her grandmother.
“Shouldn’t we tell Mami and Papi?” she asked.
Granny Pearl shook her head.
Penny put on her raincoat in a daze. She had grown up around the water. She knew how reckless it would be to take a small rowboat out alone half a mile offshore on a dark, rainy night. And in the past it had taken days of sailing to reach Tamarind—how was she going to get there in a rowboat? It couldn’t be done.
“What am I supposed to do in Tamarind?” she asked weakly.
“You’ll know when you get there,” said Granny Pearl.
The moonlight lit the frames of her glasses like two silver pools. She reached out and touched Penny’s cheek. “Everything will become clear,” she said. “Don’t be afraid, Penny.”
But it wasn’t the thought of being alone in the wobbly little rowboat in the dark night that frightened Penny. It was … what if nothing was out there? If she went out and found nothing, it would mean … what it would mean was unbearable. Her grandmother’s hand on Penny’s face had been dry and soft. Penny closed her eyes. She knew the faded print on Granny Pearl’s housedress so well that she could still see its pattern, could smell the comforting scent of laundry soap and mint leaves mingled in the fabric.
“Granny Pearl,” she said softly, afraid she might cry.
But she steadied herself. To refuse to go would be to admit that her parents were right. This was her chance to prove that the signs were real, that nothing had changed and that Granny Pearl was still herself. Penny took a deep breath.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
She grabbed her life jacket and backpack and opened the window. Seagrape squawked quietly once and flew into the darkness. Before she could change her mind, Penny swung her leg over the ledge and dropped down into the garden.
Helix
He was headed to see the Great Wave, somewhere on the far northeast coast of Tamarind, in Kana, a place he had never been before. For the past seven years, he had been living in a small, sleepy town with his father, a retired general who kept groves of fruit trees—row upon orderly row of citrus that supplied all the nearby towns with polemos, tanguis, and tart suisallies. Helix had gotten to know his father for the first time in his life and had helped him with the citrus, expanding their reach to more far-flung areas. Then a year ago his father had died unexpectedly. He’d been an old man, asleep in bed in the middle of the night—a surprisingly peaceful death for a man who had spent half his life fighting. Without a clear sense of what to do next, Helix had stayed on, tending the groves, selling the crops, but becoming increasingly lonely, dissatisfied, restless.
A few weeks ago, during an early-morning inspection of the groves, he had found a trespasser sleeping under a polemo tree, clothes damp with dew, empty peels on the ground beside him. Secretly grateful to meet someone living free, off the land like he used to do, Helix shared breakfast with the man, who he learned was from the east and was on his way back there to see the Great Wave and the Bloom. As Helix listened to the roaring—and no doubt exaggerated—stories about this amazing spectacle, this wonder of the world, he began to feel as if some color that he had forgotten was missing had suddenly been restored to the spectrum. The world suddenly seemed brighter and clearer, the things within it more sharply delineated, pulsing with life that gathered strength and seemed to propel him forward.
By the time he had returned to the house, the traveler had departed, the sun had burned off the dew, and Helix knew that he would be going east. It wasn’t just curiosity. Even when his father was alive, the town had never fully felt like home. The sense that something was missing—something critical—had only grown stronger as time passed.
Helix needed a change.
So he had begun the long journey across Tamarind, through humid jungles, across mountains where the air was thin and cool, over barren deserts where any breeze that came released animal bones from shifting yellow dunes, rattling them across the scorching sand. The journey boiled life down to its simplest terms. He had only to find food and dry ground to sleep on each night. Usually he slept in the open air; on rainy nights he pitched a small tent.
He had grown up during the war in Western Tamarind, and he was happy to feel the atmosphere change as he entered the region known as Kana. It was a relief to leave behind the old scars in the landscape—the guns rusting in the grip of feverish vines, the ruins sinking into the mud—and be in a place that had not endured years of fear, a landscape not burdened by his own memories. Even on its outskirts, Kana was lush and bright. Food was plentiful. Everywhere was drooping, swishing, kinetic greenery, singing with all the life in it.
After weeks of walking, he was now only a day or two from Tontap, where he had been told the festival would begin. He was walking through an open, empty field when he saw the green smudge of a parrot in the clear blue sky. He stopped and shaded his eyes. He felt a surge of hopefulness, as he always did.
When he was a child, she used to perch beside his shoulder while he slept each night, after his mother had died. She had watched over him for years, until he’d sent her to be with the family. He still missed her company, but it comforted him to know that some part of him was still with them.
He squinted up through the glare. But as the bird neared, he saw it was too small, its feathers striped with crimson. It wasn’t her.
And never will be, he told himself.
He wiped the sweat off his face with his arm and kept walking.
He had ample time to daydream as he walked, time for the silent, ephemeral churn of memory to overtake him. He recalled the little house on the cove—the sweet scent of the allamanda flowers blooming on the trellis, the green cloud of the vegetable garden, and the tiny butterfly cocoons shivering in the light breeze through the milkweed patch. Another world, another life. He would have thought that the memories might have faded. Detail blurred, it was true, but only as if to clear away clutter, allowing him to feel the essence of those he missed in pure, potent form. Maya, Simon, Penny, their parents, Granny Pearl—sometimes they seemed more real to him, more present, and certainly more beloved, than most of the people in his daily life.
He remembered the last time he had seen Maya and Simon and Penny. He had dived off the port side of the Pamela Jane—he could still feel the cold shock of the water on his skin. On land he had climbed a tree and sat, hidden in the swaying foliage, his hair still wet as he watched the yellow-hulled sailboat vanish into the mists of the Blue Line. He had stayed in the tree long after the boat was gone and the salt had dried white on his skin. Then, without even the parrot to keep him company, he had climbed down and begun the journey to find his father. That had been seven years ago.
Feelings drifted aimlessly, changed shape, dissolved, gave way to new ones, like the cottony white clouds in the sky above him as he drew slowly closer to Tontap. He heard something and stopped to listen, ear to the air. There was a faint tremor in the earth beneath his feet, a minor perturbation in the atmosphere, registered only by him and a sloth, who paused a moment from his lugubrious chewing to glance curiously up at the bright blue sky. A breeze rose, cooling his face, stirring and silvering the leaves. For the first time, after many days deep in the interior of the island, he smelled salt on the air. He wasn’t far from the coast now. The breeze faded. Deciding that the disturbance he had sensed must have been nothing, he resumed walking.
Copyright © 2017 by Nadia Aguiar