Dusk makes the foam-horse look more like a horse, which is unfair.

A clumsy little crowd has decided to “see it off” with ropes and bravado: not an army, not villains, just people who have been scared in a line. You, Brine, Pip, maybe Kade if he promised. You stand on the safe side of the stranded spar. You do not hit anyone. You block with bodies and sentences.

The bar sucks and rebuilds. A boy you know from net-mending puts a foot where your foot almost went in section-ten of your other life, if you had one.

East, the real sea is a dark plate. West, the Brin is a brown sentence ending. South, kelp beds take the smaller punches. North, Grey Stack’s haul-out is a choir deciding whether to stay. You stand on the fog-lane’s last polite plank of mud, which is not a plank, and you keep the spar between the crowd and the horse that isn’t a horse.

You can speak it all aloud: clock, rip-gap, surge-mark, skin-as-self, Merrick’s holy fence. Words as a net that catches people instead of fry.

Or you can hold stillness so hard it becomes contagious, get the coat onto Grey Stack, and let the haul-out fill because the seam was not taken.