Custodians
The night waded into the ocean. Up to its waist, it looked back to us on shore. Its look was morose and someone said: why is it going out so far? One of us stood and waved.
Its shoulders drooped as if carrying the stones it had collected all day back into the water, as if carrying the weight of the world. None of us saw it actually go under. We were
asked later, pressed into remembering. We’d been drinking. There had been an argument about who actually said what. It’s like you neglected your own child, someone said,
thumping his fist. I thought it was a moose, someone finally confessed. It moved like a moose, with those long strides, head and shoulders above caring about any of us.
Someone else had been reminded of her father, it had the same gait of him leaving the house for the office. Who am I, someone else said, who am I to stop anyone from doing
what they want to do? Once it was in the water, it seeped into everything. The pines and spruce at the edge of the inlet, the cabin on the other side of the dunes. The harbour
further along the shore was a rebellion of small-fisted lights. We lit a fire and waited for it to wade back out. Someone walked the water’s edge with a flashlight. We might have
better luck, someone said, if we even knew what to call it.
