I would not see Mr. Blud again for nearly two weeks. It was a task simply to keep myself from swimming across the channel every day just to get back in his library. I felt as if the thing I had wanted most had been given to me a spoonful, only to be taken away before the spoon could return to my lips. At times I felt a near-physical longing to be back in the high-backed chair in the only well-furnished room in the waterfront manor. It was only when I was able to gain perspective that I took a few deep breaths and my patience deepened.

When I came to the channel with the help of my cousin Rachel, I had harbored no intention to write a history of the channel or to spend any time in my landlord’s house, much less a library. I had come only to write. I had imagined my novel would find new legs if I changed my location, that a sudden jolt to my daily consciousness would knock something loose that was needed to finish that effort. Obviously, this is not how things played out. All things considered, I was writing. I had come to write, and I had a cool thirty pages in a stack next to my typewriter. It hardly mattered that I had not done what I set out to do. That’s life. Things change.

I sat on a bluff not far below my cottage, my feet dangling from the edge, but my back firmly planted against the back of a rock. I wouldn't have imagined doing such a thing on my first day on the channel, much less on a rainy day. Of course, then I had not known the comfort with which I would walk about the slippery rocks. I had not known the agreement that had been reached between the bluffs and I. We had our Treaty of Paris of sorts. I was at ease on the rocks as I was in front of the fire in the cottage, waiting for water to boil for tea or coffee. It was home. I also, it tickled me to the brink of a smile to think of it, did not know that every day was to be a rainy day, so the slickness of the rocks was hardly an issue to be given extra consideration.

I held my walking stick across my knees and looked out at the channel. A choppy, inconsistent wind caused triangular shapes in the water that disappeared as quickly as they formed, knifing into the dark. I looked at the impenetrable surface, looking every bit as solid as a marble cutting board, and tried to imagine tall fir trees growing from the bottom instead of seaweed. I tried to imagine octopi clinging to the branches, fish swimming under and over bird’s nests resting precariously on thin, high branches. A sea turtle, rubbing its back along the scratchy bark. A fir forest under the water, the bottom of the channel. Dubose’s mad hallucinations.

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I had something in common with Dubose I knew. Each of us had suffered out in the harshness of the channel during a squall. I had been shot. He had been...well I wasn't sure what he had been. It seemed to me at that moment, appearing quickly as ideas ever did, that I would have to parallel my own experience on the channel with that of its patron saint. My book would become something more like a historical memoir, but it would be better for it. I was sure of it. I slapped my leg in enthusiasm. These walks were good for the mind; they stimulated my creative senses. It occurred to me that it might be necessary for me to embellish my own experiences, if only slightly so that the parallel narrative did not fall flat in its unevenness. That would be alright. I assured myself that all great memoirs are exaggerated in a few places. Creative license it's called. It's expected even.

Swinging my legs back to solid ground, I left my spot tremendously pleased with myself. I would get a few solid pages of rewrites in that night setting the groundwork for my historical memoir. My relationship with Anabel might need to be spiced up a bit for drama. With luck, I had been shot, a dramatic scene for any book. With luck! Yes, that is how my mind was working in those days, reader. You can see what my time on the edge of the world was doing to me. My powers of logic were working perfectly in relation to my writing, but hemorrhaging brain power when it came to common sense. It is only now, so removed from the events of those months on the channel that I can look at my own actions thusly for the benefit of all. Let us not judge me too harshly, nor too easily either.

I made my way down to Anabel's in no great hurry. I knew she was not manning the shop, only the sullen, young girl who could not have differed more greatly from her employer. I drank my coffee in a pleasant silence, watching the well-worn ruts in the road get worn even further by the soft rain. Images of rain streaming down windows, roads, plunking into puddles, the channel, these were old hat for me now, allowing my mind to type out the pages of hours later before even beginning the stretch home. I had always thought of water as a powerful metaphor, capable of heavy fictional lifting, but now that I had found myself forever engulfed in it, it held less sway over me, became ordinary, even boring at times. I wore down like the road, sitting high above the channel in my cottage, writing a book, not about the water itself, but about two people, two lives so insignificant in the scope of the life of the channel, or of the cyclical rain. My only excuse was the old standby.

Blood is a great deal thicker than water.