A gray sky hung low with dead clouds. The ocean is a lighter color. The ocean smells of blood. Smiling teeth just below the surface.

Isaac looked out to sea. He stood on a wide shale beach and spent time contemplating the thickness of the water. The distant wink of sunset, ripe-red and the size of a fingernail. His boots were soaked through now; his feet submerged in ice water. Hands and face numb now and aching. An eye somewhere inside his skull trembled, twitched… A tactile familiarity in the wind.

Acrid wind, smelling salt and sulfurous, came down from far behind and flew out low to the sea expanse. Isaac’s trousers were whipped to the backs of his legs, and he began to shiver in a palsy. But he would not leave until the sun had finally died, or when the water spilled its secrets.

A female voice called from over the matted grass at the top of the hill behind him. The sound, cutting through time, it seemed, woke Isaac from the mute siren call of the waves. Just above his ankles Isaac’s skin was stained brown. His heart was dropping further by the moment. The voice, like wind through soft metal, called again, this time by his name, which he knew.

“Isaac!” she yelled, as her head and shoulders rose above the wet grass hill.

Isaac turned to look at her, the contrasted top of her torso against the deeper umbra of the settling night. He looked at his hands, walked slowly to shore.

The woman, exasperated, hurried down the hill. Isaac stripped off his boots and sodden socks and stood a few finger-lengths shorter; feet resting nicely on the smooth shales. He found suddenly that he could not remember when he had come here. He felt that everything had just begun on the beach, in the water, just now. He looked at his hands once more, and was surprised by their size, how hairy. The architecture of his callouses came back to him; He inhabited himself.

The woman, approaching quickly with shoulders forward, Isaac could now see, was dressed in a blue robe tied up above her knees, whose whorls looked like frowning children. Her feet were wrapped tightly with thick tree fronds and her hair was hidden by a white fabric headpiece that clung to her skull and admitted none of the coastal thrashing winds. He let his hands fall, walked a small distance onto more comfortable footing and set his boots down beside him. Isaac waited, postured in strange confidence for the robed woman, who was not far now.

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She stopped a number of legs away and waited awkwardly, looking at him as if for an excuse, or expecting Isaac to run to her side. Her face grew concerned, she spoke, “What are you doing so far out here, child? Why have you wandered off?”

Isaac watched her for a few moments, then said, “I do not know anything, but I am no child.” A twitch in his hand.

At this her eyes grew rims of white, and she came close to him. She drew from a fold in the robe at her breast a small reflective panel and struck it with her other wrist. It flamed to life and threw hot light into Isaac’s face, from which he cowered with elbows and arms. “Look at me, child. I do not harm you.” she cooed, warily coming still closer. Her hand grabbed around the thin of his arm but she did not pull him. Isaac found familiarity in her grip, trusted whatever matronly sentiment he thought could be found in the woman; no choice, for she was now bearing down upon his face with a small shard of the sun in her palm. He thought he had just watched the thing die on the liquid spears of the sea.

Under the shaking brilliant scrutiny of the light pad, the robed woman’s sunken garnet eyes met for an insane moment with Isaac’s. She stopped just short of gasping and released her grip on his arm.

A poised moment passed, horror and betrayal emanated almost visibly from the matron in blue.

After it had passed, she turned with a shaky side eye and through the implication of her gait guided Isaac, seeing as eyes through a mask, up the tall and sodden embankment.

The whole configuration, every latticed electrical impulse, the perfect image of his representation remained on the beach, still stunned. He had seen it again, and again it had stripped him of everything but his name and the thoughtless guidance toward the center of it all. The phrase was perfectly formed, and Cybele spoke the truth: “Where before you could only hear me and hold me, now you see me, and you understand." A lighted path, leading inland, streaked like chasing flame, a blue summit speaking in lyric. Then awakeness, the beach and the blue woman. He had forgotten his boots.