Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Wow,” he says, his voice breaking. “That is the sound of nightmares.” He gathers their things and climbs up toward her.

They lie bending grass stalks into their mouths, sucking dew from the blades. Below, the tide climbs onto the beach. Turtle finds a small, oily black scat filled with broken crab shells.

“Jacob,” she says.

He crawls through the grass toward her.

“What is that?”

She prizes her hand from out of the bloody, sand-crusted rind of her shirt and teases the scat with a bird bone.

“Raccoon scat.”

“Are there raccoons on this island?”

She buries her face in it, inhaling deeply, closing her eyes against the must.

“Blue fruit?” Jacob says. “Notes of leather? Gaminess?”

“It’s moist,” she says, filled with a big, pleasurable, hopeful delight.

“Medium tannins?” Jacob says.

“Day before yesterday. The moon was waxing gibbous. Almost full.”

“People don’t know this about you, but you have a strange, poetical, and associative intelligence. Now I’m imagining this raccoon laying a deuce beneath a waxing gibbous moon while waves break on the rocks.”

“Full moon tonight . Or almost.”

“I wish I understood what you were talking about.”

“I know how we’re going to get home.”

They crawl to the island’s landward edge and lie in the grass looking out into the fog. Stalky, blooming succulents nest in the sandstone, their scales powdered blue. The surf is gentler than the day before. The island is the tip of a long, underwater ridge of rock. Several such run out through the shallows. They are very black with green-blue kelp-choked furrows between them.

“Do you remember the tides yesterday?” Turtle says. She turns over in the grass, lies looking up at the clouds, counts the tides off on her fingers. “You got to my house a little before seven a.m. By nine-ish, we’d gotten ourselves here. The tide was coming in and it peaked around eleven, and it wasn’t very big. We stayed up on top of the island because we were afraid. Then sometime that afternoon, let’s say around three p.m., it went out. It was down to about two feet. That’s when we went down to the beach. We collected stuff to make the bow drill. Then we had to come back onto the island because a real big tide came in. It was five or six feet high, it peaked around ten last night. Maybe as late as midnight. That’s three tides. After midnight, the tide began going out again. That’s when I woke you up. We went back down to the beach and you tried to work the bow drill, and when it didn’t work, we fell asleep down on the beach. But what we didn’t know was that the tide kept going out all night. It was the biggest of the set, a very, very low tide, and it would’ve been at its lowest just before sunrise. It was probably a foot down past zero, a foot and a half down. That’s about five feet down from where you see it now.”

Jacob is staring out at the rocks. “Most of those rocks aren’t but a foot underwater.”

“Yeah.”

“You could—you could walk across all that rock to shore. Hell, you could wade out through the shallows.”

Dry, mucusy pleats on her lips crack and weep.

“So you’re saying that while we slept, a land bridge appeared between us and the mainland and we missed it? We were lying on the beach, cold, suffering, dying, but we could’ve just gotten up and walked home?”

“We couldn’t’ve seen it from here, because this beach faces the ocean, and probably deep water. We would’ve had to be looking towards shore, on the other side of the island. But yeah—we weren’t looking, we didn’t know, we didn’t think, and we missed it.”

“You barely made it through the night, Turtle.”

She nods. It was a simple mistake and it almost killed them.

“And this low, low tide will happen again tonight?”

“Yes.”

They wait in the wet grass together until the fog lifts. Turtle’s face begins to burn and she can see the skin on her arms glazed white and crackled. She covers her face with her flannel and stares out through a nook. The sun is high above them and a little to the southwest. The light flashes and glitters off the ocean. Turtle watches.

“Hey,” she says. “Did you say you found a soda can?”

“Yeah?”

“Bring it over here?”

“Sure,” he says.

She takes the Sprite can and begins polishing the shiny, concave bottom with the edge of her shirt. She dabs a little soil onto her wet forefinger and uses that to polish it to a mirror shine. She holds the can upside down in the crook of her knee, the bottom angled at the sun. Then she takes up their bird’s nest of tinder and hovers the scraps above the concave mirror. A bright bead of light appears, vibrating with Turtle’s shaking hands, throwing off crisscrossing loops of glare, and she works the tinder closer to the concave mirror until the spark contracts to a needlepoint of white-hot light. Within fifteen minutes, the tinder is smoking. Bright red cinders appear among the threads. She lifts it up and blows the fire into life. She sets the flaming bundle in the grass and begins to take up the wooden kindling they’d prized from the driftwood.

Jacob says, “Damn.”

She grins hugely. Jacob drags up driftwood from the cove before it is covered by the tide and hacks it to kindling with the bowie knife. She shows him how to hammer the blade down with a driftwood club, essentially using the knife as a splitting wedge. Working steadily, Jacob splits whole logs into kindling and when the fire is going big enough, she has Jacob fill the Sprite can with water. She connects it to a soda bottle with a long, hollow strand of bull kelp, cutting away the kelp bulb to make a nozzle that fits over the can. She puts the can in the fire. The steam rises into the flexible hose and condenses into the plastic soda bottle. The first capfuls are salty. Then it’s good. They lie, tending their fire, absorbed in the meditative distillation of water.

“Just wait,” Jacob says. “When you’re stranded, alone and fearful, upon the bleak, windswept island that is your freshman English class, broken on the rocks that are The Scarlet Letter , I will take your hand and say, ‘Be not afraid. The moon is waxing gibbous. The scat is moist and smells of manzanita berries.’ And you will be amazed.”

Turtle is careful to smile only very fractionally.

“I feel pretty sunburned. How do I look?”

She crinkles her eyes at him.

“Bad, huh?”

“Bad, yeah.”

“This escape plan better work. The parental units will expect me back from Brett’s on Monday.”

“They won’t be mad?”

“Yeah, probably. When they see my face. My mom will be all, ‘Do you want to die of skin cancer?!’”

“You’ll be safe, though?”

He laughs. Then he quits laughing.

“What is it?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

He just shakes his head. They sleep most of the day. They tend the fire and drink water by the cupful. The ocean swallows the beach and retreats. Smoky ramparts of clouds appear on the horizon and the sun sets beneath them, a faraway, bloodred fist.

“Do you think your dad is right,” he says, “to withdraw from the social contract?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do you think ?”

“If it happens, if it really happens, the house can’t be defended.”

Jacob is silent at this. After a long time, he lies down beside the fire and goes to sleep. Turtle, sitting on the island, feels level with the setting sun. The moon hangs in the east, breaking above the mainland, a deeper, smokier red. Swells of wine-dark water rise around her and sweep past, gathering as the coastal shelf inclines beneath them, their great bent backs glossed red and purple. They break against the bluffs and raise and collapse spuming towers of a height with the moon. She stands guard as night falls and as the moon climbs into the sky.