It’s April and the sea gives up her dead again. We gather on the beach every afternoon, when the waters recede the furthest away. Mum stays behind, shooting at the stars with her bow and arrows, pretending not to care. “The sky caught your dad,” she says, “not the sea.”
Dad took to the sky when I was small and never came back. I remember little of him—his large hands cupping my face, his skin hard like a dry starfish’s. Mum says he’s still out there in some other place, living a life we know nothing about, with another wife, perhaps, another daughter like me. But I think, What if Dad dies in that other place? Doesn’t dying work the same everywhere? Maybe he’ll come back on a shooting star one April and walk out of the sea, like the others. Mum gets angry whenever I say this, and so I don’t say it anymore. Still, every April, I spend my days on the shore.
