So I wandered down, away from the house, past the pier and the sand dotted with butterfly-people, clambered over the piles and heaps of cast-away stones, and came out again where the sand was this numinous ribbon flowing between dark and bright as the waves crashed, and the face behind it was a cliff. The wind teased me with gull-pipes and ambergris and salt-spray; my feet shivered on the sea-slick rocks.

I left, unable to bear the imagined sighs of sea-horses.

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There are orcas. They shimmer through my mind, crooning and keening songs that are stranger than E.T. or acid, silver and midnight swirling together under darkened glass. They are talking about me, but I cannot understand the words.

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But my feet tugged me to the aquarium, or maybe they were compelled by something distant and only carried me along in turn. At last they passed through sea-weed and seals and sharks and I awoke within a darkened room, glass-sheltered from the weight of water. Blue light flickered through, interrupted by sinuous ghosts far above, and then a face rested by the glass. The white beneath its chin shone dim; I heard it singing to the others, bright shapes farther up, and from there the notes rose up into the air and coaxed the wind to carry them far, far away, until they caught on seashells and were drawn out by the tide to the deep places where the wild cousins swam, and the wild orcas listened to the music from behind the glass and turned to watch the shore, the place I'd been

and I woke and went away because the trapped water-weight was too much for me to bear and there was no wind beneath the glass.

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In my dream I am pressing my hands against a mirror and on the other side of it I see the night-creatures playing, luminous spirits moving against and through black velvet, and when I look up stars spark far away. I strike the glass again and again but I cannot break free.

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The wind comes in the night. I wake to find shattered glass on my floors; red eddies trickle from my feet and down over stone and sand to the tide. The wind breathes a lullaby on my face, coaxing me to follow the blood-pull away from the house. Far out in the silver-slick black fins rise and fall and rise and fall and I drift nearer and nearer and listen to the songs that I can almost understand somewhere in the back of my mind because

they're calling me.