I felt a pull from offshore – from where I watched the sun press back into the earth just moments ago. A beckoning that felt as if it had wrapped its cold fingers around the bottom of my ribcage and dragged my torso into the waves. I felt my father out there among the tide, and layers of him surfaced and crashed back into each other again and again and nothing could possibly stop it – nothing I could fathom. Every wake breaking into my chest was a funeral. And the trees behind me howled in the wind and the lights of the hotels flickered and there was people along the boardwalk crying and laughing and fucking – but here under the waves, under the creaking oak of haunted ships, and between the endless limbs of leviathan – was the quieting of everything eternally.

Excluding me.