Gander Ellesmere, District 4 {Finished}

A level head always prevails no matter the strength of the wave. To be one with the current, not just swimming with or against, but to really learn one’s place as part of the ocean is the most fundamental lesson. One man cannot take on an ocean, but he can make peace with the waves. Life will always have moments where the water changes rapidly, swelling with salt and foam. There will be days when the whole of the water crashes against the rocks and the skies fill with lightning and darkness. But there will be days when there are no clouds. The water will move but little for you. Remembering the calm in these moments will grant grace no matter what arises. 

He is the second child, Gander. His eyes are his mother’s, his mouth his father’s. She will love him with her whole heart; he will show love when it is earned. Colt finds him insufferable since birth; too broody, too aware of his own shadow. They say his brother Colt once tried to toss him into the sea. This was how he proved to be of islander stock, little body making it back to shore on the edge of a wave.

You will never be the fastest or the strongest. Age will temper even the mightiest, and bones will ache and fingers will curl—one cannot hope to be the same as he is in youth. And so it is that to swim, one must accept the limitations, to know that pushing through or under a wave may be as useful as the flutter of kicks that accompany them. Do you strike the water like a shark, and press forward as though there is no turning back? Or think of the gulls that dot the surface, light bodies ready to take flight at a moment’s notice. There is no one way, but a rhythm and pulse to the sea. Find the pulse—be the one that could spend the hours in open water, unafraid if his ship is downed and hope seems lost. 

There are many mistakes to make. Lots of water swallowed, eyes burned, and skin pruned. He is a child of the water. His lungs burn for air but he wonders if they would be better off filled with the water. He is five, and already spends the hours alongside their dingy, arms flailing and treading the water beneath. To tread water was to know the truth of this life, the life that so many choose to live. Standing in place is exhausting—but many do it as a means of survival. He and Colt will be the steady hands his father needs as they age, two boys of strong stock. But for now they are treading water, stuck in place. Here is the rhythm of the ocean, long hours spent bundled in the cold at the edge of The Rock, watching the sea spray up against the sunset. 

The Rock, so affectionately called—on the northeast tip of district four, tucked away among a scattering of islands—presses onward, another generation of children sailing and swimming its shores. Sailors still fear bringing boats too close to the isle, for fear of running aground or sinking amongst the inlets. The coastline forgives no man, nor vessel. There is no mercy amongst these rocks, and none to be found in its people. Color is sparse, with dots of green overpowered by the grey and black sands.

No one can be sure how long the islanders have remained. There is talk they came and settled before the great war, and never bothered so much as to leave. When the war ended and the capitol raised its flag over the districts, it was years before anyone noticed the Ellesmeres missing from the rolls. They agreed to send their fish and their children, but still, they remained atop the rock. There was whispers that it was more trouble than it was worth trying to take the men and women from the isle; they were of stock that would rather be put to death than spend their days treading water with the shore lovers. 

Kit refused to come out on the boat. She was born a little more than two years after Gander, and followed him like a shadow. But she’d watched Colt get swallowed up by the sea when it was his turn, and his face turn white and lifeless. She’d screamed and cried, until at last Poult had to take her down below deck and wrap her in blankets. Even if she was the youngest, Poult had a knack for making each of them feel better. Gander admired her for that. The two never said much, least of which to one another, and he appreciated that, too. 

The water is warm when he enters—they are summer children, graced with waters like out of a bath faucet—and the sun has just finished rising over the horizon. His father, long nosed and hair slicked back into a ponytail, watches from the edge of his rusting little freighter. Gander treads water. He counts to one hundred, then a thousand, until decides to start naming all the fish he can. He looks at how pruned his fingers have become; his whole body must be swallowing up salt, his skin shriveling. He wonders if he wakes, he will be more like his grandfather, snarled by the lines of wrinkles across his skin. 

His father’s wide brimmed hat casts a shadow down onto the water, but Gander can still see the sun’s light just overhead. Cloud have come and gone; he worries little about the sun burning his skin, now that summer has come and settled. He thinks of the fish that they will catch tomorrow, of how his mother has determined to spy on the new nest of birds along the southwest side of the island. Poult has knit a new dress and wants to play pretend with him—or rather, dress him up in one of their mother’s dresses and force him to play an evil witch from one of her storybooks. He will play both the witch and the prince because Colt cannot be bothered with such juvenile things. 

He imagined that the moment would feel more climactic when it arrived. 

The waves started to swallow him, and his arms were too heavy. He looked to his father. They were islanders; they were not to be afraid of the ocean, or fear its might. Fools along the shore feared drowning; they were to embrace it. For what greater value could one place on life if he had already died? But there was no great epiphany when he wheezed at the edge of the waves, no moment at which any of life’s great secrets became clear. Only dread that he could not keep his chin above water. He swallowed one spray of saltwater, and then choked on the next. He kicked his legs and threw his body upward, but he was full only with exhaustion.

The water swallowed him down, and surrounded him. He choked on the first swallow, and coughed up the air still in his lungs. He thought of how empty the ocean seemed then, his body drifting just beneath the surface. He wanted not to be afraid, but there was only fear to comfort him now. He thought of Colt and Kit, of Poult and his parents. None of them were here, none of them would see him perish. Even his father was above the surface, too far to know the exact moment when he would expire. The sound of water filling his ears reminded him that through it all, his body could only surrender to the ocean. 

And as the warmth flushed his face and the darkness came, he felt a loneliness unlike any the island could have given.

It has been one year since he drowned. He stands alone on the edge of The Rock, but he is not lonely. In the cool of the approaching summer storm, his eyes fixed on the horizon.