“Fuck this,” she declares, and walks outside.

Big blue sky. Warm dry air, gusting gently offshore. In the shade of the bluff, down to the beach. Staggering down blindly, gaze fixed on her dead feet, moaning as she stumps down, tears and snot running down her face. She can barely see. She feels crazy, stupid, but most of all, scared. Just scared.

Down on the beach it seems a bit smaller, more like a biome. A very big biome, but not so much bigger as to cause her to faint outright. She is hyperventilating, sweating, gasping a little, sick to her stomach, staggering still on her weird boots. She has a big hat on, sunglasses on, she keeps her head down.

Onto the sand of the dunes at the bottom of the bluff. The sand sinks under her boots a centimeter or three with each step. This is enough to make walking tricky, given her feet. The sand trends slightly up as she walks toward the water, until she gets to a kind of low ridge, beyond which the sand falls away in a clean sweep, down into the foaming edge of the ocean. Broken waves are rolling up at her across this bubbling tilted expanse, the water clear over the wet gray-brown sand under it. This tilted wet verge is fringed with lengths of white foam. It’s loud here with the sound of breaking waves, most of which break about a hundred meters offshore, she guesses, then rumble in, white and foaming at the rounded edge of an incoming layer that is distinctly higher than what it rolls over, the white edge bouncing, hissing, a mass of bubbles in a line, moving in across the shallows, hitting other lines moving outward.

At the high-tide line stretch masses of blackened seaweed, also long lines of dull brown-green seaweed, with dimpled long wide leaves, and bulbs marking the lines. Kelp, she thinks. She goes to a line and sits down hard in the sand next to it. Keeps her head down, keeps breathing in a steady deep rhythm, tries to quell the nausea, halt the spinning of the world around her. Just a big biome! Hold it together! The kelp in her fingers feels like a hardened gel, just a little slimy. There is sand stuck to it. The individual grains of sand look not quite round: little beveled boulders, about fifteen or twenty stuck to the pad of her forefinger. She can see them best when she holds them about six centimeters in front of her nose. There are black flecks of something like mica stuck there too, much smaller than the blond sand grains. These black flecks mix with the sand grains, and where the broken waves are running whitely up and down the strand, some twenty meters from where she sits, there are delta patterns sluicing back down to the broken water, delta patterns of black in blond, crosshatched chevrons all pointed out to sea. It’s loud with the sound of breaking waves.

The sun comes up over the bluff behind her, and she feels the radiation on the back of her neck like the blast from a fire. It is indeed the blast from a fire. Her stomach clenches again. She digs in her bag past the bath towel, and pulls out a canister of sunscreen, shoots the spray on the back of her neck. It smells funny. Her hands are shaking, she feels sick. The smell of sunscreen makes it worse, she feels on the edge of vomiting. It’s good she doesn’t have to stand now, doesn’t have to go anywhere. Keep her head down, watch the sand grains glowing transparently on her translucent fingertip. Try not to throw up. God, what a lot of light. She has to clamp her teeth together to keep them from chattering, to keep the bile down.

“Fuck this!” she says again through clenched teeth. “Get a grip!”

“Let me take you to the beach!

Na na na na na na na na na-na!

Let me take you to the beach!

Na na na na na na na na na-na!”

A young man sings this ditty, walking by with rolling strides in the soft sand. Maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, unclothed, narrow face, blue eyes, his skin an odd brown color she thinks must be suntanned. His brown curly hair is so sun-bleached that the tips of its curls are a yellow almost white. Holding a pair of blue fins in one hand, looking like a Minoan wall painting she recalls seeing in a book. The water boy, holding water bags.

“Are you going out swimming?” Freya asks him.

He stops. “Yes, gonna ride some waves. There’s a great point break right out from here, called Reefers.”

“Point break?”

“Big reef out there about two hundred meters, easy to see at low tide. Most of the breaks will be rights, but it’s a south swell today, so there’ll be some lefts too. Are you going to go out?”

“I can’t really feel my feet,” Freya says, desperate for an excuse. “I have these shoes that kind of walk for me. I don’t know what it would be like to swim.”

“Hmm.” He frowns at this, stares at her as if he’s never heard of such a thing, and maybe he hasn’t. “How did that happen?”

“Long story,” she says.

He nods. “Well, if you had fins on, those you kind of swing from the knees anyway. Might help. And actually, if you just stand in the shallows, the water will mostly float you. You can use your arms, and shove off the bottom and catch the little waves.”

“I’d like to try that,” she lies, or maybe it’s the truth. She swallows deeply. Her face is on fire, her fingers and lips are tingling, buzzing. Her big toes are hot.

“Here come my friends; there might be another pair of fins in Pam’s bag, usually is.”

Young man and woman, again naked, brown-skinned, tightly muscled, sun-bleached hair. Young gods and goddesses, naiads or whatever, she can’t remember the name for sea fauns, but these are them. Beach kids. They greet the youth talking to Freya, calling him Kaya. “Kaya, hey Kaya!”

“Pam, have you got that extra pair of fins?” Kaya asks.

“Yeah sure.”

“Can you lend them to this lady? She wants to go out and ride.”

“Yeah sure.”

Kaya turns to her. “So, try it and see.”

The three young people stare at her.

“You do know how to swim?” Kaya asks.

“Yes,” Freya says. “I swam in Long Pond all the time when I was a kid.”

“Just stay in the shallows then, and you’ll be all right. Small swell today.”

“Thanks.”

Freya takes blue fins offered to her by the young woman. The three young ones run off into the surf, kicking arcs of white spray ahead of them, and when they get out thigh deep, falling over into a broken wave. After that they seem to be floating around to put on their fins, then they shove off into the approaching white walls of broken waves, which are breaking about thirty more meters out from them. Only then are they really swimming. They make it look easy.

Freya pulls off her boots, stands, strips off her clothes, sprays herself all over with the sunscreen, picks up the blue fins they have left her, walks very carefully down into the broken waves sloshing up the strand. Her feet are still numb, it’s like walking on short stilts, but there seems to be some new traction there in her big toes. The water is cool at first, she can feel that in the bones of her feet, but she quickly gets used to it. Not that cold. A surge runs up the beach over her ankles, then slides back down. The water under her is white with bubbles, more bubbles than water, and the bubbles hiss out their lives as they burst, throwing a fine spray calf high into the air. The water of an incoming wave suddenly loses momentum going up the tilt of the sand, then runs back down swiftly to a triple ripple, which is exposed only when the waves are farthest out. Maybe that’s true sea level. Here where she stands, water sloshes back and forth, therefore up and down, but mostly just back and forth. Waves breaking on a beach, this is how it looks, this is how it feels! Something loosens a little inside her, and she shivers now, feeling less sick than hot. Hot and yet shivering.