Weekly Writing – June 29 2024

The wave had been washing towards them for as long as he could remember. By millimetres every month, so slowly that he could watch days and nights shine through the same drops of spray before they finally fell to the earth.
The scientists from the compound took readings all the time, but he had started scratching his own in the dirt. Lines he could watch the water creep towards week by week, so clear behind the foamy white battering ram of a crest at its front. So solid-looking, it always seemed like a trick of the eye when the stones he tossed into it disappeared.
They shouldn’t have been able to dip their cups into it that way. That was what his eyes told him, and looking at it too hard always gave him headaches. The water would stay just that nearly perfectly still in whatever cup or bucket they caught it in, a clear and silent mirror, until they carried it three-point-eight metres away from the wave. That was the number all the scientists had exclaimed over – once they carried the water three-point-nine metres away, it would slosh and settle and turn completely ordinary in whatever they used to carry it.
Once that happened, they could clean the salt out of it and use it for whatever they wanted. It was even safe to drink then, and didn’t taste much different at all from the water they got out of the rain catchers. He’d been disappointed when his parents had first told him he’d been drinking out of the wave without tasting anything magical about it.
Now, though, he was usually relieved about it. They really needed the water, after all. It didn’t rain enough, especially in summer, for them to live off of just that. And if he’d been able to taste any trace of the people who’d walked into the wave and never come back, he might not have been able to make himself drink it at all.