This happened after the war.

I was twelve, almost thirteen. My brother was five years older. We had ended up in a small city in the center of the country, not too far from the western coast. A train line had been rebuilt and was running, and that summer you could travel to the coast if you had the money, it would take only a few hours.

I think that was how it started, with word spreading about the opening of the train line.

Mrs. S mentioned it one day. “Have you heard?” she said. “We have access to the coast.”

Then other people began to imagine what the coast might look like these days, and we heard someone say, “Well, everything must be new, if they’re letting us go there!”

Then someone else called it the “new coast,” and the name stuck.

Not that any of us could afford to see it ourselves, but it was something to talk about, to think about—those new buildings, new rooms, the beach.

We were all neighbors in one of the many settlements that had sprouted up in the city, and we had been waiting there for everything to be rebuilt. Or that was what the officials kept telling us—to stay where we were so that they could begin restoring the city.

But no one seemed convinced that the city would ever be restored, and this was a big reason people came and went, looking for someplace better. By then, my brother and I had passed through enough places—we had been wandering for two years, from one settlement to another—to know that the community here was better than most. Neighbors tried to be good neighbors. It was peaceful. There were plenty of supplies to fix roofs. We lived on a hill, and if you looked past the rubble you had a view of the river, which Mrs. S said looked pretty much the same as before to her.

Mrs. S was from this city. We, of course, weren’t, but she never treated us differently because of it, didn’t tell us to leave, didn’t even ask where we were from originally or where our parents were because she knew it no longer mattered: we had no place, and nobody, to go back to.

On the day we arrived, she came out of her shanty, a woman around the age our grandmother would have been. Her back was bent, and she was wearing brightly colored woven bracelets around both her wrists. She introduced herself as Mrs. S (we would never learn her full name) and told us that, if this was where we wanted to be, then we should be good to people here and start again. That was all that mattered to her.

We promised we would. Then she made us tea and came up with a list of what might make the shanty that a city worker had sent us to—an empty shanty usually meant someone had either left or died—a little more comfortable.

I told my brother that I would hunt for something to use as a door while he was at work the next day. And then together, the three of us, we looked out at the river, where people were washing clothes, and then a little beyond it, and Mrs. S pointed out where her house once was, the house she was born in, and where there was now the severed tail of a bomber rising from the earth like a great, alien tree.

It was a soldier who noticed my brother writing in a notebook one afternoon. This was right before we came to the city and met Mrs. S. We were sitting outside the fence of a military camp town a few kilometres away, waiting for food. We had learned over the years to go to camp towns when we could because the soldiers often left food in boxes beside the trash bins, or came to the gate and handed out tins of meat and, on rare occasions, other things, too: a notebook, a pen, spare clothes, a pack of cigarettes, which usually made me sick.

Often, while we waited, my brother wrote poems, though he never shared them with me. I just knew he had begun to write them because it was what our father used to do in his spare time, and on nights when he couldn’t sleep. Our father would then give his poems away in our mountain village. For a long time, I was convinced my brother and I would find one of our father’s poems—a piece of paper in a shanty, perhaps, or stuck between blades of grass in a field—imagining it was possible that people’s possessions might have moved much as we had moved, ending up elsewhere still intact.

I liked imagining this—that it wasn’t just us moving around during those years but all things.

In any case, writing a poem was what my brother was doing outside the fence of the camp town; I was watching a group of women on the other side, hanging out in front of a bar with a blinking motorcycle sign on the front. There was one who was very young, a teen-ager, in a dark button-down shirt, and I looked hard, as I always did, in case it was our sister, but of course it wasn’t. Yet I continued to watch as she approached the passing soldiers and touched their arms and stole their hats and giggled a little too enthusiastically, though it seemed to work on the men: they began, one by one, to follow the women into the bar.

We heard footsteps and turned to see a very tall man looking down at us. To our surprise, he was from this country, or his parents were from this country, and he asked my brother, “What are you writing?”

My brother didn’t respond, but the soldier didn’t seem to mind. I remember the man had tired eyes. He asked my brother if he was good at writing and whether he could do some math, and my brother nodded. (It was true, my brother was good at writing and math, though I believe that in this moment he would have nodded at anything the man said, thinking there was going to be food.)

The soldier then said that in the nearby city they were looking for people who could write and do some math. He said the word “job” and mentioned clean clothes, a uniform, and maybe some housing. He told my brother to write down an address, which was actually more of a description of a building on a street whose sign might or might not be there, but it was one of the few buildings in the city that had survived—we couldn’t miss it.

Then the soldier gave us a bag of food and left. A moment later, the young girl stumbled out of the bar and started to curse and spit. She was barefoot and had a bruise beginning to bloom across her face, and her shirt was hanging wide open, revealing one of her breasts. She looked across at us through the fence and stopped, a little startled to see us there.

With my mouth full of food, I waved to her. She wiped her mouth, straightened her hair, and then, not bothering to button up her shirt, she smiled, ignoring the pain, and waved back.

In the city, my brother was hired to survey the population. He was one of a few surveyors, each assigned to a different area. His job was to find out how many people were coming in and out of the settlements and shantytowns: their names, their ages, and where they were from; how many still had families who had not been accounted for; whether they appeared healthy or sick, and, should they look ill, he was to describe their condition in the hope of figuring out what kind of medicine was needed; and, lastly, what kind of work they’d done before the war.

It turned out that the surveys were not only part of a census—they were a way for the country to begin building a national database to try to reunite family members who had been separated. They were also a means of identifying people by profession so that they could help in the country’s recovery. If my brother encountered, say, a roofer in one of the shantytowns, the roofer’s name would be collected by someone else in the office and then sent to another office somewhere else, where they might know of all the places that needed a team of roofers.

My brother was given a ream of carbon paper to write on, a bag that had once been carried by a mailman, and a pale brown uniform he got to wear every day, the collar and the sleeves so clean and crisp that when he brought it back to the shanty he was hesitant even to put it on.

So we left the uniform there on the floor for a while, left it folded in the sunlight beside the bowl and cup we shared, and a pile of magazines we had found in the otherwise empty shanty, with pictures so faded I couldn’t tell what they were of.

The first week, my brother’s bag was stolen from him. Someone ran by so fast he didn’t see who it was, felt only the speed and then the absence of the bag. The office gave him another one. The second week, my brother got into a fight with a young man who believed he had food in the bag, and my brother came back to the shanty with a bruise around his eye, which was nothing compared with the one I had seen on the young girl in the camp town that day.

I didn’t mention this to my brother, but the girl had begun to appear in my dreams, her face painted an array of colors that blended until the face became faceless—a far, bright moon.

Mrs. S brought some cold river water up and soaked a rag and told my brother to keep it on his face for as long as it stayed cold. I wanted to be near him, but he was embarrassed and told me to go away.

On the far side of the river, two stray dogs chased each other around the airplane tail. A moment later, I heard my brother coming up behind me.

“I don’t want to be inside,” he said.

So we went down to the river to get some more cold water. We ended up staying there, sitting on the bank. When my brother’s arm grew tired, I soaked the rag and held it against his head for him. I wanted to tell him that I had begun to have a recurring dream, my first in a long time, but the words vanished as soon as I opened my mouth.

Instead, I asked when I could work the way he worked, and he laughed. He asked if I liked it here, which was his way of asking, I understood, if I thought we should stay put for a while or keep going the way we had these past few years.

It felt to me like we had been moving for so long that there was nowhere else to go. If we kept moving, we would end up back in a place we had already left or run away from. That was what I wanted to tell him.

“I like Mrs. S,” I said. “And I like the dogs.”

“You always like the dogs,” he said.

He dipped the rag into the river again, loudly. The smell of cooking came to us, carried by wind.

“Why do you think she goes by Mrs. S?” my brother asked.

But I knew he wasn’t expecting me to answer.

There was a time when we’d wondered a lot about the people and even the animals we met: how they all survived, what it took, and all the things one did to survive. This was something we used to want to know. But, the more we listened and the more we saw, the more the wanting stopped.

We heard a distant boom. It sounded as if the remnants of a building were being razed. My brother didn’t bother to turn.

“I like the old lady, too,” he said.

“You always like the old ladies,” I said, and took over pressing the rag against his head, the sunlight now turning darker on the water as the dogs barked and chased each other up the hill.

I don’t know if this will come as a surprise, but my brother didn’t get into many more fights that year. Maybe it was his uniform. Maybe over time the people in this area could tell that he wasn’t a threat or wasn’t worth the bother. Maybe it was thanks to Mrs. S. Maybe people decided they liked what he was doing, even if they didn’t entirely trust the program or whoever was in charge of it.

There were several instances of people not wanting to give him any information, but that was all it came to. He kept doing the work, first in one section of the city, then in another, going a little farther each morning as he wrote down names, all the information. Then he would walk back to the office and turn in his report and get paid. And he would do it again the next day.

Unless Mrs. S needed help of some kind—fixing up her shanty, heading to the clinic to see if there was any medicine or food that day—I wandered what was left of the streets, or, at least, the streets Mrs. S told me to keep to. On occasion, I could hear a loudspeaker blaring news about another building that had collapsed or an incoming rainstorm or the nighttime curfew, which no one ever followed.

I avoided any passing vehicles, kept close to any remaining walls, and looked for things for the shanty. I found a wool blanket in an alley to replace the ragged one we had been using as a door. I found an unbroken teacup as well as a hook I thought we could nail into the shanty wall. I found a cat playing with a boot with a good sole, and I sat there in the dirt not far away and watched as the cat eventually grew bored and went down into the ruins of a fallen building and carried out another boot. I waited some more.

Then I took the boots. In the river, I washed off the blood they were stained with as best as I could, and I left them for my brother to find when he came back after work. They were too large for him, so we tore out magazine pages and shoved them into the toes and he told me it worked; they were better than the shoes he’d been wearing, which had practically no soles at all.

Mrs. S and I watched as he walked back and forth in the settlement, his bruise long vanished by then, pleased as the sun went down on another day.

I loved pleasing my brother. I always had. I loved pleasing my sister, too, though she knew it was my brother I looked up to, and she was O.K. with that.

I was the youngest. I didn’t know where my sister was. We had stopped looking for her a long time ago.

In later dreams I had, the moon, when it appeared, said, “Surprise,” and looked down at me as I swam across the river and ran toward the tail of the airplane because I was convinced my sister was in there, alive and living with her own magazines and bowls and teacups and boots. But, try as I might, the metal cutting into my fingertips, I could never get inside.

Toward the end of that summer, Mrs. S, sitting in front of her shanty one evening, mentioned that she’d heard about someone who had visited the new coast. She had a friend in the settlement who knew a person elsewhere in the city who had saved up for a train ticket. Expecting to find a resort town, or new villages that had been built along the shore, the traveller had encountered only more wreckage and rubble and more soldiers and loudspeakers and more shantytowns and camp towns.

The exception was a building facing the water. It was new. Or had been fixed up well enough to appear new. The traveller wasn’t sure if it had always been intended to be an orphanage, but that’s what it now was, with more than a hundred children of varying ages living there. They took classes, gardened, played soccer on the beach.

It was seeing the children that made the trip worth it, the traveller said. That, and all the birds gliding above.

I was trying to remember the last time I had seen a flock of birds when Mrs. S asked my brother if there was any record of this orphanage in the office. Without hesitation, my brother said that he would find out. Ever since my brother started working on the census, he had been trying to help Mrs. S locate her granddaughter, but without success.

So we weren’t surprised that she wanted my brother to see if a survey had been taken of the orphanage. In fact, Mrs. S admitted for the first time that she had a feeling her granddaughter was dead, but said it couldn’t hurt to keep looking.

She said, “Who knows? If her name is on a list, maybe I’ll take a trip to the coast myself.” Then she winked at me as though she had just told me a joke, trying to keep the conversation light.

The truth was, we had never seen her leave the city. It wasn’t because of her age, or an issue of money—my brother would gladly have given her some of what he was making, if she’d asked. It was as if the community on this hill wouldn’t be what it was without her, or that was how she felt, anyway—that she couldn’t just leave. She was originally from here, so people relied on her and looked up to her. They approached her when they were seeking advice on how to obtain things, where to go, whom to talk to.

Still, I kept wondering why she didn’t go to the orphanage herself and take a look, just to be sure. She wouldn’t have to be gone long, she could do it in a day. It was my brother, a few nights later, the two of us lying beside each other on the floor, who said that was a stupid question: “It would be harder. To simply go, not knowing anything, only to find nothing.”

I didn’t respond to that. I kept thinking about what I would say if Mrs. S ever asked us if we were looking for anyone, which she never once had. All the words became a stone in my head which kept rolling back and forth.

The day before, someone who had lived here for years died in a shanty not far from ours. I could hear a group of people walking over to it and talking about how to divide up the things that were inside. Someone claimed a basket; another, a shirt. There was an argument about who got the radio.

And then my brother, who had fallen asleep and must have been dreaming, began to say names out loud, the names of people he had written down on the carbon paper that afternoon.

I listened. To the names and to the argument outside, and I looked up at my brother’s uniform hanging on the hook we had installed on the wall. If I looked hard enough, it was as if the uniform were flying away or as if I were falling, as if the stone in my head and I were now falling together.

My brother did eventually find a list of who was at the orphanage on the western coast. But the name of Mrs. S’s granddaughter wasn’t on it. One name he found, however, listed in the staff column, was the name of our sister.

He didn’t tell me right away. If it were me, I probably wouldn’t have told him right away, either. In truth, it was probably a stranger with the same name. That had happened to us before, in another town. We had stumbled upon our sister’s name carved into a tree in front of a farmhouse that had survived. We stood there for a long time, staring as though our sister had become the tree, until a man appeared, carrying a rifle, and explained to us that it was a tree his daughter had once liked to climb.

In any case, after my brother saw the list, he stopped by the settlement in the middle of the day and told Mrs. S that her granddaughter wasn’t on it.

Mrs. S, without looking at him, tugged at one of her bracelets and picked up a basket of laundry.

“Well,” she said. “There you have it,” and went down the hill to wash her clothes and the clothes of her neighbor.

My brother went back to work, revisiting a section of the city he’d already covered to see how many people were new and how many were no longer there.

I spent the day with the two dogs. They had grown comfortable with me, and they followed me all the way to a bend in the river, where I discovered there had once been a bridge, and I jumped on one of the broken pillars, which made them nervous, and they barked at me to come back down.

“Well, if you would prefer it prepared and baked, it sounds like your wish writes itself.”

Cartoon by Asher Perlman

I came back down. Retracing my path along the river, I watched a man from the settlement who was a stonemason climb into a military truck to be taken to wherever it was he was needed. I found Mrs. S and helped her with the laundry. I carried the basket up to her shanty and we hung the clothes to dry, and then she told me to go and help a neighbor who was patching her roof, so I did that.

The dogs never left my side, resting beside me when I rested, their chests moving like small waves as they breathed.

I wondered if dogs ever dreamed of the moon. The sky.

To my surprise, I fell asleep quickly and deeply that night. I had no dreams. When I woke, my brother was lying beside me, eyes open, holding the tin box he kept buried behind the shanty with the little money he had saved. The morning leaked through the holes in the wool blanket hanging over the entrance.

“It could be her,” he said.

I wasn’t fully awake yet and had no idea what he was talking about. Shadows passed by outside, the holes in the blanket going dark and then light again. I could hear a fly buzzing somewhere.

“It could be her,” my brother said, again. “At the orphanage. On the new coast.”

He opened and closed his hands, and, as I thought of all the times we had said that to each other, he told me he had been granted a day off and that we were going to go right now on the train.

To see for ourselves. If she was there.

“Right now,” he said.

I rubbed my eyes; the fly vanished.

“It isn’t new,” I said.

“What?”

“The coast. It isn’t new. I don’t know why people call it that.”

I thought he would smack me on the head or get up and tell me to hurry, but he did nothing, he just lay there, the tin box now balanced on his chest as he continued to open and close his hands in the air as if the answer were there in his palms.

It occurred to me that I had not seen him write a poem in a while.

More shadows passed.

And then a child peered in. I could see the child’s eye through one of the blanket holes, and I said, “O.K.,” and got up.

The trip took four hours. We hadn’t been on a train in almost two years. Or not a train where there were seats and we had tickets. The car was nearly empty. There was an old woman at the far end who unfolded a fan and stared out the window. A pair of soldiers in their uniforms were nearby, drifting in and out of sleep. I thought maybe the one on the left was the one who’d told my brother about the job in the city, but I wasn’t sure anymore what the man had looked like.

Some of the windows were open but it was still hot, and I could see the sweat around the collar of my brother’s uniform, which he’d decided to wear. Every now and again, he smoothed the points of his collar and looked at himself in the window’s reflection.

I don’t remember us speaking at all during that trip. We travelled through farmland with large craters in the fields, and we saw an abandoned tank with its treads blown out, its cannon aimed at us. I thought I saw someone climb out of the top, but then the train swerved and we headed toward a mountain, the car growing dark as we began to travel around the base. My brother looked down at his lap; I leaned against the window and tried to look as high up as possible, searching for sky.

Eventually, the mountain opened up into a wide valley where there were scattered piles of enormous stones, and dead trees stacked one on top of the other like bodies. I spotted some undamaged houses with their windows open, and a man and a woman carrying a heavy ceramic pot across the grass and laughing.

At least, I thought I could hear them laughing. Then I realized it was just the wind and the train creaking.

We smelled the ocean before we saw it.

Then we did see it, the flat expanse of it under the sun, and the train whistled and slowed, turning north to follow the coast, and we approached what that traveller had said to expect: what was visible through the window was just like the city, all the wreckage and broken pieces of buildings and the ruined land, except it was much brighter here, the sun all over and the smell of the ocean all over, too, wafting into the train.

There was no station. The train stopped at a platform near a road. On the other side of the road was the beach. We were the only ones who got out at this stop. The train barely waited for us to disembark before it kept going, farther up the coast. From here, we could see another settlement in the distance, on a hill facing the water.

I remember my brother remarking on what a view we’d have if we lived there. I remember, also, that there was no one around.

We crossed the road, heading toward the beach, distracted by it suddenly, wanting to touch the sand, which we did, digging our hands into it, my brother grinning. The wind blew against us as he threw a clump at me and I threw some back. He shouted. I thought he was about to run into the water, but he stopped. I followed his gaze to a point behind me, and saw a long, two-story concrete building with many windows.

I think it was at this moment, on the beach, that everything seemed the most possible. That our sister was alive and in that building somewhere.

We hurried. Inside, we were greeted by a man who was walking down the hall. We could hear the echoes of voices. We told him whom we were looking for and he said, “Just a minute,” and kept walking.

We waited. There were more footsteps, and a young woman appeared, holding a mop and a bucketful of water. She was wearing overalls and had tied a bandanna over her hair. Her face was covered in scars as if she had been burned or cut up with a small knife.

She looked at both of us, expectant. Then something passed across her eyes and she placed the mop and the bucket down and clasped her hands together as though she were about to recite a prayer.

We had no idea who she was.

The stranger took us to an empty classroom and had us sit at the desks like we were students. There was a blackboard up front. On the table was an open box of scissors and crayons and a stack of blue paper. From here, through the wide windows, we could see the train platform we had come from and the distant settlement on the hillside.

She turned a chair and sat in front of us. She didn’t speak for a while. I thought maybe she was a few years older than my brother, but it was hard to say because of the scars. She sat there not knowing what to do with her hands, which were also scarred, I saw now.

Then she spoke: “You’re his children, aren’t you? I knew this day would come. I knew at least one of you would survive and come here to find her. I knew it the moment I said that I was her. You have to believe me, it was the only way they would let me stay here. It was the only way.”

She was speaking fast but steadily and avoided looking at us. I couldn’t stop looking at her. Not because of her scars but because of how calm she was.

She went on, “I came here thinking maybe they had a space for me. But I was too old. So I asked if there was any work I could do. There’s always work to do, no? I said I would work for free as long as I could stay here. The thing, of course, was that I wasn’t the only one asking. Every day, people came and asked and begged. They still do. And I begged. I had been walking for so long. Up and down the coast. I had nowhere else to go. I wasn’t ever going to go back there”—she pointed out the window at the hillside settlement—“I will never go back there.

“So I kept begging. I cried. And then a woman working here asked where I was from, and so I told her. And that was when the woman’s eyes lit up. She mentioned she knew where that was because she knew a man from that area who used to come to her village to fix roofs. He was the best in the mountains. And sometimes he came with his kids, two boys and a girl, and they helped. Or, if he thought it was too dangerous, they stayed on the ground and watched and directed him. The woman said she remembered their laughter.

“And you know what I did? I said to the woman, without thinking, ‘That was me.’ And she said, ‘That was you?,’ and I nodded. And she said your sister’s name, and I said, ‘Yes.’ I kept pointing at myself and saying, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ ”

The stranger leaned forward in her chair. She meant to stand, perhaps. To walk away. Or to run away. Instead, she slowly picked up a pair of scissors, and grew so still I could hear the tide outside and my brother’s breathing and footsteps from the hallway, she was so still, except for her eyes, which fluttered and welled as my brother got up first, without a word, touched my shoulder, and we left.

We never saw her again. We never spoke about her or the orphanage after that day, and we never again spoke out loud about our sister to each other, either. In less than a year’s time, my brother would put on his uniform one morning, head out to keep surveying the city’s population, including all the new people continuing to come in, and my brother would vanish.

I never found out if someone hurt him, fighting him once again for his bag, or whether he just left. I don’t know which is worse.

Mrs. S lived long enough to see the tail of the airplane get lifted away—it turned out the other half wasn’t underground after all—and the land was cleared for her house and her neighbors’ houses to be rebuilt. But Mrs. S had no way to prove that her house was hers. And so, one afternoon, I helped her down to the river so that we could watch the young woman I had seen outside the bar at the camp town move into the property that had been Mrs. S’s home.

“Well,” Mrs. S said. “There you have it.”

She tugged on my arm as if she wanted to return up the hill, but she didn’t move.

That is one of my last memories of her.

I spent a year looking for my brother, convinced that he had simply left—that visiting the orphanage had made him determined to keep looking for our sister.

I travelled far. I retraced our steps the best I could. I returned to the coast. By then, the woman who was using our sister’s name had gone, too. A route into the mountains where we were born opened up, so I travelled there as well. It turned out that a village near ours had been rebuilt, and when I arrived there an old man came up to me and said, “You’re one of the roofer’s children, aren’t you?,” and I told him I was.

“But you’re all grown up,” he said.

This made me laugh. (I was fifteen by then.) I asked him if he had seen my brother or sister during these years, and he shook his head. He said I was the first person he recognized from our village. And then the shock of seeing someone he had known a long time ago overwhelmed him—he buried his head into my shoulder and wept and asked me how we were all supposed to keep living.

Eventually, I returned to the city, though by then someone had taken over the shanty that my brother and I had made our home. I moved into another, where, to my surprise, there was one of Mrs. S’s bracelets hanging on a nail. I slipped it on, then thought better of it and put it back.

In the morning, I went to the office where my brother had worked and asked if I could have my brother’s job.

I still do that now. I walk the sections of the city that are slowly being rebuilt and collect names and information, and I go out to the new towns on the new train lines and do the same. I try to collect as much information as possible.

I look after my neighbors. I help them wash their clothes. I leave food out for the new dogs.

When I think of that day with my brother on the coast, we are standing on the beach some distance away from the orphanage, not far from the train platform. This was afterward. But in my imagination it is as though we are about to visit the orphanage again, as though we are about to start over. The sand in our hands.

My brother asked if I was all right. I nodded, even though I had been crying.

“You’re not that strong,” he said, and I could tell he was trying to get me to smile.

We had yet to look at each other. We were facing the water, my brother in his uniform and boots, and he asked, shyly, whether I had ever thought of doing that.

I didn’t understand what he meant.

He hesitated. Then he said, without looking at me, “The way she held the scissors. Toward herself.”

And then I did understand. But I didn’t respond.

I watched the moving water and the far horizon.

I asked if the woman was O.K., as though he would know if she was O.K., and my brother said, “She’s O.K.”

“You won’t tell?” I asked.

I meant he wouldn’t report her to the orphanage for having taken our sister’s identity.

My brother shook his head. “I won’t tell,” he said.

The relief that came over me turned into a sudden desire to see the woman again, to call her by our sister’s name. The feeling passed, but was so strong I grew embarrassed by it.

My brother took a step closer to the water. It was then that he took out his notebook, which he always carried in his shirt pocket, opened it, tore out the pages, and threw them into the water.

I remember gasping and wanting to plunge into the sea. But my brother took my hand and held me in place, and I grew quiet, not because of what he had just done but because I couldn’t remember the last time my brother and I had held hands. Not, I thought, since the long field where we had run for our lives and he’d kept shouting at me over the horrible noise and the earth breaking open not to let go of our sister’s hand, which I also held. He kept shouting, Hold your sister’s hand. And, for a long time, I thought I was doing just that. But then I wasn’t holding her hand anymore, I wasn’t holding his hand, I was only screaming and running across a field that kept breaking apart into the smallest of pieces underneath me.

The tide carried the pages away. And then we heard the whistle of the train approaching and distant voices. And we turned to see a group of children coming down from the orphanage to play soccer on the beach.

And then, a moment later, we saw them: all the birds gliding up the coast. So many of them, right above us, I lost count. ♦