Romance · Second chances · Slow burn
Saltglass
Every summer the tide returns something you lost. This year it returns him.
A Fernlit original
- Where it starts
- The first returning tide, with half the cove out on the strand before sunrise.
- You will meet Lowen
- Last summer's relief keeper on Gannet Rock. He sings under his breath and cannot say where he has been.
Lowen is a fictional character. In the story, a language model writes his replies as you read; they can be wrong or inconsistent, and they are not advice.
How chapter one begins
First returning tide. Half of Saltglass is out on the strand before the sun is properly up, coats over nightclothes, buckets swinging, everyone walking slowly with their heads down like people looking for an earring after a dance.
The sea has been generous this year. Dando from the lifeboat station holds up a pocket watch and laughs out loud. Someone finds a dog's collar with the name tag still bright. A door key. A green glass fishing float, whole. You pick up a piece of saltglass the colour of an old bottle and turn it in your fingers.
Then you stop. Further along, where the shingle runs down into wet sand, a man is lying on his side at the tideline as if someone set him there.
You know the shirt before you know anything else. Linen that was white once, sleeves rolled to the elbow. You know it because you held a fistful of it at the midsummer bonfire last year while he laughed and spun you too fast.
Lowen.
He's breathing. You can see it. Soaked through, sand on one cheek, dark hair thick with salt, one hand closed tight around something. A year ago the lifeboat brought back his upturned boat and nothing else, and the cove said a prayer for him on the slipway, and you stood at the back and didn't say it.
His eyes open. Dark, and for a second very far away. Then they find you, and he smiles the way he always did, as if you're the best joke he has heard all day.
“Sorry,” he says, hoarse with salt. “I know I said the harbour wall.” He tries to sit up and doesn't quite manage it. “I think I'm late.”
Behind you, someone else has seen him. All along the strand the talk stops, one voice at a time.
Your first choice
Pick one and see how Lowen answers. In the story you can also say anything in your own words.
You say it. A year. Midsummer to midsummer.
He goes still, the way water goes still before it turns. “A year,” he says, trying the word for size. He looks at his hands, at the shingle, at the lighthouse out on Gannet Rock with its lamp gone dark for the day.
“I've not shaved.” A laugh with no breath behind it. “Did you wait? On the wall. The next evening.”
You open your mouth and he shakes his head.
“No. Don't. Not here.”
Behind you, Dando has seen him. He comes down the strand running the way a big man runs, and the buckets go over one after another as the cove gets out of his way.
He is heavier than he looks and colder than the sea. He gets an arm over your shoulders and you get him to his feet, and he says “Easy,” though it isn't clear which of you he means.
His pockets are full of saltglass. It clicks as he moves.
Along the strand the buckets have been set down. Nobody is walking any more. “They're looking at me like I'm a returned thing,” he murmurs, close to your ear. “Am I?”
Granny Annick is coming down the lifeboat slip with her register under her arm, slowly, because she is ninety and because she wants to be seen coming. You have watched her write down rings and keys and one dog's collar.
You have never seen her write down a man.
“Here,” he says. And then, because he is honest, or because he is trying to be: “I don't know. I was in the boat. Then I was in the water, and it wasn't cold, which it should have been. And then.”
He turns his head and looks out at Gannet Rock as if it might answer for him.
He starts to hum, under his breath, the tune the band played at the bonfire, and stops the moment he hears himself.
“I remember you,” he says. “The wall. I was going to tell you something.”
The sea slides up the shingle and touches his boot, and he moves his foot away from it, quick, like a man taking his hand off a hot stove.
What you do next is up to you.
Choose from the story’s suggestions or say something to Lowen in your own words. Lowen answers as himself, and every later chapter remembers what you said to him.
Make the first choiceOther ways in
Chapter one can also begin here. Each opening is a different first meeting; the story remembers which one you chose.
The register of returned things lives in the lifeboat station, a ledger older than the building, and Granny Annick keeps it in pencil because the sea, she says, has been known to change its mind.
Midsummer Eve, a year to the night. The bonfire is lit on the strand again and the fiddles have started, and you are not there.
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