Grit

Far up the islands, where the ash came down thin, a deer bends to the grass the way it always has, and there's a sound in the chewing now like someone walking on a gravel path inside its head.

Nobody there saw the sea stand up. Nobody there ran. They only noticed, if they noticed, that the deer were thinner one year, that the boar's teeth in the cooking fire looked old, that it was a long walk now for a good animal.

Down south, where the sky actually fell, there were fewer people left to fall on. And on the north coast the shellfish came back fast, and the fires multiplied, and somebody counting, seven thousand years later, from charcoal in the dirt, wrote that it grew.

I'd like to know who came up that coast carrying a pot from home, whether they were the growth, or the growth was theirs. The dirt can't say. A fire is a fire. It doesn't mark who lit it or where they used to live.

But I can hear the deer. The harm didn't arrive like a wave. It went in by mouth, a little grit on every leaf, a jaw at a time, the way most harm goes, quiet enough that nobody thinks to name it, and somebody walks a bit further next spring, and finds a field where the grass is clean, and stays.