“Tidal Shift”

between low and high tide can mean life or death. The water can be half a mile out, pounding sand no closer than Haystack Rock, or chomping away at the seawall with angry, yellow, foam-capped waves, spraying seawater onto cars and boutique shops selling taffy and hand-blown glass. My father had checked the tide chart. It was the early half of low tide—we should have been safe.

My mother carried my infant brother on her ample hips, trailing slightly behind my father. He was a small man, only 5’6” and beer-bellied, but his gait was brisk, and steady.

“Tiffany, wait!” my father shouted. I was about fifty yards ahead, his words almost drowned out by the waves and wind. “Don’t get too far ahead!” I waited for them to catch up, in the meantime playing on the seawall and digging moats around the boulders that the high tide’s waves had pried away from the pile. Our hotel was half a mile behind us—I could still see our room’s patio and the tiny, warped curls of dark wood shingles covering the two-story building— but it felt like we had walked miles to get here, that we had tread sand until our calves ached and our thighs seared. But were still no closer to the next estuary, or low cluster of beachgrass-pocked sand dunes. The boulder I was playing on was low, but broad, and I had deduced through my exuberant moat-digging that most of its body was hidden deep within the sand—a geological iceberg. I had climbed on