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PART I

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God is a slick god Temple knows She knows because of all the crackerjack lobe

Like those fish all disco-lit in the shallows That was so, a marvel with no coht when she saw it, but the ht it cast hard shadows everywhere on the island So bright it was als clearer, as if the sun were criht She left the lighthouse and went down to the beach to look at the ht, and she stood in the shallows and let her feet sink into the sand as the patter-waves tickled her ankles And that’s when she saw it, a school of tiny fish, all darting around like marbles in a chalk circle, and they were lit up electric, old and pink too They came and danced around her ankles, and she could feel their little electric fish bodies, and it was like she was standing under theshe hadn’t seen before A decade and a half, thereabouts, roa the planet earth, and she’s never seen that before

And you could say the world has gone to black da sway over the good and the righteous--but here’s what Temple knows: She knows that whatever hell the world went to, and whatever evil she’s perpetrated her own self, and whatever series of cursed ht her down here to this island to be harbored away fros are what put her there that night to stand aht Moon and the Miracle of the Fish--which she wouldn’t of got to see otherwise

See, God is a slick god Heyou’re supposed to witness firsthand

SHE SLEEPS in an abandoned lighthouse at the top of a bluff At the base there’s a circular room with a fireplace where she cooks fish in a blackened iron pot The first night she discovered the hatch in the floor that opened into a dank storage room There she found candles, fishhooks, a first aid kit, a flare gun with a box of oxidized rounds She tried one, but it was dead

In the nuts in the underbrush and checks her nets for fish She leaves her sneakers in the lighthouse, she likes the feel of the hot sand on the soles of her feet The Florida beachgrass between her toes The palm trees are like bushes in the air, their brittle dead fronds like a skirt of bones around the tall trunks, rattling in the breeze

At noon every day, she cli at theto catch her breath and feel the sun on her face froriazing out over the illimitable sea, and then, toward the ht continent Sometiht itself, that blind glass optic, like a cauldron turned on its side and covered with a thousand square mirrors

She can see her reflection there, clear and h the unrottedso to her, but the pictures she likes They evoke places she has never been--crowds of the sharply dressed hailing the arrival of so on couches in homes where there’s no blood crusted on the walls, woarments on backdrops of seamless white Abstract heaven, that white--where could such a white exist? If she had all the white paint left in the world, ould go untouched by her brush? She closes her eyes and thinks about it

It can be cold at night She keeps the fire going and pulls her arhter around her torso and listens to the ocean histling loud through the hollow flute of her tall ho after the glowing fish, she finds the body on the beach She sees it during herwalk around the island to check the nets, she finds it on the north point of the teardrop landainst the white sand, and she studies it froers up to her eye

Too small to be a person, unless it’s folded double or half buried Which it could be

She looks around The wind blowing through the grass above the shoreand waits for er When she first ca way off fro an empty red and white cooler to help keep her afloat in the currents That was er, the season pulling the water out farther and farther every night, drawing the island closer to theout fro toward the island, and there are large frag in the other direction froers of God and Ada as the water retreats and gets shallower along the shoal

But it still seems safe The breakers on the reef are violent and thunderous You wouldn’t be able to get across the shoal without busting yourself to pieces on the rock Not yet at least

The shape doesn’t move, so she stands and approaches it carefully

It’s a man, buried facedown in the sand, the tail of his flannel shirt whipping back and forth in the wind There’s soed, one knee up by the small of his back, that tells her his back is broken There’s sand in his hair, and his fingernails are torn and blue