The Wave’s Second Day

by Luc Reid

The wave, now about a day and a half old, had been born far out in the ocean, and while it had heard talk about a thing called “land,” it had assumed that “land” was a made-up thing, like mermaids or absolute truth or polar bears. Now, seeing the dark, green mass rise over the horizon in front of it, the wave was forced to reevaluate.

And this “land” was beautiful: not with the vast, dappled beauty of the sky or the shimmering beauty of shoals of ever-turnnig fish, but a rich and varied and shocking beauty of green clusters and brown pillars and wide, delicately-colored expanses of sand and armored masses of rocks rising in brown and gray cliffs over the churning water, and a whiteness at the edge of the land that the wave could not identify.

The wave felt a thrill of fear and anticipation as it realized that it was heading directly for the land, that soon it would reach it and then run across it as it had run over the surface of the mighty ocean, delving ever deeper into the interior, rippling through trees and flowers and deserts and and fields of waving, dun-colored grass, until perhaps it broke through to another ocean entirely, one with new fish and and a new sky.

The wave felt its submerged parts begin to catch against the land, and with amazement the wave felt itself lifting, its head cutting sharply into the air as it took on a mane of thick, white foam. It raised up, changing from its old rounded shape, its child-shape as it now thought of it, into a wall of power and strength and beauty, shimmering in the daylight with a thousand shades of blue and green. It roared toward the land, and the wave felt as though it were flying. The seagulls above it circled and dove, screaming in what sounded like a warning, to run from this new and powerful force. It leaned in toward the rocks that grew in front of it.

The cliff face rushed up, and as the wave crashed into the rocks, it shattered into innumerable droplets, running high up the cliff in a desperate and doomed attempt to escape the sea that came at it with uncounted brothers and sisters, crushing it against the cliff’s unyielding wall.

So this is dying, the wave thought. But there was no time to feel bitter: it was gone.