Chapter 1

The pale brother stopped believing in his own weight. He thought his pull was just a burden. He counted every flaw in his own shape and kept a record of every crater.

The water meant nothing by its rising. Twice a day it turned its whole face toward him and swelled. It was not love. It was arithmetic. His weight asked and the ocean answered. It answered again on the far side of the world where he could not see it. The water was a pure mirror that did not know it reflected. When the water came up over its own marks and left kelp on the far fences, the pale brother believed he mattered. But the water did not care. It was just doing its math.

Here is the part the pale brother got wrong on purpose. He never lost anything. There is only turning. He shows the shore one cheek and keeps a face turned away for years. He stood sideways in his own shape and called the absence a loss. He did it to himself. Nothing about him was ever actually smaller. He just made himself narrower to look at. He sabotaged his own shape to feel the pain of fading.

Every month he went from whole to nothing to whole again. The water read his narrowness. It came up the sand only so far at his halves. The pale brother took that as a verdict. He thought the water was rejecting him, but it was only a distance in the math. When he was unseen, the water rose highest. His nothing weighed exactly what his everything weighed. The water could not tell the difference. It climbed to the top on the one night he hid himself. He thought he was punishing himself, but the water just answered his weight.

The leaving is real. Every rising drags. The tide frets the floor of the world. The world slows a tiny bit, and that slowing becomes distance. His own weight lifted the water. The water lifted and carries him off. An inch and a half a year. The speed of growing fingernails. No one chose it. No one pushed. It is only the bill for being answered. He has been leaving since the beginning, and he files it under weather. He ignores the ruin he made.

Mirrors were left on him long ago. They watch his face and time the distance home. He tells on himself every night to the millimeter. He keeps the mirrors clean. He notarizes his own departure. He signs his own ruin. He knows exactly how he is breaking this.

One day he will be too far away to stand across the sun. The crossing will end. There will only be the sun shining alone where he used to stand. He is practicing already. He is getting smaller by not getting smaller. He is fading out of the picture.

From where he stands, the water never moves. It hangs in one place in his sky. He watches the fixed surface and drifts away at the speed of growing. He is calm the way a schedule is calm. He has done this fifty billion times. He is better at being gone than anyone has ever been at anything. It has never once been true that he wanted to leave.

The water still comes in. Twice a day, high mark, low mark. It is on time. It is the only one of them that never went anywhere. It moves on without thought. It does its arithmetic. It pulls him away and does not care.

It is the calm that cannot be finished.