Ceil has been awake for some time now, since long before dawn, in fact, and dawn seems to come early here. She listens to the sounds—the calls of unfamiliar birds, miscellaneous splashings, the sound of china clinking? And she enjoys the smells of vegetation rotting and seawater. She is terribly calm, raising an arm to gaze at her hand against the whitewashed ceiling of the room, marveling at fingers, the fact of them, raising a leg and noting the slenderness of her ankle and shape of her foot. Toes! We are strangely formed creatures, she thinks.
She is both not herself and more herself. Like being alone in a snowfall.
When the light widens and fills the room, she props herself up on one elbow for a better view of her husband’s sleeping face. There are his eyebrows and the creases in his cheeks that deepen when he laughs, there is his straight nose, his jaw, the cowlick at the top of his head. She touches this lightly, it feels like feathers. Who are we? She is whispering when he wakes, startled to find her face inches from his. “What is it?” he asks, “what’s wrong?”
