The Dance

We dance with the winds. Play cat-and-mouse with thunderheads. Skip over the salt that swirls in the erratic patterns of spooked bonefish. We circle, circle, circle, to outflank the looming cataclysms, to hide behind keys, to sneak around stray sheets of showers in search of hidden blue skies, to simply get out of the blow that comes impossibly from all sides at once.

Tides shift in minutes, ignoring their lunar influence. Instead are herded like livestock, driven mercilessly by tempestuous phantoms, whipped to a bellowing froth. Stampeded across the mangroves.

Flats empty, then fill, then empty again. Whitecaps in eight inches of brine. Now five. Need to run but no depth to get it on plane. Rumble out slowly, painfully, the grey wall closing in behind. Find a depression and spin the skiff hard, pirouette, slingshot to speed. Escape. Run for the next tack, too stubborn to give in, too hard-headed to go home. The waltz goes on.

Boreas. Zephyrus. Eurus. Notus. They toy with us. No. That’s flattering. They couldn't care less of us as they romp amongst themselves for control of the empyrean. We’re collateral. Insignificant. The Marles are theirs.

But in between the skirmishes we find tails, waving in the chop like crisp silver flags. The bones don’t care about the firmament. It's just air and they have no interest in it. Noses down, not up. Get a fly to them, they eat. And they run. In defiance of it all we laugh and we celebrate our own small conquests, lesser gods that we are.

The winds note this hubris and we dance once again.