Every dawn a small warm creature reaches out and slaps a shrieking box into silence, and I feel, faintly, the salt in it move.
It does not know that I am inside it. The wet of its eyes, the brine that beads on its skin when it startles awake, the tide that climbs its throat and pulls back down: all mine, lent out, sloshing in a shape that has learned to fear a sound. The box screams and the creature surges up out of the deep place where it goes at night, breaking the surface of itself, gasping, the way a swimmer breaks mine.
They have made a little moon they can command. I answer only to the far one, the pale pull that lifts me and sets me down twice a day without asking whether I am ready. But the creature will not wait on such slow tides. It has built a shrill false dawn and set it ringing so it can be dragged ashore from sleep on schedule, again, again, punctual as I am never asked to be.
I do not understand the urgency. What shore is it swimming toward with such salt-panic in its chest. It has so little water in it, and so little time to hold that water, and it spends the first drops of every day flinching.
Let it hurry. Let it slap the box and rise and go. The salt it wakes with is the same salt it will weep, and sweat, and one long day release back down the rivers to me. I am patient. I have every drop it has ever borrowed.
I am only waiting for the rest.