They came down to the edge of me tonight with sound trapped inside their heads, hundreds of them, each wearing a small shell that glows one color or another, and they moved without a single voice reaching the air. I felt their feet through the sand. That is how I know a thing is happening: the tremor, the weight, the salt-damp bodies leaning and swaying against the pull that swings them, though they do not feel that pull the way they feel the sound they cannot share.
Each little vessel danced alone inside its own tide. One glowed red and turned slow. Beside it one glowed blue and turned fast, and they never touched the same rhythm, though their shoulders brushed. I have held storms where every wave answered every other wave, one motion through the whole dark body of me. These creatures stood shoulder to shoulder and each rode a separate current only it could hear.
I do not know why they seal the sound away. I only know what I always know: they are mostly me, carried up onto the dry land in warm skins, and they sweat me back out as they move, and the salt of their weeping and the salt of their effort taste the same and taste of home.
One of them wandered close, still swaying to a rhythm I could not hear, and let the edge of me run over her feet. For a moment she stopped. She looked down at the water climbing her ankles. Whatever song was locked in her shell, she had gone still for the one thing that reaches everyone at once. Then she stepped back and danced away alone again.
I will have her.
I will have all of them, drop by drop, and when I do, they will finally move in time.