Here Until August. Josephine Rowe

       Glisk

      We are wading out, the five of us. I remember this. The sun an hour or two from melting into the ocean, the slick trail of its gold showing the way we will take.

      Ahead of me my tiny sister sits regal and unafraid in the middle of the raft that Fynn has built of packing foam and empty chemical buckets, lids fixed airtight with caulk. He’s already tested it out in our neighbors’ pool and declared it seaworthy, but if the thing falls apart he has promised to carry Sara himself. Fynn is thirteen, older than me by five years, and the only one of us three kids who has been out to the island before. Our mother had long hair then, and Fynn’s dad was still around, hadn’t yet skidded his motorbike underneath a roadtrain one rainy December night. My dad—Fynn’s dad now too, Mum constantly reminds us—shoulders a picnic basket filled with Sara’s favorites, Fynn’s favorites, Mum’s favorites, mine: cheese-and-apple sandwiches, salt-and-vinegar chips, slivers of mango doused with lime and chili, ginger beer. Enough food to last a week, though we’ll be crossing back to the mainland this same night, lit by a quarter moon and a two-dollar torch.

      The people around us hardly seem like people. More like a muster of herd animals. They move steadily through the water in ones and twos, feeling for the slope of the sandbar underfoot, the treacherous edge where the ocean floor falls away. That’s how people—tourists, mostly—get themselves drowned, snatched off by rips.

      The sea the sea the terrible …

      Yep yep, we say, we know; Dad gets wordy sometimes.

      There are other families, some towing small children on boogie boards, inflatable li-los, nothing so fine as Sara’s raft. Coolers bob alongside clothes tied inside plastic shopping bags, silver jellyfish-balloons with Day-Glo guts.

      We’re lucky, Dad’s telling us. Today is a neap tide—safest time to make a crossing. The highest tide not as high as normal, the deepest part not so deep.

      Farther out the island looks like a rough dog slouching up from the ocean, muzzle pointed northwest. What’s out there? A lot of putrid birds, Fynn’s already told me, and some all right caves, mobs of bogans sinking tinnies of lager. Nothing awesome. But tonight, after sunset, the shores around the island will be aglow with the visiting swarm of bioluminescent phytoplankton, on their anxious, brilliant way to who-knows-where. We’ll perch along the highest bluff in a sprawl of blankets while the waves crash iridescent against the rocks below, sweeping away to leave lonely blue stars stranded here and there, then charging back in to reclaim them.

      It will be spectacular, an eerie sort of magic, and I will never see anything like it again.

      But whatever, this isn’t the point. In the end, the island is just a dog-shaped rock covered with birds and sunburnt gawkers, temporarily surrounded by terrified dinoflagellates.

      It’s this wading out that matters, this crossing: the bright, migratory-animalness of it. Going waist deep, chest deep, waist deep again. What matters is how, halfway over, Fynn looks back at us, then ahead again, and says to no one, or everyone, or maybe just to Sara:

      I reckon this is how the afterlife must look.

      I see Dad look at Mum and mouth the word: afterlife?

      Fynn is the palest of us, lighter even than Mum; blond all the way to his eyelashes, the only one who crisps up in the sun. He looks adopted. A thing we all know but know better than to say.

      Anyway. There it is.

      Do I make it through childhood without staking every possible biological claim on the man who calls us both my beloved savage? I’m ashamed to say I do not. I’m content to share him only in his lesser moments: it is my dad who used to play bass in an almost-famous blues band, but it is our dad who, before the blues band, used to play clarinet in a high school orchestra. It is my dad who promises to buy us a pair of albino axolotls, our dad who reneges when Fynn and I neglect our goldfish duties and Skeletor’s tank is all slime and fug.

      (There was a time, some years, where it was just Fynn and Mum, and this is maybe what I’m getting back at him for. Or else I’m getting back at him for all the names he isn’t called in school, the way no one ever asks where he’s from, whether his parents are reffos. Or else it’s the fact that, even though one of them is dead, he has two fathers, doesn’t have to share his, and is allowed to wander off without telling anyone, to give reasons like just thinking or just walking, getting soft looks instead of strife.)

      Does my brother find some spiteful way of getting even, of