I squint. It’s a chair—a wooden folding chair.
A moment later, he emerges with two more. And then another. Four in total, lying in a heap on the rocks.
He disappears into the ship again, this time emerging with an armload of books, and something I can’t make out.
The sound rises up with the wind: the ship scraping back violently against the rocks. It’s being pulled out to sea once again.
Clay hears it too—likely feels it—and he scrambles over the side ofthe boat, dropping several books into the water, but manages to keep ahold of most of them.
I watch as he climbs back up the rocks, and when he reaches me, he drops the books and a burlap bag at my feet. “They’ll be good for burning,” he says.
“We can’t burn these,” I reply, kneeling down to touch the spines of each book.
“It gets cold enough, or there’s no fire to make yer morning tea, I suspect ye’ll be begging me to burn them.”
I shoot him a look, but he only smiles back before turning to scramble down the rocks to retrieve the chairs.
I reach for the bag, pulling it open. Inside, I find rice—translucent, a good half pound of it. I let out a breath, relieved. It’s enough to last us a few days. I sort through the books, but none of them are titles—or authors—I recognize. Most are nonfiction, books on sailing and navigation.
Clay emerges from the rocks, dropping two of the wooden chairs onto the grass—breathing heavy, wiping at his forehead.
“Find anything worth reading?” he asks. “Or should we sacrifice them to the stove?”
“I don’t know,” I answer, distracted, when I see the corner of something sticking out from one of the books. I shimmy it free and I know instantly what it is.
I unfold its creased corners, spreading the map open on my lap.
It depicts the whole world.
And everything I once knew is broken.
We lay the map flat across the kitchen table.
It’s an odd discovery—in my time, paper maps had become nearly obsolete. The use of cell phones and GPS was ubiquitous. But this map reveals an unfamiliar landscape. Alien and unsettling. The continents are like no place I’ve ever stood before.
“The sea has taken the land,” Clay comments, leaning over the map, a palm resting at the corner.
“It’s nearly all ocean.”
“Aye. An’ a lot of it.”
None of the features look familiar—there is no remnant, no shape that mimics what I remember from geography class. It’s been broken apart into smaller, scattered fragments of land. Only a handful of larger landmasses remain, while the rest aren’t much larger than my thumb against the map. It’s a world made of islands. The handwritten names of each atoll are unfamiliar yet echo some faint memory of their former identity. Where Europe once stretched from the Atlantic to the North Sea, scattered clots of land are now marked Gaelen Reach, Nordhavn, and Rhinemark. Africa is the Riftlands and Capa Noor. Asia is broken by indistinct tributaries, its fragments labeled Ulan, Isle of Varka, the Kulan Expanse, and farther south, names like the Ten Thousand Strands, Haekoro Drift, the Shattered Han. And Antarctica, shaded green—no longer a region of ice—is inked with a single word: Crya.
Even the oceans have been retitled. The Atlantic is now Old Atlantic. What I think was once the Indian Ocean is marked Indari Waters, with smaller letters beneath that read: Sea of the Old Sun. And the Pacific—perhaps most haunting of all—is now called simply: the Vast Quiet.
I shake my head, sliding my palm over the map to where Nova Scotia once sat, but is now a scattering of fingerlike islands, jagged and broken, hardly any structure to them. It’s been a year since I saw James in front of Nana’s house, and in my mind, I like to think of it—the house facing the sea, mostly unchanged. James might still be alive, or another family could be living inside, restoring the small, single-story home, caring for it like Nana had. It gave me some comfort, thinking of the place where I spent my childhood. But as I search the ragged edges of each island, I’m certain the house is long gone.
Splintered apart, sent into the sea. Nothing of what I remember remains.
Clay reaches out, touches my hand, knowing what I’m thinking. He always seems to know.
But my fingers keep searching the map, looking for something familiar. The shapes of old continents are distorted—sea levels flooding into coastlines, turning them into archipelagoes—while only inland mountainous regions hold their ground. My stomach churns from hunger, and an ache that feels like nostalgia for a world that’s been lost. And I notice what I didn’t at first. There are faint lines crossed over most of the islands and territories, some have anX, written in faded pencil. Other islands are circled.
“What is this?” I ask aloud.
My eyes scan the map, trying to understand, and then I see the notes written along the bottom edge.
X—uninhabited
