What the Tide Brings
Every morning, Piero walked the beach before the town woke up. He had been doing this for forty years. He had never told anyone what he was looking for.
The sea in November was the colour of old pewter. Piero liked it better this way, stripped of the August blue that brought the visitors, the pedal boats, the noise. In November the beach belonged to the water again, and to him.
He wore the same rubber boots he had worn for twelve years, resoled twice, the left one cracked along the toe in a way that let the cold in but not, so far, the wet. He carried a canvas bag that had once held potatoes and now held whatever the night’s tide had left.
Most mornings it was the usual: plastic, rope, a glass bottle, the occasional crate. He sorted these at home into bins he had labelled useful, not useful, unclear. The third bin was the largest.
Once, in 2019, he had found a shoe. A woman’s shoe, leather, not cheap, the heel intact. He had put it in the unclear bin, where it still lived, and sometimes when he opened the bin he looked at it and tried to imagine the circumstances. He had not yet imagined any that satisfied him.
Today the tide had brought a tin box, small and flat, the kind that once held throat lozenges or mints. It was rusted shut. He turned it over in his hands, feeling the weight of whatever was inside — something small and loose, a marble perhaps, or a coin.
He did not force it open.
He carried it home in his pocket and set it on the windowsill where the light came in. His daughter, when she visited on Sundays, had twice asked him what all the things on the windowsill were. The second time he had said, evidence, and she had given him the look she had been giving him for years, the look that meant she was simultaneously fond of him and unsure what to do with him.
He was never sure what to do with himself either. That was, he supposed, the point of the walks.
He put the kettle on. Outside the window the sea was doing what the sea did, indifferent and continuous, and the tin box sat on the sill and kept its secret, and Piero stood in his kitchen in his cracked boot and waited for the water to boil, and felt, as he often did at this hour, that he was exactly where he was supposed to be.
He did not know what he was looking for.
He thought perhaps that was fine.