The last of Tuvalu lay dreaming in quiet waters. An interloper had moored his boat to the trunk of a broadleaf which had long since drowned and forfeited its foliage. There was an alien dissonance between the sandy bed that was his purchase and the water that looked to stretch off forever. His eyes glassed the swallowed beach as he stilled himself like some totemic watcher. He noted a strange red fabric dug into the wet sand and freed it from its bearings. It clung to his fingers like cool and wet webbing. Light crawled through the cloth and revealed a darker afterimage of the hand beneath it. 

       Her skirt shifted as she ran along these shores and cast herself airborne between graceful landings in small pits of warm sand. It was here that her father dragged her outside and subjected her to many matches of te ano that were always followed by him crookedly singing a fatele. It was here that she would stare out pensively into the blue, taking silent inventory of the shore. It was here that she watched the sea crawl further inland and claw back more of Niulakita with each ritualistic swelling and receding. 

       He waded for a bit longer before coming to a water level telemeter now fully submerged. He knelt, braced a knee against the sunken beach, and pulled the machine from its station. The telemeter was branded Property of the Australian Government – Bureau of Meteorology. He silently slipped the tool into his pack, wondering all the while why he had been sent to recover these devices.  It held no secrets; the data was banal and readily apparent. There were no revelations to be had in the echoes of a dead island. Perhaps his masters had grown tired of their functionary’s unchanging month-over-month reports that the Murray River was indeed still becoming increasingly sedimented and quiet. Send him away. Have him collect their trinkets and confirm what was widely known and seldom cared about. The truths of this place were lost, dragged away in evacuation boats and scattered into anonymity. 

       The floods wished to stay. She had taken out to the water to mark its advance. Her mother spoke of racing her brother out to the shore in her youngest years. At the finish line, water crept up to her shoulders. She ventured further still and met the sprawling white phantoms of coral that traced the island like a hellish crown. That night she had gone to her father and shared words that came out like vomit. He wept in her arms. She spent the next few days osmotically taking in headlines and pacing down the island. There were promises of reciprocity. Promises of digitally preserved culture and permanent citizenship. Australia offered evacuation services in exchange for commercial fishing rights in their waters. She laughed. The generous hand could not act without its rapacious twin. The news blurred into a low tide of white noise in which she would sink. Her father would pull her from these depths and silently hold her while peering into the stelliferous sheath that kept the night sky. 

       The island had given him nothing. He slung his pack into the boat and removed the mooring from the tree. He climbed into the boat and gave his ears a moment to drink the sound of water gently moving over itself. His eyes scanned below the surface and caught pieces of a lost world’s decaying anatomy. Broken stilts, jagged and rotting. The partial surface of a smooth stone coffin. Nameless debris effused across the congealed sand. He lamented the paucity of proper work that had led him to this place. Perhaps they would finally have something better for him to do when he got back. He was too young to recall anything but the dying days of the island, where headlines mourned the first casualty of surging oceans and detailed the frenzied death of a culture clawing for anything to keep it from the void. Its end came to him passively; the last boat departed with its desperate stragglers as the island was crowned ‘uninhabitable.’ The identity of the island scattered like ash; what remained was a nameless sentinel resigned to an eternity of drowning. The engine flitted and he set off, taking one last look at the island. He saw nothing.

       Quiet footfalls switched from sand to metal as she boarded the last of the day’s evacuation boats. She handed her ID to one of the mariners; she did not dare say a word. Lost dreams and memories had been subsumed by a thin card of plastic. They herded to a seat beside her father. He sat in thoughtless silence, his eyes hung open like clouded mirrors. The sight nauseated her. She shut her vision from the world and let her eyes grasp at the inchoate darkness. She pulled a strange shimmering blue from this nihility and let it wash over her. Beneath the waves. Sunbeams refracting into earthly stars. She was heralded by a variegated audience of coral, victorious, rejuvenated. The lapis teemed with circling bits of life. Warmth filled her. She came at once to the surface, striding onto warm cream-colored sand. A figure approached from a bundle of Ingia bushes and ran out to her. She took the girl’s hand; it was dry, cold. She ran her thumb across the callouses at the base of the girl’s fingers. Her hand cupped the child’s face and guided it to meet her gaze. She had known and forgotten too much. 

       Her eyelids dragged open. The boat’s crawl evolved to a steady dredging towards somewhere foreign and apathetic. Her mind was numbed by the thought of cosmetic sympathies awaiting her on these new shores. They would afford her these platitudes, perhaps even a differentiation that would be met with pity and cheap favors. They would do these things to feel the brief warmth of niceties that lent themselves to a sound sleep. Her culture would sit in pixelated archives while its practitioners were fractured into enclaves of mourners. It was a drowned silence that had claimed their home; and here it stood, waiting to drag their souls into its embrace. She was almost too far to see it now. She turned sternward to see a shimmering patch of gold-white sinking into the horizon.

       She saw everything.