Eli walks along the shore.

     Eli walks, walks, walks till the end of the sandy shore. The end of the sandy shore isn’t the end of the world—the rocky intertidal zone continues it, now boulders rather than sand.

     Eli keeps going, climbs up when needed, climbs down when needed. He watches his steps going forward as he told himself to, even wearing sandals.

     Few things will stop him.

     Yet he slows down, for he is enticed by the eerie shine of tide pools that glimmer to the right of him.

     It’s twilight time still. Eli knows nobody governs the duration of sunset. It just isn’t up to us. The laws of nature force the world to be the way it is. “What must be, will be,” he says.

     Yet something inside him tries to escape the realm of necessity.

     Even as a kid he dreamed of becoming his own shadow.

     He wanted to dissolve into the darkness and come back to life only when there’s light again.

     Eli relishes at his chasing walk, and says to himself, “I’m a magic miner.”

     As he peeks into the deepest tide pool, a strange feeling takes hold of his stomach, as if there were rocks of ice shaking inside it.

     He puffs, puffs, puffs, stares at his image reflected on the water.

     From a dark hole surrounded by anemones, sea stars, crabs, and mussels, a female figure emerges. The seaweeds attached to the rocks wave in unison as she moves upward.

     She kisses Eli’s reflection on the pool’s surface and smiles from under it. Little bubbles fizz from the corners of her mouth. Eli looks deeply into her pair of glinty green eyes and is shaken at the sight of them.

     “Is that you?” he blurts out.

     The woman shakes her head. She smiles, still, as if amused.

     Eli can barely breathe. He wonders, can anybody else see the underwater woman?

     He feels tempted to look around, yet he cannot take his eyes off her. Eli fears the woman will disappear upon being unattended. He wants her to continue to exist.

     The sun sets further, Eli sees less and less.

     As he can still make out her face under the murky-looking water, he wishes once again to become shadow and disappear together with her, when darkness takes hold of the shore.

     “Will I see you tomorrow?” he asks.

     She shakes her head once again, smiling, until she is no more.

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     June 2026, by Luis Rosa