Somewhere off Mangavera, the schooner Tango was riding out giant combers thrown up by a distant hurricane when she struck bottom.

    "We're taking water!" screamed Elsi, who had been asleep below.

    Her head popped up through the main hatch. "I'm sure we're sinking. The sole's awash."

    "Get up here!" Jack yelled.

    He could feel the schooner getting heavy under his hand and slow to take the big waves. The massive thump had come from hitting a coral head.

    Elsi was up on the heaving deck, trying to release a self-inflating dinghy from its canister.

    The schooner wallowed heavily and started a downward plunge. Jack left the wheel to help Elsi but too late; with the Tango's bow held under by breaking waves, a big one smashed her coaming and finished her off. She sank in minutes. He cursed his luck when the dinghy failed to inflate.

Like a dog before its master, a big sea surging over the island's outer reef had given warning of the hurricane's approach. There were only the gulls, terns and noddies to heed it and, knowing what was to come, they departed like a handful of confetti blown downwind. That night the storm passed about 200 miles offshore leaving the island unscathed except for an unusually high wrack line loaded with flotsam and jetsam and wreckage dredged from the sea's bottom. Lonely among this, at the island's southernmost tip and strangely at home in the sand, a complete human skeleton lay, bleached by the sun.

    There was a perfection in its bones, all of them crab-clean, with the joints still fastened with stringy, dried-out, gristle. Somehow got gently from the sea's mouth it seemed ready to put on flesh again, and so it rested, warmed by the sun, patient of recovery. It gave the gulls nothing to peck at, its orbs empty, the sun and the stars finding no reflection in them except one night when a firefly came and, flitting inside its skull, lit its dead ports and stirred its ghost.

    One heel dug into the sand, as though to kick the body upwards, yet the hands languished, open-spread, the wind-blown sand withering over their carpals and little bones. The ribs were barrel staves unhooped and spread, the spine half buried in a drift and its pelvis at a jaunty angle. Thus composed, it stared seaward.

    But no coroner could have recited the means or time of its death nor if it had received the rites of a sea burial and been cast overboard in a shroud, with weights about its feet. Many are drowned by the sea and seldom is it that the dead are given back and never one as kindly as this. How eloquently its dry bones speak of shipwreck and storm.

    Perhaps it died by choice and this its punishment, to be mocked by the sun and the stars and the trades it loved? It is become a memorial to itself as though its spirit has outed its burial, sloughing off all things and joined now, in a larger and more permanent state with the created world. There's no denying the spareness of its being, careened on sand and out of tide's reach, beyond disappointment and travail and the long rolling leagues. Here it lies as it wished to be, worshipping the sun and sleeping under the stars.

Weeks passed and once again the wind rose shrieking and the water came hounding up the beach and, lifting those bleached bones, returned them to the deep. Down into the green gloom they went where crabs and little fishes heaved up Jack's flesh and bit by bit, that which previously had been picked apart, this man's bones, stood clothed again.

    Arms and legs thrashing against the suck of the waves he bore himself upwards until a great comber threw him up on the plunging deck of a small white schooner. Wind and water subsided, he retrieved his cap, took his place at the wheel and the ship sailed, its bows pointing backwards along the sea-path it had come. His eyes and mind looking into the night sky where time had reversed itself, the sun and all its planets in cataclysmic fall, vanishing towards the vortex of a black hole.

    He sailed back and forth by compass on a reciprocal course not bothering to look at the chart and not questioning what he was up to. It was what he had to do, his hand light on the con, sails full, the hiss of water along the hull and a peace of mind he had never known before. What blissful thing was this, he thought, where have I been? It felt like a second chance, like a new life that could be lived without fear and somehow, something in him comprehended that the future was no more and that fear itself had lost its meaning. But where was Elsi? If he had made it, why not her?

    A silver object, the dinghy canister, glinted in the starlight with something yellow attached to it. He came about slowly, up into the wind, to take a closer look.

    "Jack! Jack! For Christ's sake! Jack!"

    He had found her.