Where I End

by Sophie White

The sea is death reanimated. Down under the shimmying surface, the currents conduct the corpses and they sway in a dance, ringed around the island’s underbelly.

(Hope, I’ve come to learn, can be a noose. When we hope, we willingly, blithely, put our heads in a sadistic coil and wait to be hanged. I hoped for things when I was younger—pathetic things—and was always left swinging.)