The whole of the bay lifts and shushes, the prehistoric rock and desperate kelp and larking sea life exhaling as one, a refrain, the first words Jay ever remembers hearing transformed from a frustrated father’s complaint to a dad’s inspiration, gauntlets Jay will need to face right here on the naked beach, and tomorrow plugged into hospital tubes, and the day after, and the day after that, and every day that life washes another whale into his path. The refrain is but two words: and the world is the comma between them.
