It’s nearly eleven, the time we go to bed, but you want to walk to the ocean. I follow your lead—coat (yours is your full-length down), hat (the black cap our daughter knitted for you one Christmas), boots. You take my gloved hand in yours and lead me down the front walk. The streetlight cycles off. Shelly, our puppy, perched on the back of the couch, wonders where we’re going, and for once I resist the urge to narrate aloud what she’s thinking. Our neighbors’ houses are dark. The sky is moonless. Stars wink between racing clouds. You lead me down to the ocean, the black mass at the end of the street. It grows larger. White caps blossom. Waves rise, tip, fall, illumined by the lights along the beach road where a car trundles past before we cross, silent down the wood planks to the soft sand the waves won’t reach except in the fiercest storms, the highest tides. The wind gusts, stings our eyes. Mine water, even in mild weather. We turn our backs until they subside. You lead me down, and, when we’re close enough, when you’re satisfied we’re close enough, you hook your arm in mine. Darkness descends, envelops, seals off distances, though I sense these, too, as we gaze out into the vast, near-infinite depths, while behind us the wind has shifted, our neighbors sleep, the bars along the beach road close, and our children, adults now, in different time zones, live lives we can only imagine, can only compare to memories from when we were young, and hope they’re okay as we were okay and sometimes happy. You flex your elbow and pull me somehow closer. Waves rise, tip, fall. I brace myself against you, boots rooted in the sand.   --- Dana Cann is the author of the novel Ghosts of Bergen County (Tin House). His short fiction has been published in The Sun, The Massachusetts Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Florida Review, and elsewhere.