Above, the other gannets hang, gravity-suspended, winking shards of flexible feather thrown into the air and held there. Constellated, they sink and lift just a little with the wind.
Alba strokes her hard yellow beak along the quiet rise and fall of miniature lungs, the soft downy skull. The tiniest of fingers curl around her yellow leg. He does not belong here, where the cold greens and blues of sea glass fold and unfold. Sometimes a sleek fin curves below, suggesting the slow slide of leviathan skin into the deep. The waves and the whales beneath, they remember this tiny pink Icarus; once borne higher and higher away from the waving arms, the barbeque fallen in the sand, the father wildly and uselessly running into the waves. Patient, they await his fall.
But now the child sleeps, dreaming perhaps vague dreams of flowers, or ice cream. Perhaps he hears a mother’s breast crying out unsucked under stiff tweed. Or perhaps he has forgotten, and knows only the oily, saltpeter crush of fishbones, the nourishing squish of another mother’s acid.
Alba hears him cry at night, but nuzzled under her wing he sleeps content. She arranges the fluff and squawk of her own nestlings around him to keep him warm. Far away, wet dogs at play kick up the hard wet sand, shaggy hair tangled and stained green with seaweed. Some day, perhaps soon, his soft and pink will harden enough that he can nestle comfortably into the rock-face, picking at lichen with his long baby nails, a prickle on his back like the shaft of feathers.
