Posthuman only goes to the beach because one evening the wind comes running in from the west smelling like the sea, and because in that scent, they feel the stirring of something primordial in the lake of their stomach. So, Posthuman drives out to the coast, a creature riding its machine to the edge of the world. Looks out over the parking lot, the distant lace of sea foam. Posthuman forgot to bring a water bottle. There’s an idiom about that: water, water everywhere. Posthuman only drinks seawater because they get thirsty. If one is brave enough, it is entirely possible to make a science experiment of the gastrointestinal system, and Posthuman is sufficiently courageous-idiotic to gulp down two palmfuls of a wave before their tongue crystallizes with salt and they spit opalescence back out into the sand. Then the sun is melting a molten line across the horizon, and Posthuman is puking their guts out into the soft hollow behind a dune beneath a wind-stunted palm tree, and then the metal thread of light is reforged in silver and rises as a crescent in the eastern sky.

As Posthuman stumbles out into moonlight, wiping the sea from their mouth, there is movement in the tide. Its dark consciousness looks like how Posthuman feels when they miss some great extinct ancestor who they will never meet but whose instincts still dwell in their spine, even now, stupid grandchild drinking seawater like it won’t kill them—oh the humanity of it! The antithesis of biology, the antidote to the chaos of nature, which is only chaos because we have forgotten its reason because we have made our own, we fish-blooded fools, we reptile-ribbed unmakers of geological time.

The giant turtles emerge from the water shining with liquid moonlight. They have come to lay their eggs. Posthuman watches as they score holes into the sand with their shovel limbs. Posthuman looks down at their own hands, their abdomen still heaving with ocean. Once, their body was made for something. Their fingers to swing between trees, guided by the phantom limb of a prehensile tail. Once, the shape of them—their pleasures and their poisons and the great old coin of the moon—were part of the same cycle. Not now, they think, as the turtles lay white pearls beneath the sand. As they drag themselves back into the tide for another year of swimming. Not now, but once. But once. But once.