NIGHT MODE WITH MOVEMENT

The moon’s gravitational pull creates a tidal force. We waited for it to become dark, or almost. There are no sunsets like those on the West Coast, quite so vivid and virulently lovely. The moon makes tides, but it’s wind that tends to cause waves, friction between air and surface water creating those crests. For a moment, the sky was a pink so tender it made my chest flutter. The moon lures the ocean out, water bulging on the sides closest and furthest from it. With marshmallow mouths and fire pit smoke, we watched the water become slick as ink. I hadn’t lived in California in over a decade, hadn’t visited for over two years.

We walked toward the ocean, the moon a mist-made and murky circle above. We were three generations of women, or almost. Mother and two daughters. Mother: carrying the ashes she waited to release until my return. You have to understand, I don’t believe in ghosts. I can only tell you what happened.

There is no ache like the one from missing the ocean. I would know. I’ve weathered long years landlocked. I don’t know the last time my grandmother visited the ocean in life, but I do know that she missed it. Bedridden, an end of near stillness—how can I begin to imagine the ferocity of her longing? The ocean has its own gravitational lure. In death, she wanted only this: the water around her eternally. You have to understand, I don’t believe in magic. If I did, I believe it would happen by the sea.

My mother plunged her palm into the ashes and scattered them. The night was almost unbearably beautiful. The dusty quality of air at dusk, each second marking an increase in darkness. The waves reflecting flecks of the moon, as if the water could make its own light. I was afraid to touch the ashes. I gave them to the waves straight from the container. It felt too intimate, too awful to hold them directly. I don’t remember the last time I touched her in life.

I think my grandmother believed in magic. As my mother scattered her, I tried to capture what I knew I couldn’t. The voice of the water, the cool lick of salt and sand. This is how we should all be remembered, in near dark, by the sea. To be so lucky, to be so loved. I snapped pictures with my phone. I shifted it to the night mode setting, and suddenly the images lit up, my mother once a grainy blur becoming again her sharp self. 

What is magic but a shift in perception? A slight of hand trick. We believe what we see, or is it the reverse? Can belief dictate how the world unfolds around us?

On the night setting, my phone commanded my mother to hold still, but she didn’t. She reached into the ashes and gave them to the waves. The moon felt like a ghost above us. They say there is a face of a man in the moon, but I’ve always thought it was a woman. My phone took a slow photo, struggling to capture its image crisply. The result: my mother in perfect, ethereal focus, and a bleary swipe across her hands and the container holding my grandmother’s ashes. A thick blur that moved from the ashes out toward the sea. As if some presence, as if—

Flat, dark plains called maria create the dark shadows that form the moon’s face. I know there are logical explanations to the blur in the photo. A coincidence—my mother’s movement creating it during the prolonged exposure. But all the photos were taken like that—in night mode with movement—and none of them feature a distinct blurry section. Maria comes from the Latin for sea, for it was once believed the shadows were old lunar oceans. Now we know the basins were forged by lava flows. Now we know these meandering paths never contained water.

What is magic except power? What is a ghost, but the power of our memories? What is more powerful than grief, than love.

In the moonlight, we three women walked. The force of the tides pulled parts of us out, lured toward the heart of the sea.

Michelle Donahue has prose published in Brink, Passages North, Arts & Letters and others. She holds a PhD in creative writing & literature from the University of Utah. She is currently associate editor at Ecotone and teaches creative writing and publishing at UNC Wilmington.