"Tom, Tom, wake up, Tom." It was a man's voice. He felt a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake in the dark, reeling him up from the soft, muffled depths. It was Lyle, Lynne's boyfriend, his big hand rough, and urgent.

"Hey Tom, wake up. There's been a tidal wave," he was saying. "Come on, let's go. There's been a tidal wave. Let's go to the house."

Tom bolted upright. "I knew it! I knew it!" he cried, instantly awake. Across the room, Chris was sitting up and rubbing his eyes. "Let's go, boys," Lyle reiterated, moving toward the stairs in the dark.

The three of them started down at a trot, Tom and Chris still in their T-shirts and underpants. The wooden stairs were cool on Tom's bare feet. Two steps above the landing where the staircase made a turn, Tom first felt dampness underfoot. From there to the landing and down the final three steps everything was wet. When he reached the bottom, his feet felt not the slick of the cottage's linoleum floor but the grainy burr of wet sand, a thick layer of it. Lyle led the way out over the sand-covered floor, through the open inner door, and stepped over a white board that was now inexplicably plastered across the bottom of the outside entrance at a slight angle, clinging with nails driven into the siding at either side. It looked like one of the planks from the fence at the edge of the yard, above the river. Tom followed Lyle over the rail and onto the lawn.

But there was no lawn. What he saw instead was like something from a dream: familiar and eerily unfamiliar all at the same time. Every inch of what had been green grass was now covered with dark, wet sand. The sand was strewn with debris. Some of it was the same stuff Tom was accustomed to seeing in the wrack line on the beach after a storm: clumps of seaweed and grasses and driftwood of all sizes. But there was more. Thick, lustrous yellow foam clumped in piles a foot or more thick all over the sand, and more of it piled deeper against the house and cottage. And fish: flounders and perch and bullheads, lying still and scattered all over the yard. And little waxy, translucent pink shrimp the length of Tom's pinky finger, thousands of them, everywhere.

Tom took a few steps, then stopped and stared, surveying the known world. The house was there, and the old, two-story detached garage, but the concrete block patio wall on the north side of the house had collapsed. The fence was gone, its posts still standing but the flat white planks all missing—all but the one that had apparently plastered itself across the cottage entrance. The dock, too, had vanished. So had the rowboat that Lynne and Lyle had left upside down on the lawn after their moonlight float a few hours earlier. An outdoor rabbit hutch that had stood along the west wall of the cottage now staked a claim in the middle of the yard. The chicken coop, too, had drifted west but was still upright, the chickens apparently still alive, judging from the low rustling sounds that came from within. East of the cottage, drift logs lay scattered on the yard, huge logs, one as wide as Tom was tall. Beyond the north edge of the yard, past the shore pines, the river was running out fast and full like a winter flood tide, laden with dark, angular, moon-washed objects—more logs and other floating debris Tom couldn't quite make out. Across the short expanse of sand-covered yard between the cottage and the house, he could see his mother standing outside the back door, watching them, her arms crossed over her chest in the cool of midnight, hugging herself. His brothers and sisters were all out wandering on their new backyard beach too, smiling and laughing as if a little drunk on it all. And there was Mr. Jensen, their bachelor neighbor, in his long white nightshirt and white nightcap, his bare legs thrust into leather work boots, a quizzical expression on his face as he went about poking the toe of his boot into piles of debris. There was a tang in the air, a briny smell like low tide, fresh and pungent, mixed with the faint odor of rotten eggs.

Tom's mouth, which had been hanging open, now spread into a wide smile. He drew in a breath and felt his shoulders fall back, his arms reaching wide. "I knew it!" he said, over and over. "I knew it! I knew it!" He began to turn in place, and soon he was running in big circles, the balls of his feet slapping the wet sand, finding their own way among the pink shrimp, the slick, green seaweed, the buttery foam. Around and around he ran, laughing, his arms open and stretching to the very tips of his fingers, as if to embrace it all: the glistening sand, the shrimp, the logs, the late hour, the moonlight, whoever or whatever had granted him this night, this best night of his whole life.

—By Bonnie Henderson, '79, MA '85