Marina raises her hands and the moon appears just above her palm—a small, pale half dollar, hidden treasure among the clouds. She dips it in the ocean and places it against the velvet sky. And then she fashions a second, a twin.

"See?"

Matt still doesn't find the magic to be worthy. It's not healing the sick, he thinks. It's not planting the last fruit. It's not draining the ocean, plucking the debris—plastic trash, fishing line, tangled nets—and flooding it back. It's not beckoning rain over barren fields, promising crops. It's not pasting the glaciers back in place. It's not love, not even close.

He shrugs and folds his arms. 

She plucks a bold purple iris from his tattoo and twirls it in the moonlight. The tide smooths over the pebbles she has artfully arranged into the letters of his name. Matthew.

He calls it cute. He calls it touching.

She whips her arms and blows him back with a flattening gale. He smiles and squints into the wind.

"I do see. It's beautiful. But what can it do?"

The windows in their childhood cottage are bright with light, the barnacled stilts tall to keep the tide at bay. He watches her gaze up at their small wind-battered, rain-faded first-and-only home; the last house along the shore after the rest were swept by storms. Their father hewing it from the trees, not knowing they would become rare giants. The last years have been lonely and unrelenting with the deer dying off, then the geese. Nothing seems to last anymore. It's all just a series of endings. We have each other, they have told themselves since birth, both placed in the same crib, in the same striped pajamas.

But just after they lost the bluest skies and final patches of forest and before the end of chocolate and coffee, her magic came—a pomegranate in her fingertips fashioned into jewels. A Persian rug she stroked turned into a portal to the last grocery store within a hundred miles. A pencil tucked in her hair became a butterfly, dusting the curved shell of her ear with oranges and yellows before floating out the open window. Their late dog's leash, reminder of walks when there were neighbors and orcas and farm stands, became a strand of bright self-illuminating lights.

They called them Wilkie Lights in his honor.

"Turn on the Wilkies?"

"Sure."

Matthew wanted all the damage reversed, clocks turned back. Even as children, Matthew wanted Marina to unmake the impossible. When their father fell over the wheelbarrow in their small garden, Matt begged Marina to bring him back. She couldn't even turn a shawl into marble back then.

"Why can't you put the geese back in their V in the sky? Why can't you sprout spinach from bindweed? Why can't you calm the oceans?"

She raises her shoulders in a shrug and steps into the lapping current. She lifts her boot, wet to the ankle, and stamps into the shallows and the entire ocean glows like fire.

"This is what there is," she says. "This is what I have."


.