At three o’clock the next afternoon, Catta stood on the edge of the dock, deciding whether to dive or not. Penny and George lay near him in the hot sun; they had been swimming already and were now drying slowly in the salt air. Five minutes earlier, Cyrus had left in the Heron for the mainland. He said the Migration had been a success—the lambs had made it safely to North Island.
Standing there, surveying the flat water of the harbor, Catta knew it would be cold. There would be, when he dove, the sharp intake of breath, the fierce embrace. He would swim out to the orange buoy and back and then climb up to lie on the dock next to the others, all three in a row with their heads on their hands. He would tell Penny and George the water was cold, which they already knew. All of that would happen soon enough. But for now, for this moment and perhaps for all the time still left to come, what he wanted most was to feel the sun’s warmth on his bare skin.
Only that. Only the sun.
A Note on the Author
Estep Nagy’s writing has appeared in Southwest Review, the Believer, the Spectator, Paper, and elsewhere. He is the writer and director of The Broken Giant, an independent feature film that is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and his plays have been produced across the United States as well as in the UK and Australia. He attended Yale University.