On The Shores of Euphrasia
Phase 1: The Dreamer Arrives
Facts and details are malleable. They tend not to matter when there’s no one left to remember. I’ll tell you how it was and how it felt. Most importantly, I’ll share what it meant.
He arrived on the shores of the Bay on the cusp of winter, cast up by circumstance. The monotone sky was a dull grey, the color of old pewter; the Bay beneath it, a darker grey, pulsing slow and thick as sleepy thought. The beach wasn’t exactly sand, but a litter of crushed shell, crab carapaces, black rock, and rotting seaweed that breathed salt, rust, and pungent decay. Small metallic fish turned in the shallows with mechanical grace, their scales flashing like coins beneath murky glass. Something dark drifted just below the surface, curling in slow agony, tethered to unseen anchors. The rocks were slick, barnacled, angular. In the distance, lines gently slapped aluminum masts with a muted clanging sound. No gulls cried. No voices carried. He did not know how he had washed up here. He only knew he was not elsewhere.
Beneath the crushed white and grey of ancient shells, he found broken tile, brick fragments, and tide-worn sea glass, the remnants of lives shattered and polished by time. Below even that, he uncovered clay: red-brown, iron-rich, stubborn as old blood. It resisted him. He dug with cold, trembling fingers, more compulsion than choice. Eventually, the clay clung to his hands as if recognizing them, as if a prior pact had been made and only now fulfilled.
He did not sculpt a face. He sculpted a vessel. A torso first, curved like a sail drawn tight by invisible wind. Then limbs, awkward, unfinished, juvenile. On the wrist he inscribed the shape of a heart.On the breast, a keyhole.Above the brow, the shape of a flame. Last came the cavity of the chest: not empty, but waiting.
He stepped inside. The clay yielded, then held. It sealed at the seams. He blinked once. The sky blinked back.
He did not ask where he was. The Bay had no answers, only conditions. It spoke in silences: a liquid pewter and mercury surface rising and falling in windblown peaks, with whispers of facts no map could hold. Across its moody width, the far shore shimmered. That would come later.
It occurred to him that he must find others, those like him. The ones dreaming of the distant shores. But for now, the wind blew. The water pulsed in and out, in and out, like a sleeping thought. The clay cool against his ribs.
He sat beside the first pier, a skeletal stretch of wood stabbed into the shallows, and watched as light scattered across the surface of the tide like broken intentions.
There would be flags, later. And bonfires. And false kingdoms. And the illusion that time could be convinced to wait. But all that would come after the clay hardened.
Phase 2: The Kingdom of Euphrasia
“There were four of them now, and the world was made of yes.”
By the following season, they were four. The clay had set but lacked detail. No worry, they would add it as they went along. The vessels moved with adolescent grace. They were no longer alone in their making. Each had been dreamt, shaped, tested. Each now bore a voice, a compass, a flame, and a song.
They called nothing by its real name. Not the boat. Not the Bay. Not even themselves.
There was the Mapmaker, who saw coastlines in clouds and etched borders in the dirt with a stick. There was the Rigger, whose fingers were always wrapped in twine, whose mind solved puzzles no one asked. There was the Firekeeper, who set things alight: arguments, laughter, campfires, rules. And there was the Chanter, whose hands made chords from silence and whose voice made myths out of minutes.
They had no laws, only challenges. The only sin was repetition. Each meeting began with a rite: a raised sail, a sour chord from a salt-battered guitar, the clatter of mismatched gear tossed into Shamrock’s belly. She was their green myth, patched and perfect, reborn each time they dared her into the wind.
Their kingdom, Euphrasia, had no borders, only possibilities. They charted sandbars and crowned them with flags made from t-shirts and towels. They greeted oysters and seaweed as though they were remembered ancestors. They renamed coves and sandbars with each visit: Crow’s Mouth, Bloodless Isle, Teethrock Point, Cuz Beach, Nowhere Again.
Nights were marked by bonfire. Not for warmth but for ritual. Shadows stretched like questions. They spoke in symbols, invented oaths, swore allegiance to nothing except the eternal Why. The fire was a lighthouse and a lie.
They believed they had conquered the Bay. But the Bay, as always, only tolerated their joy.
It happened on a day that began too calm. The sky was a sermon in blue. The Bay, a sheet of brushed tin. Shamrock drifted, rudder slack, sail twitching like a bored animal. And then: the black wall.
The storm came in like punishment. Clouds slammed shut overhead. The wind and rain arrived sideways. The mast bowed. The halyards and stays screamed. The mainsheet line bit deep into their hands. The Bay had never sent dark angry waves like the ones they beheld now. They didn’t speak, there was no time. Only movement, instinct, ritual. The Rigger at the sheet. The Firekeeper on the rail, half-mad with laughter. The Mapmaker scanning the horizon for a safe harbor that didn’t exist. The Chanter’s voice, low and cracked, singing something no one could make out.
Shamrock leaned, tilted past sense, daggerboard slicing air. And still, they held. Not because they understood the storm, but because they could not imagine breaking.
Then silence.
The squall fled east, dragging its wrath behind like an old coat. The Bay stilled to a dark glassy black. The sky to the west cracked open all gold-red, absurdly beautiful. The wind caught again, clean this time. Shamrock surged forward, skimming the surface like a skipped stone. They shouted in one voice. Giddy. Wild. Whole.
Later, it would be called ‘the Test’. Or ‘the Naming’. Or just ‘That Day’. But in that moment, they were kings. Not of land. Not even of the Bay. But of the act itself. The daring, the vessel, the storm that was endured.
That night, on the shores of a sandbar in the middle of the Bay, they gave the name to their kingdom: Euphrasia. A word that meant nothing, but sounded true. A name for the place inside the storm, the firelight, the boat, and each other.
They did not know they were still clay. But something in the wind did.
Phase 3: The Distant Shore
Time passed, though no clocks were kept. Their clay no longer softened in the rain. It darkened in the sun, cured by seasons. The vessels they had once stepped into, blank, tentative, joyous, naive, had hardened. Raw, flexible possibility had become form. The wind that once teased now pushed.
The Rigger and the Chanter left first, together, before dawn. No ceremony. No flag lowered. Only the quiet creak of Shamrock departing the dock, and a single chord hummed low in the throat of morning.
Later, the Mapmaker followed. He left behind a bundle of not-quite-finished charts and a final message scratched into the parchment: “I went West, but the Bay bends to the North. Follow soon.”
The Firekeeper lingered. Too long, perhaps. He walked the old piers alone. Whispered to coals that no longer caught. Rearranged the stones at the fire circle. He swam once to the sandbar island, planted a new flag, then watched the tide wash it away.
He did not leave all at once. Departure came slowly, like fog lifting. One morning, he perceived a vessel adrift just off the shore: Shamrock. Perhaps it had always waited there, but he hadn’t noticed. He had been the last to arrive at the Bay, and now he stepped aboard and sailed toward that Distant Shore.
Reprise: Born of Euphrasian Mud
They are flesh and blood now, aches in their knees and backs, laugh lines carved by years, salt and time. One jokes that he resembles a melted candle. They’ve stood on distant shores. They’ve built houses not from sand but from intention and memory. They’ve held children. Paid bills. Lost bearings. Buried parents. They’ve forgotten the names of things they once swore to rename forever.
But the Shamrock still floats. She waits beneath a tarp by the old dock, patched and perfect, green paint flaking like dry lichen. The sail is smaller than they remember. The tiller may be stiff. But she remembers how to glide.
And every now and then, when the tide is low, and the world permits, they gather. Not as kings. Not as boys. But as dreaming vessels still. Weathered, yes. But still buoyant.
They sit by the fire, now fed with bought wood. The Chanter strums the same chords and they hum along. The Rigger fiddles with the old rope just to see if it still holds. The Mapmaker ensures the charts are rolled and stored dry. The Firekeeper blows on the coals and stokes the flames.
They speak of nothing. And in that nothing, everything. They say the name aloud, now and then. Euphrasia. It means nothing. But it still sounds true.
And sometimes, just before sleep, the Dreamer feels the clay against his ribs and realizes that what he shaped, shaped him in return. That the vessel he once stepped into now walks, speaks, remembers. That he dreamed himself alive, and in doing so, kept the dream alive as well.