He hit the water fast, the shock of it drawing hot skin tight and raising a temporary chickenskin down his chest and belly, inside arms and thighs. The water wasn't cold, but the beach had been a porcelain kiln - the white hot quartz and calcium sands radiating the relentless ultraviolet and infrared of the noonday sun.
He felt as burned out as those sunbleached sands - two dimensional and seared by the fires of the past few days and nights. Cleaving the agar oily surface of that Boxing Day summer sea, he arrowed for the bottom, where serried ranks of waves scalloped the seabed. It was as if the heat had driven them there for shelter too. Made them forsake the ocean's surface, leaving it smooth, its suddenly gentled rise and fall like bated breath, while they waited below on the sand for the cool of the afternoon when the seabreeze would entice them back up to leap together into whitecaps before continuing their journey to the shore.
He felt the bubbles stream from his hair and the air compress inside his ears as he neared the bottom and saw the perspective change. No longer a swimmer in an ocean over an undulating seabed, he became a bird or shaman's spirit soaring on outstretched wings over another ocean. One whose swells were sharply defined and regular, burnished brightest gold in a late afternoon sun. An ocean on an inner world that beckoned another dive - a penetration of yet another dimension.
Just as he was considering attempting exactly that, the apparition was dispelled by the sudden appearance of a net of brightest silver filaments spread upon the waves of sand. The net pulsed in slow expansion and contraction as if seeking to ensnare the shadow of his form that lay at its center. Seeing he could not outswim it, he rolled over to look above and see what hand had cast this pretty trap. There was none. Just the sun's fitful sparkling on the surface of the sea.
He ceased swimming/flying and saw the refractive magic of those shining strands playing on his body. Pulling him back to the surface of the world. He looked left and right and saw instead of clearest aquamarine and turquoise that today it was jade and malachite. The kind of day where the sea turns silver gold. A change day. A crucible. No wonder it had been so hot.
He looked again at the silver web playing across his body and knew it was no snare. He lay as a star in the water and felt the breath held within raise him toward the surface. He closed his eyes. Floated away. He didn't notice breaking the surface the second time.
