The Land Bridge

The tide alarm wasn’t a bell anymore. It was the sound of water tearing at the last dry seam of the island - an uneven, grinding hiss that climbed the rocks like something alive and stubborn, then slipped back, then climbed again, faster each hour. Mara Kade had learned to hear it through her bones. Right now it was close enough that the flat stones under her boots sweated, even before the first sheet of seawater broke the lip of the tidal flats.

She stood with her hands sunk in the pockets of her oilcloth coat, feeling the grit there, feeling the tremor in her fingers she pretended was only cold. The sky over Lake Island was the color of tin. Low tide still clung to the world in patches - dark, slick mud pulled away from the higher stones - but the water line was creeping, stubborn as a decision. She watched the thin channel beside the bridge access, where the land bridge should have been exposed. The tide should have been retreating by now. Instead, it shivered and began to rise again, as if the sea had second thoughts and decided it wanted its territory back early.

The tide used to never come up over the beaches, but over the last 20 years the tide has been slowly rising, to where now they cover most all the land of Lake Island during the high tide. But there is a second island, Bay Island only accessible by a natural land bridge seen only during low tide.

“Enough staring,” Jorren said behind her, voice tight enough to snap. He shoved a coil of rope into her line of sight like a weapon. “They’re moving. If you don’t decide, they’ll decide for you.”

Mara didn’t turn right away. She could hear people in the flats - canvas scraping, bare feet slapping wet stone, children crying in bursts that tried to become quiet when adults hissed at them. The smell of fish rot lived here all year, but today it was sharp with fresh salt, like Lake Island had just been cut open. In the distance, beyond the last line of huts, the waterline glittered and thickened.

She got chosen to lead the group across the land bridge not because she was a leader, or an elder. By far, she was only in her 40's, and she wasn't the groups leader. Not that simple. She was the only one of the group that had been on the other island, Bay Island. She had been forced to stay on Bay Island. And really had no desire to go back to that island, even if it were drier, and safer.

She finally looked back. About twenty islanders had gathered where the ground stayed hard enough to stand on: their faces streaked with mud, eyes fixed on her as if she’d been the one to pull the sea up by its roots. Their leader - if you could call anyone that anymore - should have been someone else. But Lake Island had eaten years, and it had eaten people. Mara looked now at the only dry route she’d ever seen: the bridge, the higher Bay Island lay just beyond, the way the world changed when you stepped onto ground the tide couldn’t reach.

“I decide when we start,” Mara said.

“That’s the problem,” a woman hissed from the front. Esha, hair braided tight against the damp, a bandage on her forearm that had gone yellow at the edges. “The high water is already wrong. It’s coming early.”

“It’s always wrong,” Jorren muttered, but he didn’t argue. He was watching the flats too, watching the sea like it might blink and apologize.

The island kept flooding every high tide, and it kept swallowing whatever plans people tried to make. They’d been stranded here for years, forced to live through the same fear until they’d stopped calling it fear and started calling it weather.

Mara drew in a breath that tasted like wet rock and old smoke. She wanted this scene to be different - wanted it to be orderly, with time to count mouths and tie knots properly. But her want didn’t move tides. Now she was compelled - by voices, by necessity, by the way the sea had already climbed too high - to lead them toward the bridge access before the window closed for good.

“How many can walk?” she asked.

Esha’s gaze flicked over the group. “Those who can carry their own weight. Those who can’t - ”

“ - don’t get left,” Mara said, and heard the firmness in her own voice even as her stomach tightened. She hadn’t said those words before. They felt like something she’d borrowed from a better version of herself.

Jorren exhaled through his nose. “Then we move slower. And if we move slower, the sea eats us.”

Mara held his stare. The rope in his hands looked too clean, too new, as if he’d stolen it from a storehouse that still existed somewhere. She wanted to ask where he’d gotten it, but the flats were already calling for decisions.

The first wave arrived like a slap. It didn’t surge all at once; it slid over the dark mud in a sheet, then found the gaps in the stones, then threaded between people’s boots and ankles. Someone screamed - more from surprise than pain - and another person grabbed the scream’s owner by the elbow, yanking them back up onto higher rock.

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