The Edge of the Water
Pip & Dawn, Book 1
by A.J.Sharpe
© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. No licence is granted for any use beyond the terms. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms

Pip lived at the top of the shore, where things could be counted.
Stones. Reeds. The steps from his door down to the water: forty-one.
He checked the count most mornings. It was usually right.

Under the sea, nothing held still long enough to be counted.
Light fell through the water in pieces. Currents unwound themselves.
Dawn swam up through all of it, towards the wobbling brightness where the world ended.

Twice a month, when the tide was proudest, the sea climbed the sand and filled the hollow by the flat grey stone.
Then it drew back and left a pool there, like something it had forgotten.

The morning after the high tide, Pip came down to count the new stones.
The pool was watching him.
He counted the same stone four times, to be sure of something else entirely.

Dawn had meant to leave with the tide.
She stayed instead, with only her eyes above the water, learning the small dry creature that kept arranging the beach.
The tide left without her.

On the third morning he brought a speech. He had practised it on the reeds.
*Hello,* he said.
The rest of the speech had been longer than that, and better.

Dawn rose to look at him properly, and the water rose with her, and Pip saw how much of her there was.
The speech left him.
*I want to see where you breathe,* he said, which was not part of it.

Dawn thought about it the way she thought about weather, slowly and without alarm.
*The sea only lends,* she said. *Even to me.*
Pip wrote that down later, on a dry leaf, and got it slightly wrong.

After that, the mornings had a shape.
He came down the forty-one steps. She came up from wherever she had been, which she never said.
The pool held still between them and let itself be used.

Pip made improvements.
A flat place to sit. A reed rail for rough weather. A line of white pebbles down to the water, in case she ever lost her way.
Dawn admired them all and needed none of them.

In the evenings the pool went the colour of the sky, and the line where the water met the sand thinned to almost nothing.
Almost was the wide part.
They stayed late, one on each side.

The proud tide came again at first light, up the sand to the hollow, the way it always had.
This time two of them were waiting for it, one on the shore, one in the swell.
The pool filled. The morning started.

© 2026 A.J.Sharpe. Terms: https://pip-and-dawn.com/terms