The Third Breath
Pip & Dawn, Book 3
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

The eleventh boat was a diving bell, which is a boat for going the wrong way.
Pip folded it from one leaf, waxy side in. Underneath it, air stayed air.
He tested it in a puddle two Pips deep, surveyed it like a sea, went down like a stone, and came up like a cork, reporting.
Dawn attended every launch.

The pool let him practise in its shallowest corner.
One breath down, touch the sand, up.
He wrote the numbers on a dry leaf: how long a breath is, how far down is.

Two breaths. The pool's floor had country on it: hills the size of his hand, a forest of one weed.
He came up talking and was still talking at dusk.
Dawn listened with her chin on the sand.

*Where the pool stops being yours,* he asked, *what is it like?*
*Bigger,* said Dawn, answering a different question.
*There is a cold current that comes in under the warm,* she added, unasked. *I like that one best.*
He wrote all of it down.

The proud tide came up the sand on the last hot day, and the sea and the pool held hands.
While the hollow stood full, the sand off the point stood dry. He wrote that down too: it has to come from somewhere.
Pip stood at the join with the bell under his arm. Just the edge of it.

The first breath lasted to twelve.
The swell came from wherever a sea keeps things, and the bell went sideways, and the second breath lasted to nine.
The third was water.
Then Dawn was under him, and there was air, and he counted nothing at all.

He was laughing before the coughing finished, which is a thing the saved do.
*What would you give,* said Dawn, still close enough to catch him, *to breathe where I breathe?*
*Everything, obviously,* said Pip, and sneezed, and laughed again.
*Ready enough,* she said, and he grinned, and took it for a verdict on the state of him.

They stayed by the stone while the sun went about its business.
The bell lay on the sand, drying.
Nobody said anything for a long time, and then nobody said anything for a while longer.

*I will stop,* said Pip. *I promise it.*
He meant it, and Dawn could see that he meant it.
He folded the bell flat and put it away among his kept things, and she could see that too.

*The sea does not count tries,* she said, when he apologised for the eleventh time.
It sounded like forgiveness.
He stopped apologising.

*When you listen to the shell,* she asked, that evening, *what do you hear?*
*Where you live,* said Pip.
She stayed low in the water past the last of the light, looking at something that was not on the shore and not in the sky.

For three days he measured nothing.
On the fourth he measured the distance from his door to the stone, which had not changed, and went to bed easier.

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