The Two Shores
Pip & Dawn, Book 8
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

Years went over the shore as tides had: high summers, low winters, and no two springs the same size.
Grass came to the hollow and held its shape, the way beds do.

The sea kept its distance, and Pip let it.
The reeds stood grey by the old edge, their marks gone soft as grain in driftwood.
He had not read them in years, and left them standing.

The nine hulls were a garden now.
Things grew in them that had never asked what a boat was for.
The ninth still had its name, and nobody had ever said it.
The clear stone she had brought sat among them, holding its light.

The shell lived inside his door.
Mornings, on his way out, he put it to his ear the way other creatures look at the weather.
The sea was going. It was always going. He went too.

Past the sandbar, in water the shore has no word for, a small grey stone lay in a hollow of rock where the light got down at noon.
Dawn passed it most days.
Some days she stopped.

She still came up where the water was safe and looked at the long line of the land, whole, from the outside, the way he had once seen the whole of her.
She knew its shape by heart.

On the first proud tide of spring, the water came up the sand as far as it still knew how.
Pip walked down to meet whatever arrived.
Past the sandbar, the same hour, Dawn rose to her surface, for no reason she would have given.

He had brought the shell down, for no reason he would have given either.
She had nosed the stone up into the noon light.
Between them lay water, and under the water, sand that remembered being a shore.

The foam came up to his feet and left again, twice, like something keeping in practice.
He stood in it without measuring anything.
Out past everything, a paleness rose, and sank, and was gone before the word for it came.

Dawn held the stone in the light a while.
It had been years in the sea and had kept every one of its edges.
She turned it over twice, to be fair, and set it back where the light could find it.

Pip stood in the edge of the water and said the ninth boat's name, out loud, to nobody.
*One day you will say it,* she had said, and the day had picked itself.
The name went as far as sounds go over water.
Out past the sandbar, Dawn lay at her surface, and did not hear it.

Then the tide turned, the way tides do.
He carried the shell back up the forty-one steps, counting them, out of habit, and they were forty-one.
The sea went out behind him without turning around.
It was always going. Nothing about the going had ever been about him.

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