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Shuffling in circles to the foggy beach and back again and again for hours that wouldn’t stop, so no one did: Mom and Tay and his parents, the waitress, the fisherman and the beach taxi driver and the police chief’s wife, the slumped staggering tourists with unclosing eyes turning milky like the eyes of the blind.

The man who saw his old dog alive again enough to lick his hand and whimper and disappear into the dunes. The woman whose husband woke up from a coma, and they laughed together for a little while. Another man driven mad by music. Another woman who saw the boys who chased her when she was little, exactly the same. The other men whose fear made them blame and murder. Everyone living what they used to dream of.

These are the stories.

And these: Roscoe’s supermarket trashed and looted of candles and cans, shopping carts half-buried in the dunes like skeletons in the desert. Beach house doors creaking in the warm wind smelling like low tide, seagulls’ cries that go up at the end like questions. Sand windblown smooth around the base of the boardwalk posts and the empty high lifeguard chairs, a page of newspaper flapping along like a dying bird.

But then, there was a shout from down the beach and another woman stood and lifted a shaking hand to point out to sea and it was okay, a light glimmered in the shifting whiteness of the fog, red and then green, the outline of a boat, and another, with flashing blue lights, bobbing. People were onboard, in uniforms!

Another shout, and down the beach more shapes of people came, in uniforms too, in a group they came together, but their voices were kind as they turned this way and that to look around at everything and even stop to speak quietly and hand a blanket and bottle of water to someone else just speechlessly staring. We were all silently staring, hoping that maybe somehow they bring the end of all the bright noise.