index

1.

I did not intend to write this. At first, I meant only to keep a ledger of distances.

Each morning, at a fixed hour — punctuating a sentence that never ended — I took my bicycle out from the garage on Forbury Road, coasted down to the sea, and recorded three numbers: the tide height, the extent of the rock shelf, and the day’s growth of the coast. There was a line of paint on the rusted balustrade at St Clair, a mark left by some earlier watcher. I placed my finger there. It became a habit.

Before the extension began, our maps were content with disagreement. They tolerated their old mistakes with civility. Fiords were misspelled, towns moved a fraction of a degree. That was forgivable. But then the South Island began to bloom. And the North.

We called it many things at first: the Outgrowth, the Chalk-Tongue, the White Road. This was to delay any contract with reality. In the newspaper offices they struggled to find photographs that did not contradict themselves. In drone footage, a rough tongue of rock — coarse, chalky, fibrous — extruded a few metres beyond the previous day’s edge; in person, if you stood too long, the sea itself was unable to decide whether to retreat or to participate. A geologist in gumboots stooped and tapped the new stuff with a hammer. It sounded like wood. This was an illusion, she insisted.

When the first houses were moved, people cried. They weren’t tears of grief. They were the ordinary tears of a body that has been in the wind too long. A wave slaps you, the eyelashes salt, and certain things become permissible.

People spoke to one another in a way that hadn’t been possible, not in my lifetime. Names came back, old ones, and were used. You know those stories about how the coast used to be different. We said them without irony, and the coast acquiesced.

…

Continues in a forthcoming collection (late 2025)