She stood at a distance, imagining her daughter there, playing. She saw how her daughter lit up with glee when she was near the sea, or scampering along the shoreline, collecting shells, poking holes in the mud with a stick, or simply ambling along ensconced in the mercury of being. What is the difference between memory and fiction? She watched and listened, as a mother would watch and listen. The sea splashed forth, retreated, splashed forth, retreated. The rhythm was soothing, unmistakable, dependable. This was the sea of her past, her childhood. Her daughter had never been to the sea, had never played in the sand, as she was playing now, a fugue and ghostly footage in her mother’s time-hunted eyes. She went to the rocks and sat down, staring out from behind dark sunglasses. She remembered days and nights on the beach with her girlfriends. They were young once. I was young once. Now, I am older and my daughter moves lyrically along the shoreline, glee-infected. What is the difference between memory and fiction? Ephemera becomes us, and we it, whether we like it or not. Some ephemera, geared on a fast-track, takes away what we never had, what could have been, gusts invading a sandy beach. The sea, a smooth slate-gray mirror, briefly, then the mounting of ripples disturbing the smoothness, and in its place, a grammarless script. What is the difference between memory and fiction? She looked out at her daughter, a hundred or so feet measured in years, no time at all, her daughter wandering elliptically along the lacy edge of the sea, rhythm unbroken. Behind her daughter’s footsteps, she saw flashing traces of color, the remnants of fractured rainbow in harmonic motion, following the cause of light.