EACH MORNING, CLARA LEAVES her White Rock condo overlooking Semiahmoo Bay, and heads out for a run on the beach, her feet trudging through sand. When the tide is out, she cheats by running on the hard wet surface, dodging tidal pools. Today, the beach is deserted but for a jogger, a woman walking her dog and the man building a sandcastle nearly a half-mile out. There are no children nearby, and Clara wonders who the man is, and what exactly he’s doing.
For several days now, she has come across him building his structures halfway between the low tide line and shore. Today, she aims her run further out, to see what he’s building, and perhaps speak to him. As she approaches, he looks up, and she recognizes him from a recent newscast. He is the civil engineer who designed a highway bridge that recently collapsed, killing three people. Although lauded as brilliant, he has fallen from grace and is suddenly a pariah; everything he has accomplished so far is now being viewed through the lens of this error.

=Celia they trapped you—Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica
singular creature—sucked cells from your ear
and preserved them in a deep freeze colder
than any Pyrenees wind. Later—did you know you were
the last of your kind?—they found you lifeless crushed
by a tree made heavy with snow.

I WOKE UP AT SIX, SAT UPRIGHT, AND PUNCHED MY SISTER in the shoulder. Val rolled away from me, pulling a sweat-soaked pillow over her face and ears. High above our bed, the morning sun burned through a small, open window. The August weather had stayed hot for weeks, never dipping below twenty degrees Celsius, even at night.
“Today’s the day! We’re going to get our horses.”
I poked the back of her legs. Val moaned. Last night, after a date with her cop boyfriend, she had come to bed around three a.m. Although she was only sixteen, she smelled like stale beer and home-rolled cigarettes.