Portage

Sometimes on those mornings before the sun had burned off the fog, when she looked out over the roofs and trees and white steeple receding in the thin curtains, she imagined an ocean out there, past the point completely obscured by the fog, where an ocean might have been at one time, a long time ago. And once after she thought about the false proximity and dismissed it as that, she fell quiet and heard the wind sounding through the leaves like the dull shatter of waves coming from somewhere beyond the strict white steeple, enough to make her look again and want the fog to stay.