The Bore at Midnight

Evangeline Murphey had been cleaning floors at Laverton District Hospital for thirty-nine years, and in all that time she had never once gotten used to the smell of a biohazard spill at eleven at night.

She knelt on the linoleum in corridor B with her yellow gloves on and her little orange sign propped behind her, scrubbing at the spot where somebody, nobody she would ever meet thank goodness, had dropped a bag of pathology samples on their way to the incinerator room. The disinfectant stung her nose even through the mask. Her knees ached the way they always ached on a Tuesday shift, and her back made its own complaints, and still she worked the mop in slow patient circles because that was how she had been taught at twenty-one by a woman named Dot who was probably dead by now.

And there was the other thing, the strange thing, the thing she kept forgetting about until it warmed against her thigh again. The paper-wrapped package in her apron pocket. Galen had pressed it into her hands at the door that morning with the kind of grin he wore when he had found something at a forum, and she had carried it around all shift without opening it because opening it would mean thinking about it and thinking about it would mean the night went faster and she wanted, honestly, for the night to be over already.

It felt warm. Warmer than her own body heat could account for. She told herself it was the corridor, the radiators, the rubber gloves holding everything in, and she scrubbed some more.

The hospital was empty at this hour the way only a hospital can be empty, not empty at all but quiet in a listening sort of way. Somewhere a machine beeped twice and stopped. Somewhere a trolley wheel squeaked. Evangeline wrung out the mop, stood up with a grunt she would have been embarrassed by in company, and looked down the long bright length of corridor B at nothing.

Her phone said 11:09. Twenty-one minutes left on the break room clock before she could take off the gloves and the mask and go home to a husband who was probably asleep with the lamp on and a book sliding off his chest.

Except.

Except that Galen had said, that very morning, over the toast, "Come down to the pier tonight, Evie. The bore's running big with the full moon, they said on the wireless, and I've got a thing to show you, a thing I got at the reading, you'll want to see it under moonlight, trust me." And she had said, "Galen, I'll be filthy and half dead and it'll be nearly midnight," and he had said, "Midnight is the best time for it," in that reasonable tone of his that had got her into forty-two years of reasonable trouble, and she had not said no, which in their marriage amounted to a yes with the volume turned down.

The loading dock at the back of the hospital was where the delivery trucks came at dawn and the bins went out at dusk, and at eleven twenty-seven at night it was just concrete and a sodium lamp with a moth doing laps around it. Evangeline came out with her bag over her shoulder and her hair pinned wrong and stopped dead.

Galen Patton was sitting on the edge of the dock, sixty-four years old, legs dangling like a boy's, though he was not a boy, he was a grown man with a hat shop and a bad hip and hair gone white at the temples and damp, actually damp, curling at the ends from the estuary air that came up the river in the evenings. He had two tin travel mugs set beside him, steam still rising off them, and a flat paper-wrapped parcel in his lap, butcher paper, tied with string, identical in shape and size to the one riding warm in her apron pocket.

"You didn't go home," she said.

"Couldn't. Wouldn't." He stood up, easy on the good hip, awkward on the other. "I made you a coffee. It's the good instant, the one from the tin, not the jar."

She came down the steps slowly, because her knees had views on stairs, and took the mug from him, and it was hot and sweet and exactly right, and she hated that it was exactly right because she had been saving up a fine mood all shift and now it was leaking out through her fingers like heat from the tin.

"Galen, I've been on my knees in somebody's worst hour for eight hours. My back is a bag of gravel. I smell like a pathology corridor."

"You smell like a working woman." he said, which was the sort of thing he said, and she rolled her eyes at him and drank her coffee anyway.

"And what is that?" she nodded at the parcel. "Because I've got one of those in my pocket already and it's been sitting warm against my leg all night like a hot water bottle that won't behave."

His face did something she had not seen in years, a quick bright lean-in, the forum face, the new-discovery face. "You felt it too? Open yours. Go on, open it now, I want to see."

So she dug in her apron pocket and pulled out the paper-wrapped thing, and it was warm, genuinely warm, warmer than her coffee almost, and Galen was holding his own up to the sodium light, and they unwrapped them at more or less the same time like two conspirators, which was ridiculous, two grown adults, sixty and sixty-four years old and the best part of forty-two years of marriage between them, sitting on a loading dock unwrapping presents at half eleven at night.

Inside each paper was a small square of glass or something like glass, thin as a window, ruled with lines so fine she could not count them, and when the sodium lamp caught hers it threw color, a spray of thin rainbow lines across the concrete like spilled light.

"What is it?" she said, though she was already turning it, watching the colors swim.

"Diffraction grating. Replica, mind, a copy of one from a physics collection, a fellow at the forum had pictures and I got talking to him and well." He waved a hand, his Galen wave, the one that meant the story was longer than the night. "You hold it up to the moon, Evie, and the moonlight comes apart into its colors. All the colors hiding inside plain old white light. And I thought, tonight, full moon, the bore running big, the pier, my wife coming off her shift. It seemed like a night made on purpose."

She looked at him. Forty-two years and he could still do this to her, make her want to be cross and make her want to laugh at the same time.

"It's nearly midnight," she said.

"Midnight is the best time for it."

"You said that this morning."

"I stand by it. It's a position I hold."

"And the bore?"

"Big one tonight, they reckon. The water comes up that narrow channel like a wall, you've seen it, you know what it does, and under a full moon with one of these in your hand." He turned his grating over, and even here, under the ugly orange lamp, it threw a faint line of green and violet along his sleeve. "Come on, Evie. Walk with me. It's twenty minutes down and the coffee will hold out to the pier and back."

She should say no. She thought about saying no. She thought about her bed and the lamp and the book that would slide off his chest and the warm square sitting in her hand throwing little ghosts of color across her knuckles even now, and the strange warmth of it against her thigh all shift, which she had told herself was the radiators and did not quite believe anymore.

"Twenty minutes down," she said. "And if I fall asleep on that pier, Galen Patton, you're carrying me home."

"Forty-two years, haven't I always?"

He had not, always. But he took her bag off her shoulder and slung it over his own, and took her hand, and his hand was damp-cool from the river air and rough from hat brims and curling irons and steam, and they walked out past the bins and the moth and the sodium lamp, down toward where the black water of the estuary waited, and the two wrapped papers went into her apron pocket and his jacket pocket respectively, side by side in spirit, both of them still warm.

Behind them the hospital hummed its empty hum. Ahead the river lay flat as poured metal under the moon, and somewhere up its narrow throat, a long way off yet, the tide was gathering itself to run.

The walk took longer than twenty minutes, because Galen stopped to look back at the hospital, which was shut and dark, and stood there looking at the window like a man at a graveside, and Evangeline stood beside him and waited, because forty-two years teaches a woman when waiting is the thing to do.

"Look at that," he said, tilting his chin at the window. "That felt brim in the corner. The one with the feather. I curled that edge at two in the afternoon today and I still think it wants another pass."

"It's perfect, Galen. It's the best brim in Laverton. Come on."

"You're only saying that because you're tired."

"I'm saying it because it's true and because I'm tired, and one of those is your fault."

He laughed, that low pleased rumble she had been hearing since she was eighteen and he was twenty-two and still had all his hair, and he took her hand again and steered her down the lane, past the shuttered bakery and the dark window of the newsagent, and out along the track that ran beside the estuary toward the pier. The air came up off the water the way it did in the evenings, cool and salt and mud all mixed together, and Evangeline found her knees, which had ached all Tuesday, aching a little less, or maybe she was only not noticing, what with the warm square in her apron pocket and her husband's shoulder bumping hers every third step like a slow bad drumbeat.

The pier stretched out into the narrow channel like something nailed down by a giant, grey boards gone soft with years, and at the far end stood the little shelter, corrugated iron, dented here and there, with a slatted bench inside that had gaps in it like a greenhouse shelf. There was a kerosene lantern hanging on a nail by the door, because someone in Laverton, years ago, had decided the pier shelter deserved light, and Galen struck a match and got it going, and the flame stood up yellow and steady behind its glass, and their shadows went flung out long across the boards, two stretched shapes with hats, walking toward the rail and back, walking and walking without going anywhere.

"Sit," he said, and she sat, on the slats, which pressed their pattern into her backside in a way she decided not to complain about out loud, and he sat beside her, and the shelter smelled of kerosene and old rain and the iron of the roof cooling, and they drank the last of the coffee.

"Tell me about the forum," she said, because he wanted her to ask.

"Well," and he was off, the fellow with the pictures, the physics collection, the man's cousin who did something with light at a university, and Evangeline listened with half an ear and watched the colors jump on his sleeve when the lantern flame flickered, and it was nice, actually, sitting in the dark with her feet aching and her husband talking, and she would not have said so for anything.

Then the sound started.

It was low at first, so low she thought it was the wind in the channel, a long hiss like the estuary clearing its throat a long way off, and then it did not get louder so much as get closer, and the flat black water out there under the moon began to move in a way water should not move, a single swell, a long black roll coming up the throat of the channel with the moonlight lying on its back like a silver seam.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, Galen, there it is!"

"There she is," he said, standing too fast, his hip catching, and she reached up and steadied him by the elbow without even thinking about it, the way she had done ten thousand times, and he dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out the wrapped square, and the paper fell away onto the boards, and he held the grating up in front of his eye like a jeweler.

The moonlight came apart.

That was the only way she could think of it, later and ever after. The plain white light of the full moon went into that little ruled square and came out the other side as a fan of thin color, red and orange and yellow and green and blue and violet, laid across the black water like a ribbon thrown over a shoulder, and the ribbon reached down the channel and lay along the face of the oncoming bore, and the bore, the great hissing wall of it, ran up the estuary wearing the rainbow like a bride.

"Galen," she said. "Galen, it's on the water."

"I know," he said, and his voice had gone strange and quiet. "Evie, I never. I hoped, but I never."

And here is the thing she would tell only him afterward, and him only once. The colors did not sit still. They lay across the water and they moved, they drifted and gathered, the way spilled oil gathers, the way a school of fish gathers, and they gathered, all of them, every color in the fan, into one place, a soft shifting patch of light riding just ahead of the wave, coming up the channel toward the pier, and the hiss of the bore came with it, and the warm square in her apron pocket went hot, hot as the spill she had mopped at eleven o'clock, hot as a held hand, and under the pier, in the dark between the driven piles where the water ran loud, something pale began to come up.

"Galen," she said again, and could not finish, because her mouth had gone dry as the