here is a window at the end of the world. The window is blue. The world is white. It thins and pales at the edges like albumen. The window floats in the waters at the rim of the world; trickles of foam and spume seep over the sill of chapel-stone. It rocks back and forth like a buoy, rising sharply form the black waves, a fin cutting through the meridians.

There is a woman at the window. Crab claws hold back her hair, blacker than whale’s eyes. She holds the curved edges tightly, a drowning thing clinging to driftwood. She presses her long brown nose to the seawater glass. She is hiding, as best she can.

Behind her like mountains rise the tanned, chilblained legs of Atlas. His knees are scuffed, as if often bent to some ashen floor in prayer. This is a very great secret: every morning Atlas kneels, with infinite care, bowed by the beauty of the sun, the glory of a thing whose weight he need not bear. Beneath the waves at the end of the world his sandaled feet are crusted with coral like shoes, his ankles braceleted with kelp and ecstatic mackerel. The body of Amphitrite, lovelier than eelskin, floats so far below his gaze that her jellyfish-shrouded shape against the window is little more than flotsam.

It is only that she did not want to marry the ocean. It is so vast, and cold. She is the warm sea washing golden islands that float in her sight like spindles, dipping and bobbing. Poseidon took her up in his blue arms, so often tattooed that only the occasional mermaid or cursed sailor could be seen. He took her up and she was frightened—she could smell shipwrecks on his skin, and so many ghosts held the train of his cloak! He opened his mouth and there she could see the diaries and broken oars and sextants of so many doomed captains. His elbows were capped in wet, sopping shields.

So she had fled, fled here, to encircle the world, her home, her hearth, her window at the end of all things. Surely here he could not find her, and she could remember to herself that the sunrise on Mykonos smelled like bread and lemon-wine. Through the window she can see her islands, she can see the blue clamshells cluttered against perfect pillars, white as the flesh of fish. She can see her own footprints on Naxos, and the orange rinds littering the beach like feathers. Through it she can see watersnakes mating, and pelicans hunting.

There is a dolphin at the end of the world. It is coming towards her, towards the window, towards her net-weaving hands. It bounds and arches through the white waves, a silver dart, a silver bolt. Its slick grey skin has been so often tattooed that only the occasional seashell-riding goddess or saved sailor ringed by nereids can be seen. Its eyes are very black. It pauses on the other side of the glass, streaked with water as though it has been raining. Its bottlenose bumps the pane.

Meet me at Gibraltar, the dolphin’s gaze whispers. The sea must join the ocean, at all the ends of the world. It is not so cold, in the deep. Come with me, oh blue and glassy thing, and I will show you ice and adoration, past the breakers, past the tide.

Atlas watches the sky, waits for light.

© text by Catherynne M. Valente 2007