The day was grey, as so many are along the San Mateo coast. Inland, past the mountains, the dark overcast would skid down the eastern slope as a long cascade of white fog, while a bright sun lit a sky of piercing blue, but here, on the beach, the world was closed in, silenced by the lowering press of mist and the insistent chaos of the surf.
     He sat on the bluff, looking out to sea toward a horizon lost in the grey, as the cold salt tang buffeted him and the low oceanic roar drowned all sound. Here and there on the beach below a few figures wandered randomly, jacketed against the wind, one frisked about by an oddly exultant dog. It was no day for swimmers or sunners, though two youngsters played tag with the surging froth, daring the sea's dragging net, that omnipresent, invisible undertow. Shore birds echoed them, running out and back, probing the sand, sometimes standing against the spill of a spending, broken wave with its scant cargo of kelp and drift. Above, gulls shrilled their calls in faint, tinny voices. Times like this, the little space isolated in the opacity of the surrounding vapor seemed all the world there was.
     He got up, slide-stepping down the slope, the sandy dirt giving way to each foot-planting. At the bottom, where the true sand began, the dimpling surface slogged his progress, retreating from and then refilling each impression, back and in, a dry miniature of the great sea itself. He descended toward the water, stopping just short of the wet, roping limits of the sea's breath, where its intrusion set fast the infirmity of the indecisive land. He gazed into the emptiness, and in time sat again.
     The little dog returned, all nose, tongue and excited eagerness. He let its tongue slither-slobber his hand, roughed its wet coat. A sharp command and called apology in the mid-distance ended the depredation, his own appropriate wave and reassuring response capping the incident. He wiped his hand on his pants as his eyes returned to the pulsing sea, and he forgot the dog.
     A longer, higher pulse than most licked his toes and brought up from the deep the gleam of some small something, out of place in the grey pastel of the gloom. Idly curious, he took it up before the sea could take it back, holding it between forefinger and thumb for examination. It sparkled with a sourceless light that could in current weather be neither intrinsic nor reflected, but was present nonetheless. In appearance, a hard little half bead, sheared away on one side, impossibly warm after the freezing brine, the cold of his hand, transparent yet without letting vision through.
     He held it near his eye, and the spark leapt up into an observation of another day—through the glass, if glass it was, the beach was transmigrated to a sundrenched strand on a weatherless day, peopled by laughing, naked legions frolicking in dancing waves of ultramarine. He gasped and dropped the bead, which smacked the wet sand and half-rolled a quarter inch. More cautiously, he leaned forward, retrieved it, and looked again.
     The same sunny scene smote his eye, though now he noted it was the same beach as that he sat on, the same waveforms rolling in from the ends of the ocean, even if brightened and clarified. As if from a great distance he heard the glad cries of those present yet absent crowds, felt the warmth of their here-hidden sun. The individuals nearest him looked his way and appeared to register him, their glad grins gone uncertain in his confounded presence. Their familiarity struck him suddenly.
     One child, unselfconsciously nude, approached and reached out to him. He recognized the small face, felt the tiny fingers against his arm, and as he called out the name once more let the bead fall.
     He stared at it in the sand, doubting his wakefulness, his sanity. But it could be no dream, no delusion. The reality he had glimpsed and touched was solid as his own, even as its occupants were impossible. He had known them, loved them, ultimately lost them. And that child had been his own little girl, fifteen years in the grave—somehow full of life and by appearance no older than when she had died.
     Both dread and exaltation seized him as he reached again for the bead, a mingled fear and longing. The altered landscape was back, surrounding him now rather than focused through the object, itself now as lusterless as the world he had been in a moment before. Those he had known were gathered about him, glad again, and greeting him. He questioned without voice, and they answered without speaking that it was not they who had been lost, but he, now found, and welcome to remain.
     But it was wrong. Even as his troubled soul was soothed by their happy strains he saw he did not fit the picture. In this sun-drenched San Gregorio lacking any use or need for raiment, he was yet dressed for a cold, grey day, and yet cold within, even with the soft, gentle sun of the here and now warming his skin. Amid perfection, he knew himself unshaven, uncouth, and unready. Perhaps he was welcome here; perhaps he could indeed remain. But not, he knew by some instinct, not now. This was not his time.
     It could be, the boy replied. Undress; remove what doesn't belong; leave the old you behind for your grey sea to take. Regain joy, and come back to us.
     It is not my time, he said again, and the world inverted, the grey from the bead re-enveloping him while the light that had surrounded him drew back into that tiny, impossible gleam in the little bit of glass in he held his hand. He regarded it, still wracked with longing. Once more he brought it to his eye, glimpsed again that same yet other world, felt that small miracle the ocean had brought him.
     He could tell people, let them know their hope is not in vain, that better truly does await. But who would, who could, believe him? He was not some huckster, to spread yet another new and shallow faith. This was not a truth to be gained by hearsay; but by experience, feeling. The bead. It could convince. But ... would it really? And ... should it?
     How many had such a miracle come to, over the ages, by sea drift or in some other fashion? Many? Few? He alone? How to know, with a thing so impossible to report?
     He realized he could not take this wonder, not dole it out like some stereogram, a penny a peep—much less horde it as a private treasure, a miser squandering wonder with possessiveness. Such notions were repulsive, indecent. The thing had come to him, but was not his. If it represented a glimpse of the unattainable, he must be content with the glimpse. If a promise, he would await its fulfillment.
     He let his hand drop into the wet sand. A finger of foam came, creeping past the rest, and he opened his hand and let the bead go tumbling back into the chance that had brought it. And he sat, gazing out into the mist-shrouded ocean as the birds screeched above, the dog yapped in the distance, and the cold, deep mystery of the world enveloped him.