Nested outline heart design

My grandmother cut these into the salt-cured rock when the flats were still a harbour, back when the ships came in with lamps lit. She showed me the trick of it with a flat chisel and a bucket of wet sand. Three lines, always three, because she said one line is a warning, two is a road, and three is somebody saying come in out of it. The outer ring takes the weather. The middle one takes the hunger off your back. The innermost is narrow enough for one person to sit inside with their knees to their chest and wait for the wind to turn.

The boy who came up the causeway that autumn had a cracked lamp and a sack with nothing in it but a folded map of a town that wasn't there anymore. He wanted to know who had made the stones. I put his finger on the inner line and made him count the grooves. Four, he said. Then I turned the stone and showed him a small, careful mark in the corner, a heart with its chevrons drawn left-handed, the way my grandmother never drew hers. Someone had sat here before us, and whoever it was had been keeping watch from the middle ring.

He settled into the innermost groove that night without being asked. By morning the sand had drifted to his shoulders and he was humming, low, the same tune she used to sing to the lamps. I still bring a bucket out every spring to clear the lines. Some of them are wider than they were.