a short history, as far as one can be given
No one agrees on when the Brackish arrived, because arriving is the one thing they never did. They were not washed in from the sea and they did not come down from the hills. They were already there in the seam — the wide, indecisive water where a river loses its argument with the tide — at whatever hour anyone first thought to look.
What's known of them is mostly negative. They kept no shore, because the shore moved twice a day and they moved with it. They built nothing a flood could take, which is to say; they built nothing anyone has found. They left no graves; a tide flat does not keep what you give it, only borrows. Theirs was the richest water on the coast and the least permanent — an ecotone, the naturalists would later call it, the seam where two worlds overlap and neither holds title — and the Brackish appear to have taken this as instruction rather than warning.
If they reckoned years at all, they reckoned them the way the estuary does: in varves, the paired bands a still water lays down, one pale and one dark, two opposed seasons settled as a single line. The Brackish are what gathers between those bands. Not the salt and not the fresh — the lens of stranger water held in the middle, thick at the heart and pinching out to nothing at either edge.
The only people who tried to carry them out of the bourne were sailors, who fixed their likenesses to the prows of boats. Not as ornament. As a ward — the way you hang a holed stone in a doorway — a figure of the in-between set to watch the in-between. A boat so marked was said to find the channel in fog, and to be given back whatever the bar tried to take.
The figures gathered here are those wards, recovered one at a time, no two from the same wreck. They are not portraits; no one living saw a face to carve. They are closer to a grammar — the shapes a coastal people reached for when they had to name the ones who stayed in the seam. Each came ashore alone. Each carries the same line beneath it, and we have let it stand.
Neither of the sea nor of the land. Of the seam between.