Magdalena Prue

What it looks like, and what it does

A woman lying in a bath whose surface rises and falls not with her breath but with a tide. Skin faintly translucent at high water, patterned like wet sand at low. A calendar of tide tables on the wall. A salt-crusted wedding ring.

Waxes and wanes with the tide. Speaks in rhythms. Yearns toward the sea on spring tides.

What is known

In 1994 she waded in at a seaside town to rescue a dog and was gone an hour. She came back with the tide and has not entirely left it.

She is about forty per cent water at low tide and ninety at high. At spring tides she is difficult to hold in a room. Her husband tells her the news each evening. She answers in the sound of waves, and he says he understands.

What it can do

• Dissolves into water and gathers herself again from it
• Hears the sea at any distance

Where it stops

• Cannot survive dry air for more than an hour at low tide
• Cannot be moved more than thirty kilometres from the coast

An encounter

Reyes arrived to find the bath full to the lip and a damp print of a woman on the bed, shrinking. Mr. Prue was holding a towel and counting backward from the tide table. “She likes to be told the time,” he said. Reyes read the tide table aloud, clearly, to the water.

Alma Reyes, district nurse, A rented house above the harbour, Pennick, A spring tide, 04:00

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Her mass and water content, weighed monthly for nine years, track the tidal cycle to within 3 per cent.
• rumor: That the dog was never found, and never needed rescuing.
• interpretation: She may not be turning into the sea. She may be going home by instalments.

Still unresolved

At each spring tide she is a little less herself and a little more of something else. The family is divided about taking her back to the shore.

Where it has been recorded

• Pennick (confirmed) — Recorded by Alma Reyes, district nurse.

Stories about it

• Most of Her (Entity story, 4 min) — On a spring tide at four in the morning a district nurse is called to a rented house above a harbour where a woman lies mostly as water, and is asked to read the tide table aloud.

Connected entities

• Dormant Susannah — Both are held in a bed by people who tell them the news. Both are partly somewhere else.
• Pietro Salt — Both are given back by the tide in pieces. Both are looked after by people who know their routine better than they do.