five shells i picked five shells from the sea today, salt-battered, shore-scattered, i cradled them like eggshells in my hands. they put out the wave breakers to prepare for the evening’s storm, pronged and stoney like the sky. the children call them monoliths, knowing that there is nothing more alien than a human creation attempting to control nature, and the seagulls flap in agreement. i nearly lost a shell on the way home; it was the third fragment i’d found, half of it eroded so that specks of sand had left speckled holes in it. i had to halt my journey back when the realization came: this shell was once a body, a home, an outer being. i am a husk-collector, who will promptly prepare these corpses from the sea to be strung up in silver wire, thrust into a second-life as an oceanic chandelier or to thread through a chain and drape across skin. is this what the shells deserve— to be repurposed into a fixture of my own making? who am i to repurpose the dead? shall i send them back to the sea, to their watery graves, and let the storm decay and refine them into sand once and for all? i think then of my high school friends, who would save shells for me from trips to nantucket and maine. they were as valuable as nuggets of solid gold, and they still are now. i don’t know what made them more precious, whether they were given to me, entrusted by a friend, or that they were what they were: husks. with the first crack of thunder, i chide myself.
Love this!
thank you so much!!