Finalist
Terrain.org 15th Annual Fiction Contest
We met on the cusp of summer, those last sacred weeks before the schools unleash their vermin, pile them into their parents’ Foresters and Trail Blazers and migrate south for the season, to clog our beaches and pubs and cozy New England Main Streets. I was renting a little place 30 minutes’ walk from the church I’d stopped attending the minute I moved out, much to my mother’s dismay. Picked up a gig tending bar at Captain Craig’s. Spotted her through those tall, oceanfront windows, barefoot, neck bent like she lost something in the sand. Theft isn’t common here, but it happens. People lose wallets. Good Samaritans sometimes turn them in, sans cash. Or phones too slow to sell.
I told Craig I’d take an early lunch and shambled down the shore to meet her. She was wearing one of those long shift dresses she likes, apron pocket deep as her knees. Put her hands in and clawed out fistfuls of shells, purple mussels and rosy scallops and bright orange oysters and so, so many clamshells. They came almost alive in her grasp, skittered through her fingers like tiny, clattering animals. She’s a collector, she told me, and no amateur. Grew up a mile from P-Town and just moved back to the Cape. Her name is Kay.
I won’t say I was smitten. But I stayed down there past my 30 minutes, listening to Kay talk about mollusks, how you can’t find their indigo color anywhere else. The next night she came to me, laid all her treasures out along the bar and named them by the polish-chipped tips of her fingers. Again the night after that. Never ordered more than a cranberry ginger ale or a root beer. She came just for the pleasure of showing me all I’d ever crunched over.
At close we walked along the shore, the horizon a clean incision in the orange-fuchsia sky, bleeding black and glassy waves to our ankles. The setting sun lit her soft brown hair like fire, a halo of it around her head. Kay didn’t catch me looking. She wrapped her skirt to her knees and pinched a tiny patch of sunset out of the sand. A yellow, opalescent shell the size of my thumbnail.
“A jingle shell.”
I asked why she called it that. She cupped more into my palm, fingers full of clinking, glittering sky. We made a cavern of our hands, held them to our ears, and shook. The shells jingled like Christmas bells, like Kay’s own tinkling laugh.
“You should see the rest of my collection,” she said.
Kay lived in a one-bedroom bungalow on a beach across town. Not the soft, shell-speckled stuff we sunk out toes into that night. Her beach was rocky, jagged as the house that jutted from its edge, wood gray and sea-shorn. Inside, it’s scallops in the crown molding, mollusks in the bed frame. Shell-shaped soaps in the shell-shaped soapholder. Say it ten times fast if you can.
Kay inherited the house years ago from a great aunt who had been something of a legend in town. A known spinster, a recluse, occasionally a witch. To Kay, an idol, a middle finger in their family’s face with whom she shared a kinship beyond blood. I asked what she meant by that, the answer fathomless as those sea-deep eyes.
“I’m not sure what I’m doing here,” I told Kay. She sat cross-legged on the loveseat, pearly upholstery the color of a pink scallop shell. Her arms strong and sun-freckled, lips the flavor of sea salt. It must have been a mistake. A fluke. I kissed her again, just to be sure. The shells rattled on their shelves.
In the morning, it was a one-time thing. A misunderstanding. She came to Craig’s no matter what I said.
“Just a root beer,” she assured me. And so, it happened again.
“This time will be the last,” I told myself, every time, until it wasn’t. The flimsy thing between us took shape, concrete in its calcified flesh.
I heard it before I saw it: woke to the clack of its jaws around a tiny limpet balanced on the tip of Kay’s finger. It was the size of a small snapping turtle and about the same shape, except its round body was not encased inside a single shell but several dozen. Moon shells wound in spirals over its horny back, white scallop underbelly and purple mussel feet like flippers. Or clown shoes, too big for its toddling, many-jointed appendages.
“Don’t touch it!” I warned. Kay fished another miniscule shell from her collection. The thing snatched it from her palm, crunched terribly between its jaws. Kept on crunching after it swallowed, shell-bits rattling through the brittle machinery of its guts.
“It’s hungry,” she said.
“It could be dangerous,” I said.
Kay scratched her fingernails between the thing’s crevices. Its turret tail rattled in delight, back flippers thumping against the coffee table. “I don’t think it’s going to hurt us.”
The creature clacked its jaws.
“What should we do with it?” I asked. Kay stopped scratching and the thing went quiet. Widened its big, yellow eyes. Golden jingle shells between clamshell eyelids, layers and layers of them, unfolding as it fixed its sights on the object of its adoration. I was hardly worth a glance. It wanted Kay.
In the end, I took the creature to Captain Craig’s and set it down on the shore, the spot where we met. Seemed as good a place as any to say goodbye. It pranced happily across the hot sand, tripping over its bumbling purple feet. But if I nudged it toward the water, it snapped its beak and scurried back to safety. I left it sunning its shells on a tall grassy dune, and marched up the beach to Craig’s. The thing must’ve seen me go, because soon enough it was scratching at the door.
“Awww,” cooed the girls behind the hostess stand.
“Not on my bar,” Craig scolded from the kitchen. I scooped the creature into a dish tub and left it with the dirties until Kay came by. It glistened its tinkling eyes, and it had her.
“I’m taking Clack home with me,” she said.
“Don’t name it,” I said.
“We have to call it something,” she said.
“Clack clack clack,” said Clack.
At the house full of shells, Kay slept through the clatter of Clack’s breath, like wind through a pile of old bones. She’d let the thing into our bed, curled her soft shape around its rigid body. I had to pry them apart to study it. Clack was no machine, no hoax. Whatever organism had carved out its home inside this eclectic assortment of calcium carbonate, I can tell you for certain, it was alive. To wrest a shell from its corpus was to make the thing cry in sharp, shuttering agony. The commotion woke Kay, who kicked me to the couch.
“If you’re a masochist, leave Clack out of it.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt the thing,” I explained. I didn’t even make it bleed. After that night, I lost the stomach to try. Never saw flesh or breast or tongue or genital, nothing remotely mammalian from Clack. It ate shells and pissed sand and followed Kay around the house like a love-drunk suitor, like it couldn’t survive without her yellow reflection in its bulbous, tinkling eyes. Only when I left, Kay said, it grew anxious, restless, waddled from room to room as if searching for me.
I asked the girls at Craig’s if they’d ever seen anything like it. They told me Spring Break escapades and ex-boyfriends with exotic tastes. I told my high school buddies too—the ones who stayed or still came home for summers. No better luck. They took one look at Clack and shook their heads, not unkindly. Stammered out a few “Seriously?”s, and “Who would’ve guessed”s.
“I couldn’t make this thing up if I tried,” I told them.
“That’s for sure,” they said.
“This is beyond me,” they said.
“As long as you’re happy, though.”
“What does happiness have to do with anything?” I asked.
“If you’re happy, we’re happy for you,” they just kept saying.
She asked why I was so ashamed of everything. I asked if she had any shame at all.
Kay’s friends were even worse. The few she had let Clack crawl into their laps. They’d ask to hand-feed him bigger and bigger shells as his lumpy body expanded, first to the size of a housecat, then a medium-sized dog. They didn’t mind if his dull periwinkle claws left white marks on their legs like Kay’s scratched-up hardwood.
“How can you act so normal?” I’d ask.
“Come to P-Town this weekend,” they’d say. Or, “You should cut your hair.” In all honesty, I came to prefer Craig’s heavy brows and mumbled apprehensions.
“It’s unnatural,” he said, when pressed, “but that’s none of my business.”
“I know it is,” I told him. I think I might’ve thanked him.
“Whatever you do off the clock, that’s your business,” said Craig. “Just don’t bring it in here. And stay away from that girl.”
“This isn’t about Kay,” I tried to explain.
“She’s just like the old lady,” was all he would say. “But that’s none of my business.”
My brother, the poet, thought it could all be some kind of metaphor.
“How could it be a metaphor?” I asked, “It’s a living thing. It’s right here in front of me.”
“Just think about it,” he said, “The shell as a home. The shell as protection. What do you need protecting from?”
I hung up on him, then and there.
The worst was my mother. She saw me and Kay walking down the beach, hand-in-hand, Clack shambling on ahead. Passed us by without a word. I had to run to catch her. She wouldn’t even let me explain. Just looked me square in the eye and said, “I’ll pray for you.” Then she kept on walking.
“Why do you care what she thinks?” Kay asked.
“She’s my mother,” I said.
“Clack goes where we go. She’ll have to get over it.”
“Why should she?” I wanted to know. By that time, Clack had grown too cumbersome to stay in the house by himself. He needed half a dozen walks a day, and never seemed content with just the one of us. When I left for Craig’s, Kay said he’d paw the door and try to clamber through the windows, whistling all the while through his shells, a bone-chilling phantom of a Doberman’s whine. On the weekends Kay flew to her collectors’ conferences, he’d clatter to the ground in a pile of his own pieces and mope until she came home.
I tried to convince her that we could put a stop to this behavior. We should be able to take a walk or go to dinner without Clack tailing us every step. Kay wouldn’t stand for it.
“I’m not like you. I don’t understand how you can hide so much of yourself from the people who love you. It kills me.”
I asked what the hell that was supposed to mean. Why she couldn’t drop this monstrosity for three hours and have a normal night, just once. She asked why I was so ashamed of everything. I asked if she had any shame at all. The storm gathering behind Kay’s eyes broke, spilled down her cheeks like rain, and for the first and only time, she asked me to leave.
I was so deaf to the sound of clattering shells, I didn’t even notice Clack behind me until we were practically back at my old apartment. The place was in sadder shape than I remembered, dusty and rot-smelling from whatever had gone bad in the fridge. Clack’s big body fumbled through the space, scuffing his shells on the doorframes. I told him he could stay one night, then I was bringing him back to Kay’s. He wagged his shell-braided tail and clambered up onto my twin mattress. I made him a bed of paper shopping bags on the floor of my closet.
In the morning, Kay was gone. Her windows were dark beyond their shell-laden sills, silver Crosstrek missing from the driveway. A week went by without a word. Then two. Her absence gaped, a slow-healing wound. I picked up extra shifts at Craig’s. Made peace with my mother, endured the deluge of her friends’ single sons. Started going to church again. None of it could rinse the thoughts of Kay from my mind. I pictured her pacing some faraway shore, hair all aflame, smock dress rolled up to her knees, filling its pockets with shells.
Clack grew lethargic with the lack of her. Resigned himself to whine from the closet or under my bed. I’d walk the beach after work, weigh my pockets full of snacks for him to munch, then pick at, eventually ignore entirely. He was losing shells faster than he would eat them, leaving scattered pieces of himself around my apartment. By the end of summer, he rarely ever bothered to lift his head.
We don’t get much of an autumn on the Cape. The chill rolls in from the east around the end of September, and it’s all bitter salt winds and snowdrifts until May. The tourists turn their COEXIST-stickered tails, flee back to their warm city lights. We natives bunker down with our road salts and tire chains and lock our lonely hearts away.
That’s when Kay reappeared, just before the season took a turn for the truly miserable. I spotted her car at Stop & Shop. Puttered around the parking lot until she floated out on a breath of sea air, cardigan-wrapped, arms full of paper shopping bags, hers and her companions’. A spike-haired punk by the name of Victoria. I asked if we could talk.
“Now’s not the best time,” she said, “but it was good seeing you.”
“It’s about Clack,” I said, “Aren’t you even going to ask about him?” But she was already climbing into her Crosstrek.
I found him deep in the back of my closet that night. He wouldn’t touch the shells I brought him, but his tail still thumped when he saw me, yellow eyes on mine. I cupped his gaunt, brittle face in my hands.
“We don’t need her,” I told him. “We’re alright. We can do this on our own.”
Still, he wouldn’t eat.
A week or so later, I came home from my first date with the nice young man my mother had been advocating for. When I tried to coax Clack into a few bites of dinner, he didn’t stir. Not a single movement, hardly a sound but the faintest breath wheezing through his shells. I scooped him into my arms and half his body fell away, what’s left little more than the day he found us. Only those yellow eyes opened when I lifted him, tinked shut as I swept him out onto the street, running faster than I knew my legs could carry us.
Kay’s bedroom light glowed golden from the rough beach as I scampered to her door. Knocked and knocked until she opened, hair all mussed by an invisible breeze, to ask what I thought I was doing there.
“Help me,” I begged.
“You have to go. I’m with Vicki now.”
I said I’d leave if she took Clack. Showed her the state of him. She said she’s sorry, so sorry, she wished she could help.
“Why can’t you?” I asked.
“Oh, Hannah,” she said, dabbing at her tear-freckled cheeks, “he was never mine to keep.”
She went inside and shut the door. I stayed on the porch as she and Victoria paced the house, crouched in the indigo shadows of their silhouettes. The waves rose and mounted the rocky shore, rolling in the rhythm of Clack’s weak but ceaseless breaths. I cradled him in the crook of my arm, stroked his lumpy spine, and for the first time, I felt a fluttering, feather-light timbre. It could have been my imagination, the phantom echo of my own pulse. I turned his body over in my palms.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
Somewhere behind the shell at the center of Clack’s belly beat a fractured heart. I pressed his tiny, brittle body to my chest, and wept. Thump-thump, he drummed. A wordless affirmation. I am alive. I am alive.
A. C. Silva is an emerging writer of fiction and nonfiction. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Virginia Tech, where she is working on a debut novel and collection of short stories. In recent years, her work has appeared in Qu Literary Magazine, Add to Cart Magazine, The Bangalore Review, and elsewhere.
Header photo courtesy Pixabay.
