Green Shell
by K. Curran Mayer

Staring down past limpets and seaweed into the bottom of the crevice, Kim drew a quick breath of the salt-laden air. Treasure. Just when she was resigning herself to failure, here was one of the beautiful green shells that she had coveted all week.

It was no bigger than her thumbnail. Only a practiced tidepool-comber could have found it in the shadows.

It felt a fraction too heavy when she snatched it. She bit her lip and flipped it over. Sure enough, it was occupied, like all the others of its kind she had ever found. The iridescent worn spot at the center of the whorl was beautiful, but perhaps also a clue that the green shells were too fragile to survive rattling around empty.

Kim's restless fingers turned the shell over and over, unwilling to let go. This was the last chance to find something really good on this vacation, something to stand out among all the other memories jumbled on top of her bookshelf at home, adding a hint of salt to the sterile bedroom so far from this vibrant, dead-fishy world. All week she had only collected clams, slipper shells, mussels — nothing she hadn't possessed before.

She glanced around at the broken fragments of other shells that lined the rock crevice. She could find a lever, pry her captive open, and rip the helpless soft body away for crabs to eat.

Something in her unexpectedly balked at the ripping part, at the thought of the gushing ooze and snail guts. She reminded herself that she wasn't a squeamish girl. She could bait a hook without flinching. Sometimes she helped her mother pick slugs out of garden lettuce, popping their flaccid bodies between her fingers. She explored heaps of reeking seaweed with nothing but curiosity, almost as interested in the dead things she found as in the living ones. But all that seemed somehow different.

She sometimes trod on snails and barnacles by mistake when roving over rocks at the edge of the beach. Their dying crunch always roused some shame in her, but not nearly enough to keep her down on the desert of sand where other children made castles and flew kites, sustaining very little squirming life. In the grand scheme of things, it wouldn't be any different to deliberately kill a snail for its shell. The crabs didn't care whether their meat was provided by misplaced feet or by intention.

She picked up a blue fragment of mussel, then thought it probably wouldn't be strong enough and substituted it for a shard of scallop.

"Kim!" Her mother's voice rose over the squabbling gulls. The call of breakfast, just in time to spare her from the decision. Kim dropped the scallop shard and laid the snail gently down amongst the seaweed, trying to ignore the gleaming mother-of-pearl crown and the delicate tints of the unusual green coloring. She wasn't positive that the green was the color of the shell, and not special algae.

She picked it up again, scratching at it with her nail to see if the color came off. It didn't. If it were algae, she would have expected more variation. All the specimens of this kind were this exact wonderful green.

"Ki-im!"

Cupping her hand around the shell, occupant and all, Kim shoved her fist into the pocket of her sweatshirt. "Coming!"

A cormorant startled heavily up into the air as the girl bobbed up out of her crevice, its black wings thumping against the morning fog. Kim paused to watch it go; if it hadn't known she was here, she hadn't known about it either.

Inside her fist, the living snail was so motionless she could almost forget it was there. It didn't seem so very different from the empty shells that rattled together at the bottom of her pocket, their original owners already consumed by their neighbors.

---

Trudging into camp, Kim found her parents hunched at the picnic table and watching a pot of water on the tiny propane stove. Kim felt a moment's detached pity for them, slow and cold-blooded as they huddled in their layers of clothes. She hoped her own blood never cooled.

She wondered what they would say if they knew about the prisoner in her pocket. The snail that would die, inevitably—even if Kim told her parents it was her pet, even if she put it in a jar of salty water and offered it boiled lettuce, she knew she could not keep it alive. She could try to feed it, though, so it wouldn't really be her fault when she would finally pry out the limp body, flush it down the toilet, and clean her prize. The snail couldn't survive without the ocean any more than it could without its shell.

Kim plopped down beside her mother, frowning down at the graffiti that previous campers had hacked into the table. She felt the shell had belonged to her from the minute it entered her pocket.

Anyway, she couldn't have uncollected gaps. Someday she would organize her pirate wealth, build a glass display case to keep all the shells safe, learn their Latin names and make labels and maybe give it all to a museum when she got old. As for the snail, it was only a snail. She was thinking far too much.

---

By the time breakfast was over, the fog had burned away and even Kim's parents were starting to crawl out of their jackets. Hot cocoa curdled with milk and cornflakes in Kim's belly. The snail in her pocket seemed in a low-tide stupor; it hadn't moved once since she found it. Kim shrugged out of her sweatshirt while they struck the tent, folding the sweatshirt carefully so that even if the snail tried to escape, it would just get lost in the folds.

But when she returned to an empty pocket, nothing fell out onto the ashy campsite sand when Kim shook the sweatshirt. It wasn't just cocoa and milk curdling in her stomach now. She knelt, combing the ground with eyes and hands. If the snail had wandered off into the dune grass, it would die. Even if it knew which way to go, Kim was certain it couldn't bring its tender belly safely across the expanse of sharp sand grains. And Kim would still not have her shell, would be left with only the knowledge that she had killed a snail for no good reason.

Then her hand brushed the escapee, not a foot from where the sweatshirt had been. It was lying as still as a pebble again, hiding inside its beautiful green home. Kim brushed the sand gently off its back. The spot of mother-of-pearl gleamed in the sun.

She let out a breath, feeling the way she once had when she had been climbing a spray-slick rock and nearly tumbled off. She could have cracked her skull that time and lain on the shore while the tide came in, her parents not expecting her back until lunch-time. The knowledge that she had come so close and yet managed to escape had left her too limp to even feel relief.

"Kim, aren't you coming?" Her parents were starting down the path for the traditional last dip before the day of boredom and broken air conditioning on the way home.

Kim scrambled up, the precious shell clenched in one hand. Her least-favorite tidepool, she remembered, lay at a similar tide level to the crevice where she had found the snail in the first place. The pool didn't have enough sea anemones for her, but a snail would think that was an advantage.