..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Thursday, October 11, 2007

“J, a consonant in English, (used here in the word ‘jealousy’)
in its original form, was that of the tail of a subdued dog,
And it was not a letter but a character, standing for a Latin verb,
‘jacere,’ meaning ‘to throw,’ because when a stone is thrown
at a dog, the dog's tail assumes that shape."
- Ambrose Bierce - “The Devil’s Dictionary”


FICTION:



spiderbites...a 79% true story



chapter III: snails





When you’re in the back seat of the car fighting with your older brother and younger sister for elbow room on a nine-hour drive to vacation in the ocean, you need the windows open at least a crack for the same reason you poke holes in the top of the jar that holds the spiders. Not only will they sufficate, they’ll very likely eat each other. Also, when you look up triumphantly from the small amount of space you’ve successfully conquered, angry eyes in the rearview mirror will remind you the order the three of you were born, reminds you that you will always have to sit in the middle, and remind you that there’s nothing you can do about it.

How does that saying go? “You don’t pick your family?” Maybe. But you know what else is true? You don’t pick your friends. And I keep telling myself that I keep him around because his finest moment still makes me laugh to this day. Everybody you know has a finest moment, the very first song on their greatest hits album, you just need to take the time to think of it. Some people’s songs are more impressive than others, and Jay, a guy I’ve known since bicycles, made a memory for me that’ll always have a special place in my heart because I was there when he disrupted a theater full of slack-jawed moviegoers, something I only had the balls to do once in my life and for a more noble reason. He did it because it was funny. In fact, I’m laughing thinking about it right now.

It was one of those real heavy, holiday-time dramas up on the screen, and the theater was packed. We wouldn’t even have gone to see it, but we’d missed a plane coming back from a friend’s wedding (it was a summer when there were too many friends’ weddings to count) and we had four hours to kill. We walked into the cinema next door to the airport, a great money-making location that took advantage of weary layovers, and asked for two tickets to the longest movie they had. I barely remember the flick, since we only saw a third of it, but it was a murder mystery. It was during this scene where a frantic father is trying to break through a protective line of cops to see if his son is the dead body in the chalk outline at the end of a long trail of blood that zigzagged down a beach and ended under the shade of a pier. Never mind how they made a chalk outline in the sand, right? So, the dad is fighting with these cops and screaming over and over, “Is that my son under there?! Is that my son under there?! Is that my son under there?!” And there’s this pileup of uniformed cops restraining him as he screams in anguish at the sky, and the camera soars above the scene and the music swells and the surf is pounding...and Jay leans over to me and whispers in a very serious tone:

“You know what would make that scene very different emotionally? What if the dad was screaming, ‘Is that my sandwich under there’ instead?”

I stared at him a minute and tried to stifle a laugh and blew snot out my nose instead. It didn’t make much sense, and probably wasn’t that funny, but both of us started snickering uncontrollably, and we could actually feel the anger of the crowd rising around us. After some hateful glares and a “Shhh!” or two we got it under control. And we were doing fine under the movie came to the scene where the father has to identify his son’s body. They pull back the sheet, and his son’s face is twisted in a grimace of pain, and the father mutters, “Yes, that’s my son.” And right then me and Jay look at each other, both knowing that we’re thinking the exact same thing. Instead we had heard the distraught father say:

“Yes, that’s my sandwich.”

We both lost it, loud barking laughter that made my stomach hurt as if I’d dry heaved all night or did a thousand sit-ups. Angry moviegoers demanded our ejection, and we were still convulsing as flashlight-wielding security manhandled us out the door by the screen. The sunlight that blasted onto the furious faces in those seats was worth everything. One little kid was even angrier than the staff, and he actually chased us home, standing on the tips of his toes and challenging us to fight. Turned out that the theater was letting kids pay for their tickets in milkweed, as the government was sponsoring a program to collect the fibers to make parachutes. It was also a great recruiting tool for cannon fodder since any kid who collected plants to pay for a movie ticket would also be broke and hopeless enough to find the prospect of patrolling the Middle East exciting. What better way than to let them make parachutes? Hell, they’ll probably claim that a few good-sized frogs could make ammunition. Or a cup of snails could be ground up into tank treads. The movie theater actually handed out empty extra-large popcorn tubs to collect the milkweed, and you’d turn them in right where they normally tore a ticket and they added it to a growing pile. I guess I noticed the pyramid of empty popcorn tubs on the way in, but I think I just assumed it was some kind of popcorn-eating contest or a creative display for a new botanical horror flick. When the kid explained it all, face all red, fists balled up, we laughed even harder. We talked about it later and decided that the kid was so mad because he couldn’t get a refund like some of the other angry moviegoers had already been demanding on our way out. What were they gonna do, give him his milkweeds back? To him, the movie wasn’t something you could watch again. It was a one-time event. The things happening on the screen were as fleeting as real life if that kid could only see them once.

Anyway, that was Jay’s finest moment, disrupting that movie. His worst moment was The Loch Ness Monster incident. I try not to think about that too much though. But the sandwich? Shit, I think about that night all the time. And even when he’s a pain in the ass these days, I smile every time I remember over lunch.

* * *

The parking lot in front of my apartment used to be sunk into the ground about five feet on all sides. It looked a bit like a huge community pool, more like the biggest cell in a TV dinner tray, the one that always held the meat. The inclines on the sides were gradual and only noticeable during the winter when it filled with snow and slush and you needed a little extra gas to clear the entrance to hit the road. New residents would spin their tires there for a couple days until they figured out the only way to start their day was to keep their momentum.

You’d think this obstacle would have made me late for work every day, and, yes, I had to dig myself out or give the car another running start to get up the hill in January. However, those inclines were actually the only reason I ever made it to work at all. Back then I didn’t know why, but those slopes would encourage my legs to start running right before I reached my car, if only for about two or three steps at the most.

In an undergrad film class, we learned that the first movie ever made was
really just a series of images showing a horse running. It revealed for the first time that between gallops, all of a horse’s legs are off the ground at the same time. This is also true with humans, which was proven in the second movie ever made. Running is actually the act of throwing your body weight and catching it, if only for a second. Throwing and catching myself (something my brother could actually do with a football when, disgusted with my performance, he tried to play two positions at once) was the one thing that gave me a sense of purpose or urgency in the morning. A jog of one, two, three steps tops, would wake me up enough to navagate the traffic and the red lights to get to work and behind that all-important cash register on time. Only after the landlord responded to some complaints and a construction crew filled in, flattened, and repaved the parking lot, did I realize that I was actually running to my car to go to work without ever knowing it. I figured all this out because, even 28 jobs and 13 different parking lots and driveways later, I was never on time for work again. On a good day, I can get there about three minutes late at the absolute earliest.

I blame that small hill that once had me flying to work like a goddamn horse for about zero point two seconds, and whoever signs my paycheck will blink real slow and turn away. Yes, horses do fly, I’ll try to tell them as they walk away. And so do we if we move fast enough downhill.

Sometimes I would have my ex-girlfriend walk ahead of me a couple extra steps so that I didn’t pass her by and have to wait at the car for her for those zero point two seconds. But she would waste time turning around and slowing down, thinking I was trying to hide something from her. I wanted to yell that she was making me late for work, that I needed to run for three steps, but it would take way too much explanation.

Way later, after the parking lot was filled in and that girl was long gone, a retired neighbor on the ground floor asked if I’d recently gotten a new job. She said I didn’t seem as happy going to work as I used to. I tried to explain how I was actually still at the same job, that it was only the landscape that had changed. She just stared at me out her window, face framed between her lush hanging ferns, and silently sipped her coffee. I told her I could prove it, and the next morning dug through a pile of old photographs to find that ex-girlfriend took when she was watching me out the building’s basement window.

The window was actually below ground level, peeking around one of those drainage boxes people sometimes fill with flowers, and if she was down there doing laundry, she liked to fling that window open near my feet and scare me when I got home from work. I fell for it every time. One afternoon, she had decided to photograph my trek from the parking lot to the building, all the way up to the scare. The first picture in her series was supposed to show me getting out of my car, but the angle of the photo and the sunken parking lot revealed only my head floating in a sea of grass and asphalt. This picture was so strange, it stayed on the fridge surrounded by magnetic hiakus until we broke up. I put it in an envelope, confidently thinking that a picture of my disembodied head would explain everything my neighbor wanted to know about my recent shoulder-slumped, can-kicking, slow-motion treks to my car, and I slid it under her door. She never acknowledged the photograph, and she never greeted me with her morning coffee again. Her two ferns were moved to her kitchen window around the corner of the building that faces the highway.

Maybe the reason that picture scared my neighbor was the same reason I jumped every time I looked down to see my ex-girlfriend peeking out near my feet. There just isn’t supposed to be heads down by the ground.

I always parked my car in the same spot, and I’m parking this stolen car there, too. Back when the lot was still sunk, I wore a path from the front door of the apartment building through the grass, down the hill to that spot. I still can’t believe that one person can make a trail like that. I thought it took years and about nine hundred pairs of shoes. And for some reason, even after the landscapers leveled it off, even now that I’m taking a different route and will never run to my car again, my trail of dead grass remains.

I turn off a television screen of snow, or “ant races” as my brother used to call it, and try to remember what movie I fell asleep to the night before. Someone once told me that a movie is only as good as its villain. I think she said that while we were walking out of a movie that didn’t have one. I should have told her that there were no villains in film until the third movie ever made, where they finally filmed the man and the horse together, and a woman threw a bucket of water on them both.

When I hit the button to stop the alarm clock from shrieking, the pieces of chewing gum roll off the wood, two dry pebbles without any of our spit left to make them stick. Before they fall, I could swear they had crawled even further away from each other.

The phone rings. Of course, there’s no one there. Probably just robot bill collectors that don’t know how to react, just sitting there holding their breath when they don’t get another machine. Every morning when I get these calls, I can’t help but picture an insect calling me, maybe something like a mantis, something with long antenna waving the air as it crouches on the receiver unable to speak. Nothing says “ominous prank call” like a bug with its antennas slowly sniffing the air while your voice vibrates the phone under it’s nine legs, “Hello? Hello?!”

That reminds me of my lizard and I check his tank. All I see are the crickets in there for him to eat, huddled in pairs, frozen in fear near the corners of the glass.

I try to flip the coin with my thumbless hand again even though I forget to come up with any problems that heads-or-tails would solve. It doesn’t matter because the quarter shoots off my ringless finger, hits the TV screen with an alarming bang, then vanishes behind the bed. A question from Jr. High echoes in my head. My best/worst teacher would read a story I wrote and ask, “What’s different about this day?” I’d answer, “Um, I don’t know. The hero chokes on a bowling ball? Uh...a grasshopper tries to make a phone call? What do you want from me?” And she’d say, “That’s not what I meant.” And I still don’t know what the fuck she meant.

I would drive by the bookstore to see if she’s working, but someone would recognize this car. In fact, since my newly acquired, stolen ride dirtier than the vehicle I abandoned at that grocery store, it would remind everyone at my former job of me even quicker. Back in those days, my car was so filthy, after closing the store one night my boss said, “Don’t ever rob a bank. That car of yours would leave a trail.” I also remember another employee trying to convince the management staff that I’d been burning rubber in the parking lot, but my dirt-caked, disintegrating wheels were actually just dropping the kinds of skid marks it might leave in its underwear. If a car wore underwear.

I reach into the drawer under the alarm clock and dig through piles of
bubblegum machine toys, old photographs, and expired rubbers to retrieve a handful of loose keys. The pictures are ex-girlfriends, and the keys around them are extra keys to every car I’ve ever owned. I wish I could assign a similar importance to the wrappers and bubblegum machine toys that the pictures and car keys hold, but no keepsake really comes close. And I wish I would have thought to keep these keys on a ring in order of when I got rid of those cars so I’d know which vehicle they belonged to. Loose keys are like saving a photo album of negatives. You know there’s a picture in your hand, a memory important enough to catch, but you just can’t see any of the faces. My loose pictures remind me of a girl, a good friend who wanted to be more than that, and my failed furious attempts to masturbate to her picture to force myself to start liking her more. It never worked. On a similar note, after several weeks of experimentation, I was also unable to jerk off to black pornography no matter how hard I tried. Weird ‘cause with my new family there’s no way I’m a racist. More on that later. I’ll try real hard to prove that.

I remember my recent discovery in the grocery store parking lot and how it may have hinted that any key works in any car. So maybe it doesn’t matter which key is which after all. I straighten out a stray paperclip from the drawer then wrap it around my thumb and drop those old keys onto it one by one. Then I tie up the ends and drop it in my pocket.

The only responsibility I have today is to pick up Jay after he gets his tattoo. He wouldn’t tell me what he’s getting. Even though I never asked, I figured I’d have heard all about it before, during, and after since he usually thinks everyone is as excited about everything as he is. Jay is the only friend from high school or college that still lives in this town. Remember when I said that sandwich was his finest moment, his Greatest Hit in my mind? That the movie theater incident would be the best song on anyone else’s album? That might be true, but he has thousands more songs that’ll just make you sigh real loud and blink way longer than normal and try to turn him off.

I walk slowly to my car. I could swear my parking lot is not just level these days. Feels like uphill now.

There’s time to do a quick bookstore drive-by (two words that sound great together) and see if she still works there, maybe try some of those old keys in some old cars, maybe squeeze in a bit of stalking before I get to make fun of some permanent graffiti on a Jay’s body. Halfway there, I get confused when I see two lanes at the other end of a turn that both say “Wrong Way.” I stomp on the brakes, and cars honk behind me. I do a U-turn and ten more cars honk to join in. I don’t know where the fuck they want to me go. We could be stuck at the end of this road for years without a U-turn. They’re gonna have to do one, too, eventually. Maybe they were out of “Dead End” signs and used two “Wrong Ways” instead, like trading two cool colored crayons with the kid next to you because the white one doesn’t do shit. Who knows. I ain’t superstitious, but I do two more illegal turns and jump a divider to get away from that detour.

I roll down the window for some air and see a blur of wings following my car. At first it seems like the bird is running from me, but it won’t turn off. I even point the way, in case it missed the next exit.

What time is it? She’s not even at the bookstore anymore. She’d be gone for the day by now. Always fucking late, everywhere I go. How late am I? I’m so late that I can’t even stalk someone on time.

Back on the highway, a car in front of me slows down in the passing lane, and I start riding it’s bumper close enough to read a magnet says something about autism awareness. I squint, then roll down my window to yell, “Come on, the car’s not autistic!” A mud-caked 4X4 appears in my mirror and lunges like it needs to get by. Then the yellow lights start flashing and I sigh loudly and move over for him. Moving over for yellow lights? My mood is worse that ever.

I turn up the radio and listen to the DJ talk shit about toll booth operators:

-...and I don’t care if I lose that part of my listening audience, because every time I stop to pay a toll, or, God forbid, as for direction, they’re always on the phone anyway. It’s not like they’re listening to the radio in there, even though it would be the perfect way to pass the time. In case you’re just tuning in, I drove up to a booth with a handful of pennies. Only it wasn’t just a handful of pennies, it was the exact amount needed to made that gate go up. So I see one sign that says “exact change only” and one line that says “cash.” Since I’ve never seen a pop machine that ever took pennies, I figured if the “exact change,” line didn’t have a human being, it wouldn’t take pennies either. I’ve only got a second to choose, and I don’t want to risk throwing those pennies in that scoop, watch it choke and lock up, and then I’m just sitting there while the cars crash and pile up behind me. So I swerve and pick the human. Big mistake. I had him the pennies and you’d think I’d handed him a swirl of fecal topping off an ice cream cone. He set the phone on his shoulder, sighs and says, “Didn’t you see the sign?” And I say, “I got pennies. You ever see a pop machine take a penny? Hell, I didn’t even know the technology existed.” And he sighs louder and slams them down. Then he waits and waits...and waits. And wait. Then the gate goes up...

The harmonica of a blues song starts to build in the background.

-...so I call the Department of Transportation, they give me a number that gives me a number that gives me the number of the guy in the tollbooth. But by the time I get to him, I’m not that mad anymore, so I just say “I lost my wallet when I was paying my toll, is there any way you could check?” He takes my number and says he’ll call if one turns up. And that was the best I could do. Callers have been asking me why that gave me any degree of satisfaction. And I’ll tell you why. Because the promise of a lost wallet on the road is the best way to maybe get him to step out of the booth. And that might mean he’d get clipped by a semi. You see, friends, there’s a statistic that states that truck drivers falling asleep at the wheel take out about six a month toll booth operators every month. That’s why the road starts rumbling about 300 yards before, in case you’re snoring with a mouthful of steering wheel. Doesn’t anyone remember the papers a couple weeks back? Apparently, one row of tollbooths was playing in a softball tournament this summer, and an 18-wheeler jackknifed through them all and wiped out the entire team. Well, I can see that the phone lines are lighting up with angry truckers, so this next song will be dedicated to them...

I turn the radio off before it starts.

I reach to roll up my window, and the bird that was following me, suddenly dart inside my car and stands on my dashboard near my inspection sticker. I didn’t even know that was possible, that they could match speed, then slow their wings once inside. Kind of like the movies where they drive the car up into the back of the truck. It stares at me while I drive and I slow down and roll down the passenger window so it can leave. When I look up, it’s gone, but I never heard it fly away. A bird can’t hide in car, can it? Do they crouch down and walk on their wings when their on the ground?

Off the highway at the next exit I approach and intersection and see a sad, decapitated streetlight, just the top of it, the green and yellow circles missing, sheared off by some vehicle or storm. It still flashes red and car in all four lines stare up at it, unsure of what to do.

I drive by the bookstore anyway. Two employees on a smoke break wave to me. Some kid taking out the trash turns to smile. Who the fuck is he? Only I would steal a car that would make a stranger think he knows me to. This is hilarious. Worst stalker in history. I decide to wash this car as soon as I can. A clean car would be a better disguise, and if I get pulled over, I could plead innocence (ignorance) more easily. “Officer, who would wash a car they just stole?”

I find one of those do-it-yourself car washes that’s basically just a two-sided garage and a hose you can rent. Jay used to call those “crime scene specials” claiming that they were constructed for hit-and-run drivers to wrestle the tricycle out of their grill and wash off any evidence. Stepping closer, I see that it’s only accepting quarters. I check all my pockets and come up with three. Need eight. I go back to the car and check in the seat, glove box, and under the mats. I find a scrap of paper with a list that doesn’t seem to make any sense:

-Three dogs, seventy cats, five spiders, six lizards, nine hermit crabs, two snails, one praying mantis.

The hell? Is this a recipe? Whose car did I steal anyway? Was he building a small, half-assed ark but he wasn’t good at math? Or maybe it’s a list all the animals this guy owned. Can anyone really have seventy cats? That’s a lot of cats. That’s like a house made out of cats. Can’t be a list of pets though. Half of these are pests, not pets. It reminds me of the first and last question I asked in Bible class when I was little. We were talking about floods and animals and “two by two,” and I finally got the guts to raise my hand and go, “If there’s two of everything, what did the frogs eat? Were there more than two flies, just in case? Did they keep them on tiny leashes? Can you even leash a fly?” The resulting silence and stares lasted so long I swear I heard crickets chirping. So I asked about the crickets, too.

I dig through the glove box for more answers, knowing there’s never gloves in them. There’s a tire gauge, some Mardi Gras beads, pizza coupons, ball-point pen with ink long gone. And I keep getting stuck on the praying mantis at the end of that list. I could see the rest of the creatures in a shoe box with holes punched in the top. Except for that. It’s funny that this list was in this stranger’s car, because, for a brief moment, I actually had a praying mantis as a pet. And it wasn’t easy. A shoe box didn’t work, and it ended up living in the space where my glove box used to be in the only truck that I owned. It was blue, my first vehicle with four wheels, and there were holes punched in the top, too.

A flashing arrow herds the traffic into the left lane, then back into the right. A sign on the road says simply, “15 Years For Killing A Worker.” 15 years of what? You’d think that sign would be more specific. Someone might think it’s 15 years of hugs or free breakfast.

The car in front of me has a huge dog cage filling the back window. A bumper sticker proudly proclaims, “My son’s an honor student!” Then why do they need to keep him in a cage?

I remember all my cars not by make and model, but by color, shape, radio, slow leaks, cracks in the windshield, bends in the antenna, the smell of a lost taco somewhere in the back. Mostly color though, now that I think about it. Had about seven cars, and that covered the most important crayons in the box. You know, there’s a lot of movies about someone backtracking through all their ex-girlfriends or boyfriends, but there’s no movies about going back through all the cars. That’s a shame, because one rarely exists without the other. And those cars are where the real pain, memories, and answers are. My first car was violet red, a crayon that kids fight over when they’re drawing something violent. Actually it was a truck, not a car. An '88 pickup. Something called a Rancher S-9 or some shit. It was a stick shift and kind of fast for its size. This was the first thing I installed a stereo in, and since it was only built for two, there was no where to put the speakers. They just got jammed behind the seats. Well, “seat” since it was just that one long bench. I liked that bench. It reminded me of my home away from home for four years of Little League baseball. It had a leak in the fuel line, and everyone kept saying they smelled gas when there were inside with the windows down. I thought it smelled good. It finally died when me and Jay took it home from a road trip to Columbus for my friend Gray’s wedding. Boom! Apparently something horrible happened under the hood that resulted in a smoking hole where the engine used to be. That was the weekend where we got our snapshot of the elusive Loch Ness Monster. That photograph would be one of the worst things I’ve ever done, if it wasn’t for the pictures I took before and after that one. I blame Jay for being a bad influence that weekend, but that’s okay. I’ll keep him around forever because he never says anything about my thumb.

Just to be clear, when I say someone “doesn’t say anything about my thumb,” obviously I’m talking about the thumb that isn’t there. There’s probably a better way to say it, like “he didn’t say anything about the weird void where a thumb would normally be.” It’s just easier the other way.

At another car wash, I see it only costs fifty cents for five minutes of hose action. I pull into the empty bay, step out and play a game where I’m trying to drop quarters into the a slot before it spits them out the change return. How can none of these things work when I always see them full of cars? Maybe Jay was right and they really do serve a purpose I’m not aware of. I decide to sit there awhile and see what it does. Nothing. I climb in the back seat instead. Nothing. I sit on the lump between the seat, and listening to the drip of the car wash hose holstered up high on the wall, and being uncomfortable just for five seconds back here, activates memories of fighting with my brother and sister, desperately trying to stretch out on a day-long drive to the Atlantic Ocean for vacation.

* * *

-Can I please roll down the window?

-No. Quit asking.

All the way there, I’d play this game where, if I could just take a deep breath without touching either of them, I wouldn’t have to scream. My dad would tell me to look out the window, and I yell back that I didn’t get a window. My mom would say that I wasn’t blind, that there were four windows to choose from. I would yell back that it was raining, and even I could somehow see through my brothers and sisters heads, there’s nothing to see anyway. It was a fun game.

There were limits to your patience and attention span when all the widows are up. But as any boy collecting bugs in his jar will tell you, if it’s railing, holes in the lid will drown them. Better to risk the heat and lack of air. Right when I was about to start kicking at the backs of their seats, the windows, their heads, everything, my little sister asked all very confused why my dad didn’t “just put on all the wipers” so I could see. I had to smile in spite of my pouting. All was forgiven when we started smelling the beach through the vents anyway.

The clams. I'm not sure how important they were in my life, but I will always try to give little things lots of meaning. Especially since this flashback in a car wash should have cost me fifty cents and I’m getting it for free.

When I was 9, our family used to go camping in South Carolina every summer. Our tent was always within walking distance to the beach, and me and my brother and sister couldn’t wait to burst out of the flap and run barefoot and wincing full speed down the bike trails until we crashed into the surf. We'd bring some toys with us, usually various rubber and plastic crabs and fish and ocean things. But we'd be tired of playing with those after the trauma of the car ride, so we'd turn out attention to the actual creatures in the sand instead. Anything slow and small enough to catch that looked like those toys seemed fair game. There was a big difference.

My brother was content to stab sandcrabs with a stick when they tried to bury themselves after each wave, not happy until their backs split and the legs stopped digging. He went at it like it was his job. He must have eliminated entire generations. Me, I was fascinated by the clams. Even though I was young and confused and no one corrected me from calling them “snails.” Back then, I thought everything with a shell was a snail, maybe because those words had the same number of letters. But these live clams amazed me. Not the ones you’d get on a plate, not the open butterfly shells you'd walk over on your way to the water, not the ones I’d seen in cartoons or would have played with in the car if someone was dumb enough to market a toy clam. No, a live clam was this tiny, wiggling half moon that the waves would bring out by the hundreds. I had no idea they could actually move. They were rocks and they moved? How was that happening? It was as shocking as seeing a mailbox start talking. I decided to get a bucket, found a blue plastic one rolling lazily back and forth with the pulse of the surf, and I ran along filling it with clams until the rubber handle was stretched to the breaking point.

I'd crouch down where the water was safe (I decided the danger line was where it washed up to my ankle bone) then I'd carefully lean down on my knees and elbows and watch the waves. When a good wave hit, I would see them. I would know it was a good wave because it made my feet sink and scared me just a little like an unexpected dip in the road.

At first they seemed to be nothing but colorful stones, but when I looked close I could see they were actually engaging in a slow-motion scramble to hide, trying frantically to bury themselves in time for the next wave. And if I looked real close, I could see how these rocks were moving. With a tiny transparent tongue, it would shovel and twitch and then, impossibly, balance itself on one end and sink down into the sand. Leaving behind nothing but two small, pulsing holes where it had just been a moment before. At the time, I thought those were eyes, but later I found out it was more like a nose.

After I'd seen this routine two or three times and my bored older brother was starting to stab at me instead of the sandcrabs, tragically for the clams I stopped the studying and started the collecting. I gathered up fistfuls at a time, angry that my lack of a thumb was slowing me down, ignoring that ankle-bone danger line and splashing around in breaking waves up to my knees with my brother doing his best to sabotage my new mission. My sister was too little to join us, and just watched from a safe distance where my parents could keep an eye on her. She was a late addition to the family and too young to run amok like her brothers. She was like the shortstop who runs out to cut down the distance of the throw to where the action was. There was an unwritten border, like those electric fence collars for dogs where we all knew we could go. If my parents could see her, and she could see us, them me and my brother could stay just out of my parents sight and fly just under their radar. That tiny lack of supervision is usually enough for children to hurt and kill things they shouldn’t.

My sister might have been more involved if she’d have known it was her last summer and our parents would soon be divorced. Recently, she’d gotten out a calendar and did some math to trace her conception to five vacations previous on that very same stretch of beach. But at the time, she was just an annoyance under foot, or this little staring thing in the distance. All afternoon, she watched my brother stab at my ankles and me furiously grabbing handfuls of sand and clams before they had a chance to get those strange tongues out to dig. Later I found out it wasn’t really a tongue, more like a thumb.

I stacked them in the plastic bucket until the handle finally did break and had to drag it along behind me. I found another pick bucket to cap the blue one with and I stashed my ten pounds of clams under the pier and then promptly forgot about them as our thoughts turned to campfires.

In the morning, I pulled the pink bucket off the top and found all the water inside it gone and a pile of dead, dry clams already starting to stink. I imagined the water level in the bucket slowly sinking all night as hundreds of nostrils pulsed and drank it in. I saw that the pile of shells had formed an hourglass up the side of the leaning bucket, and I wondered if this was because they had tried to climb over each other to get out. When you’re little, you think you can grab an ant, stick it inside the cap of your pen, and keep it as a pet forever while you do your homework. And you think, even if it’s something that lives in water, three carefully placed holes in the top of a jar will be the equivalent of a complicated filter system. And when you’re little, the guilt over all these things you clumsily kill never sticks. I dumped them out, and did feel bad enough to bury my crime. And when I saw one upending it’s shell and sliding down into the sand, I wouldn’t think about the ones that died, I would smile, excited to know there was a creature in the world that could exist with only a nose and a thumb, and maybe that’s all you really needed to get by.

I never thought about those clams again until, a couple years later, my little sister was pulling snails off the tomato leaves in my aunts gardens for weeks and eventually filled a baseball cap to the brim. She was still too young to understand that there’s some things you can’t keep as pets, things you can’t keep alive no matter how good or bad your intentions. However, she was old enough to resist calling them “clams” like I insisted.

I found the cap she’d forgotten after who knows how long, following a trail of stench the length of a football field behind a pile of firewood. I scratched my sweaty little head in confusion, wondering why there were clams in northwest Ohio. I had thought clams and snails were the same thing until that summer on the beach. Then, as I poured out the snails that had boiled in the sunshine and abandoned their shells in a final attempt to run, the smell made me choked back a scream so hard that a little puke came out my nose. That helped, actually.

::: david - 3:38 AM [+] :::
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