When I was a kit my sister and I would often hunt for colorful shells along the seashore. My mother, a telemarketer who had earned a bachelor's in business from a university no one of great importance had ever heard of, had a side hussle making earrings and necklaces for tourists. My father, an older dog fox, was still of the opinion that youngsters should play outside every once in awhile despite the easier option of letting Netflix and smartphones keep his children busy.
That hunting was best shortly after high tide, when Neptune called back the froth and fury and left a glittering bounty upon sodden sands. My sister and I had two rules: finders keepers, and if something had found it already it was off limits.
The rumours are true. You can find hermit crabs living in pepsi cans and though the cochinos of that era could sometimes grow within beautiful combinations of glistening ivory and rainbow striations to the size of dinner plates we both showed such oddities respect even though it would have led to greater profits had we seized their shelters instead.
I was happy in those days, had little on my mind except the next math test, the cute coyote girl who always winked when I snuck a glance.
My sister was gloomier. When she turned fifteen she started wearing black all the time. She got her ears pierced early to the horror of mom (ironic I suppose, since she was in the business) and showed me her first tattoo on her sixteenth birthday. It was a rose, the petals gray as a gravestone and the jade thorns dripping with blood, ghostly beneath her fur it twined up her wrist almost to the elbow. Beneath this phantom were the words 'love is a lie unless you know it has nothing to do with making it.'
I was a clever thing, even then, and I thought I understood it. Our parents certainly didn't though, and upon it's discovery there was a dust up between the three that would have made me blush had I been one of the old hairless monkeys who used to rule the world.
We still sought shells after that yet things were different. She seemed angry all the time, restless. The slightest frustration brought up her hackles, and her lips would part and show the pearly points of still growing canines. "They just don't get it bro," she'd often say.
I would just smile and nod, not knowing what else to do, one ear back and paws akimbo. I'd tell her to tell them so. I'd tell her I looked up to her. Sometimes I'd even say I wanted to be just like her, even though I worshipped our father.
She knew that though. "If you can't get out from under the shadow of old silver you'll never know how to be free," she'd often declare haughtily.
Old silver...well, he was a little long in the whisker. A shard of me wanted to laugh when she said that yet...there's this fear you see. One that makes nightmares, that makes you stare at the stars and wonder why. That makes you look in the mirror and wonder whether what you see is truly you or a doppleganger draining you dry like a red solo cup at a party. That force wants a refill and you're just a vessel for the next thrill, you're...
His step seemed a little slower every year, his voice just a little softer, and I-
Well, that's neither here nor there. Sure it's not.
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One evening, under a full moon just before my sister left for college, we found the greatest shell ever. It was a huge conch, majestic, wet and agleam and wrapped in dark seaweed. The spikes that rose from its hypnotic swirl were as large as wolf claws, and at the end of its spiral was a long spike that reminded one of an assassin's stilleto or a unicorn's horn.
I was taken aback, and so she touched it first, and per our rules I turned my slender back on the treasure and forced a laugh.
"Mine!" she barked happily. "Beat you to it brother!"
"So you did," I said. "Are you going to give it to mom or-"
"Hell no," she growled vehemently. "This thing could fetch a thousand at the sea market. She'd just make a candleholder or make it an accessory to one of those hideous statues she's taken to carving from coral lately. What a fucking waste for something so beautiful."
"Sure," I said softly. Suddenly I noticed the moon. It was out early, eerily bright as it rose in opposition to the russet glow of the sun as it set. The receding waves crashed like thunderclaps. Sometimes I wondered why one chased the other, why they seemed so perfectly opposed. I'm not one to believe in gods or anything but...strange isn't it, how duality is so like a razor balanced to slice and cut yet be dropped when one knows what one holds. I-
She punched my shoulder and called me a sore loser and I started laughing and swore I wasn't and all of a sudden the dark voice and the eyes of the dragon were gone and it was just two foxes on a beach, one almost full grown and one who wished he was.
I have a terrible habit of making too much of things.
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She went off to college and I stayed in town, learned to be a fisher like my dad. I crafted hooks, cast nets, learned the tides and how to rig a sail and caulk a boat (or build one from scratch). For a year or so I forgot about the shell hunts with her, forgot about the conch, forgot even that she had ever called my father 'Old Silver'. When he and I battled storms and huge fish together he never seemed that way to me. In my eyes he was and always will be a warrior, a figure larger than life, who faced down the ocean itself just to put a meal on the tables of those who didn't how.
He was a hero of a sort, to the town, and he was a true one to me.
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Let's leave it there. Let's shelve calamity, sorrow, darkness and all that must be when something good exists. The goblet of blood time lusts for can wait a few hours, for I am tired of the telling.
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