The Sea Scallop

There were any number of things I could have noticed first about her. The tall boots. Her gray eyes. The lazy brown waves of her hair. The chunky necklace draped around her slender neck. The small mole just below her left eye that I couldn’t help but kiss. These were the things that the people around her noticed. The people sitting at the tables eating chicken breasts with plastic utensils and salads wet with weak dressing.

Standing behind her, I first noticed what rested in her left hand as it hung by her side next to the counter. Absent-mindedly, she rubbed her thumb in the smooth curves of a small scallop shell. Held in place by her index and middle fingers, she lived, worked, fucked, ate, sang, slept, walked, wept with that shell in her hand. She had found it on a beach on the Cape two years ago when she had been killing time before a dinner of salmon, potatoes and asparagus. She had found it amongst a collection of pebbles left by the receding tide of the afternoon. She had lifted it up with her thumb and her forefinger and brought it to the water where she rubbed out all of the sand stuck in its ridges. The scallop was not particularly beautiful. Its whites and purples and browns and reds were dull and haphazardly mixed.

She had held it close to her eye to study it. She turned it over and over, running her fingers across every curve, ridge and edge, memorizing  its simple design as waves lapped the sand 10 feet off and the sun dipped behind the dunes.

I could see that she was there now. She was awake and her eyes were open, but she was not in front me. Her fingers were working through that shell as she stepped out of the line and onto the sand. It was there that I saw her take off her boots. I saw her eyes fill with the softest blue and the lazy brown waves of her hair catch the wind. I saw her drop the necklace in the sand and let the sun warm her neck. It was there that I kissed the small mole just below her left eye.