The Trade in the Shallows

The rain stopped all at once, and Yara heard the sea come back. She rolled her sleeves and stepped off the warm stone into the shallows. The water was the temperature of a held hand. River slid in beside her, grey-brown and dripping, whiskers beaded with rain. Steam lifted off the flat rocks where the sun had leaned all afternoon. Everything smelled rinsed. Yara pushed her toes down and felt the sand underneath, ridged row after row, like the roof of her own mouth. River rolled once and came up facing her, nose first. "You felt that too," Yara said. They waded out together, slowly, into the long soft stripes the late light laid across the water.

Yara went along the tide pools with both hands out. The weed on the near rock was velvet one way and slippery the other. Barnacles rasped her thumb, a hundred tiny gritty hills. A limpet shell was ribbed like a fingerprint. Eelgrass slid between her fingers, cool and flat as ribbon. "Everything out here has its own kind of skin," she said. River pressed a paw to the weed, lifted it, pressed it again, and their whiskers twitched. Then they tipped backward and floated, which is how River listened best. A crab moved under Yara's shadow and she lifted her foot and let it go about its evening.

River had been carrying a stone since morning. Yara had noticed it at breakfast and again at noon: a round grey stone, held against their chest while they floated, used for knocking open the small tough things River liked. It was a good stone. It was also the wrong shape. Twice while they drifted it rolled off River's belly and vanished into the sand with a small private plop, and twice River dived and came up with it and settled it back and began again. Yara did not laugh. She watched the way you watch somebody trying. The third time, River sighed through their nose and the stone sank anyway.

So Yara went looking. She walked the ribbed sand with her eyes down, letting her feet read it, and the water pulled past her ankles and let go. Most stones were round. Round was what the sea liked making. Then her heel found something flat. She crouched and brought it up streaming: a grey slab the size of her palm, warm from the whole day's sun, with a shallow dip worn into the middle of it, exactly the shape of a thumb. She set it on her own flat hand and tilted her hand. The stone stayed where it was. Yara turned and waded back, holding it high out of the water.

River was already surfacing with something tucked under one arm. It was half a mussel shell, blue-black and rough on the outside, and inside it was smooth as the inside of an eyelid, pearled, with a curve of violet near the hinge. River had been keeping it for days. Yara put one finger on the smooth part and drew it slowly from end to end. It was the best thing she had touched all week, better than the velvet weed, better than the warm slab. "Everything out here has its own kind of skin," she said, "but this one is the quietest." River looked at the flat grey stone in her other hand and stopped swimming.

Nobody said anything, because nothing needed saying. Yara leaned over and laid the flat stone down on River's chest, in the middle, where it settled into the wet fur and stayed. River let the mussel shell go. It drifted sideways through the green water and Yara caught it before it reached the sand. Then River rolled, on purpose, all the way over and all the way back, and the stone was still there. They tapped it twice with a paw to be sure. Yara sat down in the shallows with the water at her waist and ran her thumb across the pearly curve, again and again, while the sun went down behind the rocks.

The tide came up around them the way a blanket comes up. Far out, something large and unhurried broke the surface, breathed, and went under without hurrying anybody. The moon arrived early and lay down on the water in pieces. Yara lay back and floated, shell held on her stomach, and River floated beside her with the flat stone riding their chest like a small grey passenger. The sea moved them a little and then a little more. Her hair spread out. Her ears went under, and the whole world became one low hum with River's paddling stitched through it. She thought about how many shapes the sea had made just by rubbing at things.

When she finally stood, the sandbar was further than she remembered, so she let the water do it. A swell came in behind her and lifted her off her heels and carried her, slow and smooth, all the way to the warm shallow place where the sand was soft and only a few inches deep. River came in on the same swell, stone and all. Yara lay in the warm water with her cheek against the sand. "Everything out here has its own kind of skin," she murmured, and her thumb went once more across the pearled curve and stopped there. River settled against her arm. Out past the rocks, the sea went on quietly rubbing things smooth.