Molting
Cecilia, Thomas and Paul navigated their way through the obnoxious guffaws and overstretched arms of the adults spilling grey goose lemonades on their toes. They ran one after the other, ducking and weaving, to arrive at the path on the opposite side of the deck.
The deck served as the afternoon watering hole, where the adults sipped their cocktails and smoked burly cigars while bickering over investment deals or complaining about taxes before moving indoors with the sunset. The adults largely ignored the children and the children were like to do the same, so long as they didn’t need money for the ice cream shop or a judge to yield a verdict on a domestic dispute - though the adults were often too incoherent to respond and the children often times resorted to vigilante politics.
The children followed the path that led toward the freshwater sea of Lake Superior, carving their way through the rocks that left dimples in the soles of their naked feet. Ignoring the shells and worn glass, the children bent over the stoic crayfish hiding in the shallows and the washed-up fish that freckled the shore, collecting bits of death to take home.
Thomas prodded through the shallows alongside Cecilia, looking up from the water to Paul, who stood on the dry sand of the beach. “Where do you think all the crayfish went?” he asked, thinking of a time when the crayfish were thick among the rocks and easy to find.
Cecilia spotted a red-orange shell between the agates a foot beyond her toes; her hand hovered directly over it, and inch above the surface. “How should I know,” she responded, her hand darting quickly into the water and back out again, a skilled hunter.
But the exoskeleton was lifeless – the crayfish dead. She pushed it into her pocket; she would feed it to the few crayfish they kept in a tank back at the house. They were scavengers, and she knew they would pick any dead thing apart for meat. They even ate their own molted exoskeleton to fuel the growth of their new one.
Cecilia abandoned the shallows and crawled down the dock that hung over the edge of the sea, mesmerized between the cracks at the tiny minnows playing beneath the surface. Thomas and Paul followed the oldest to the end of the plank. As the sun began to dissolve behind the horizon, the three of them plopped their bottoms down on the brim of the dock, their feet dangled in the water.
“Bet if you jumped in, you couldn’t touch the bottom,” Thomas teased, nudging Paul in the ribs. “You’re so short,” he laughed, “you couldn’t reach”.
“Of course he would touch the bottom, you idiot. He would sink,” Cecilia said as a crooked grin mischievously spread from the corners of her mouth.
Paul piped in, “I would not,” his voice an octave higher, unsure and small. His hands cradled each other in the crevice between his knees; his lips perched into a pout, though his round and soft face made his attempt at defiance more angelic than anything else.
“Do it then,” Thomas urged, but Paul remained glued to the wood of the dock, staring into the grey sea. Thomas guffawed like his father.
Paul simply followed them wherever they went, a tiny shadow that hardly spoke and one hardly noticed. When they found the dilapidated boat house swimming in the shallows a few miles down the shoreline last summer, Paul had watched solemnly as Cecilia and Thomas pillaged through the edifice. When Paul moved from the silent background as if to stop him from stoning the windows, Thomas had only guffawed.
After a few moments of silence watching the sun disappear, Cecilia uprooted herself from the edge and walked back along the dock towards the shore, followed by Thomas. She hated to walk through the woods back to the cabin and the boisterous adults there, but it was worse at night.
Paul remained dangling over the edge of the dock as Cecilia and Thomas vanished up the path, remembering his brother’s guffaw, his sister’s smirk, the clumsy adults holding drinks and cigars back at the house. He didn’t want to follow Cecilia and Thomas back to that, where Cecilia would tuck him in and kiss him goodnight while Thomas ran the lengths of the party trying to entertain the adults.
Paul stood up and removed his sandals and Mickey Mouse t-shirt, resolved to sink his feet into the bottom. He didn’t care if Cecilia or Thomas believed him or not. He hovered over the edge as he’d seen his brother do, and his father, his arms held above his head, his hands aligned as though in prayer.
He plunged himself into the sea, flopping through the surface and feeling the water rush by his body as he sank into the sandy bottom. He felt relieved when his toes reached the body of the earth. But his toes sank through that false surface, and he realized there was no bottom. He felt the sand on his knees, his thighs, and started for a moment to kick and desperately flailed his arms. A rock suddenly appeared beneath his feet and he used all his energy to straighten his limbs and rocket above the surface of the sea. But the sea had pulled him closer to shore and under the dock, and his head found a ceiling where the sky should have been.
Halfway to the cabin, Cecilia suddenly stopped and turned to look behind her. “Where’s Paul?” she asked Thomas, searching beyond him for their shadow, not realizing that shadows cease to exist in the dark.
“I thought he would follow us,” he said, turning to look down the path the way they had come. The woods looked ominous and cruel without the sun casting light between the trees. Cecilia grunted in annoyance as she turned to retrace their steps; she expected Paul would be pouting on the dock still, upset at their teasing. As always, Thomas followed her.
They walked to the end of the dock, back to where they had watched the sunset together, and though his shirt and sandals laid piled at the edge, Paul was gone. Cecilia checked in the boats that lined the dock before turning back along with Thomas to search along the beach for her youngest brother.
But where sand should have softened the ground beneath her feet, Cecilia felt the crunch of eggshells breaking. The stoic crayfish were crawling from the sea, covering the beach as one giant throbbing body. Cecilia looked at Thomas, but he stood silent on the dock, afraid to follow her across the threshold.
“Thomas, come on,” she said, her voice mechanically calm. “I think we’d better get back”.
“But what about Paul?” His voice cracked as he edged back down the dock toward the sea.
“He’ll follow us,” she said, her head bobbing up and down like the waves bringing in the crayfish. She looked at the creatures beating beneath her feet, how she’d collected hundreds of them over the years, piling them into buckets and carting them home, never once afraid of their tiny claws. Now their tiny claws were making her cringe and her feet bleed.
“Thomas, he’ll follow us,” she repeated, looking up from the crayfish to the trees lining the beach. “We have to go. Come on, Thomas. Grab my hand,” she told him, reaching through the air for him, each second spent waiting for him. His hands remained entwined, twisting together in panic.
While Thomas wavered, his gaze entombed upon the body of their shells, Cecilia dove from the throbbing mass onto the dock, and, slipping behind him, knocked Thomas from his fearful coma and into the sea of crayfish. Feeling his feet attacked from beneath, Thomas leaped through the beach to the trees and the path on the other side, with Cecilia following closely at his heels. They didn’t stop running until they reached the house.
They didn’t stop to talk with the adults still laboring over their vodka on the deck, though the sun had set. They slipped into the house through the back door and went straight to their respective beds, at either end of the bedroom. But neither of them slept.
In the morning, when the adults found Paul missing from the breakfast table and then, later, when they found a pile of his belongings on the edge of the dock, they asked the children, “What happened to Paul?” With Thomas silently standing behind her, Cecilia solemnly told the adults that he must have jumped into the sea and drowned.
Shortly later, police swarmed the beach and the shallows where the crayfish had been the night before. The adults hid behind the walls of the house, waiting with crossed fingers, unsure how to balance the weight of a wine glass in one hand with the weight of a dead child in the other.
Cecilia and Thomas watched from the edge of the woods as the police searched, knowing they’d never find the body of Paul. Knowing it had disappeared with the crayfish.
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