seashells

It started with a doorknob.

She turned it and when she stepped outside there was no porch. Suddenly her shoes were gone and she was stepping on seashells. Thousands of them, making up a beach, a beach that stretched and stretched beyond her doorway, her doorknob, her bare, bleeding feet. They were sharp and they hurt to walk on. But she walked. Some stuck in her feet and clung on for dear life, digging in deeper and deeper with each step, until the bottoms of her feet were colored pale pink and dark brown and swirled grays.

When her feet stopped working she got down on her hands and knees, and looked out, looked out to the setting sun, a half-globe sinking into the waiting waves. Her fingers curled around cowries and oysters and snails and crunched them up until they bled out of their shells, broken bits of shell, digging in and cutting into veins. Speckled cowry and smooth oyster and swirling snails dying red, and she thought, My God, this is how the Indians painted.

Her knees, too, bleeding and scraped, dragging over all those shells, painting Indian pictures, pictures of fat bulls and scrawny men. Maybe in actuality those men were buff and broad and their daughters and wives held onto them and laid silken black hair against smooth red chest and they always cried. Maybe they always cried. Maybe they cried. Always.

When she got to the sea it was empty. A huge basin of nothingness. It went deep and on the bottom little fish were flopping around gasping for air. If the fish had tears, they would cry, she thought. Like the Indian women. And then she thought, why don't I cry?

But there were no tears.

Her tears were the ocean, and the ocean was empty.