Together they dug a hole. The boy and the girl. And boy wearing gloves, with fingers like fleshy worms poking through the wool his mother knit, told girl of the long lost oyster shells.
Knees in the dry sand. The thin top layer crusted like old sugar and holding their footprints like broken road lines, painted by children in the rain, falling in and out of one another, overtaking each other. And running
the boy said, ‘Once upon a time I heard that once upon a time you could find oysters here.’
And the girl thought, surely somewhere there must be two oysters like he and I. Waiting to be found.