Near water’s edge,
the delicate sound of thousands of shells
dancing on turning tide
make the sound
of most delicate wind chimes
ringing like tiny bells, fairies at play.
routinely cast on shore,
on shore to be collected
as treasure.
She didn’t doubt she knew more about him than the woman he married. They had been old and secret friends for far too long. His wife would never think to ask him about the collection of small seashells in an intricately decorated wooden box nestled in the bottom of his armoire. There were several tiny conk shells in his collection that took a magnifying glass to see if you expected to see more detail than a simple dot. Probably his wife would never know the shells existed. She would never hear the excited explanation of the type and size of a shark when he found a shark’s tooth there on the white beach sand. It was his favorite place; his skin well tanned by summer’s end. Would his young wife ever bother to ask what was in the leather bound book that held the drawings and descriptions of new things that he stumbled onto in his travels? She could still picture the pages covered in drawings and in his left slanted script in blue ink on parchment. No doubt the young girl only saw dollar signs and he was blindly in love.
He was handsome, rich, and well endowed and these attributes were all a woman like that would care about. He’d put a three karat diamond on the girl’s hand, not because of its worth, but because she was so much like the living ghost of the sweetheart from his youth. He couldn’t help but lust and give. He’d had too much money for too long to remember how much power it held over most people. Other people cared about what seemed too superficial to matter to him: people like his young wife and things based around looks and money. It would be only a matter of time before those rose colored glasses would fall from his face, and his heart would be broken again.
She sat beside the water and listened to what he said she would hear; the delicate sound of seashells in the turning tide. It was the sound of thousands of small fairy’s bells striking each other as they played. The salt of the sea spray blended with the tears she cried for him.
© 2007 C. Harter Amos
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