The Slow Undoing of the Mussel

The tide pool held the cold the way a stone holds it, all the way through. Soren had his sleeves pushed up and his forearms were pink from the water and he did not care. His aunt was forty feet down the beach with a paint scraper and a bucket, muttering at barnacles, and she had told him to stay where the rocks were flat. This rock was flat. This rock had a starfish on it.

The starfish was the orange of an old road cone. It lay draped over a mussel like a hand over a doorknob, five arms curled down and gripping. It was not moving. It had not moved in the whole time he had been watching, which was long enough that the sun had shifted and the shadow of his own head had crawled off the water.

He pressed one finger against the top of the starfish. It was rough, like wet sandpaper, and it did not flinch. Underneath, where an arm met the mussel, the shell was open. Not wide. A gap the width of a fingernail, dark inside.

Soren knew mussels. Mussels clamped. You could not pry one open with your fingers, he had tried, they held their two halves shut with a muscle stronger than anything that small had a right to have. This one was open a crack and staying open, and the starfish was doing nothing, and both of those things were wrong at once.

He put his face close to the surface until the cold came up off it against his lips.

Between the starfish and the shell there was something else. Something that was not starfish and was not mussel. A film. A pale, wrinkled, jelly-colored film, thin as the skin on warm milk, spread into the gap and down into the dark of the shell. It moved a little. Not like an animal moves. Like a sheet settling.

He waited for it to be a trick of the light. He shifted his head so the light came from the other side. The film was still there, folded into the mussel, and now he could see it wasn't going in through any wound or crack the starfish had made. It was coming out of the starfish. Out of the middle of its underside, where he had assumed a mouth would just be a mouth.

Soren sat back on his heels. His knees were soaked. His notebook was in his jacket up on the dry rock and he did not go for it yet.

The thing coming out of the starfish was the starfish's stomach. He was fairly sure. He was not fully sure, which was worse, because being fully sure would have let him stop looking and being fairly sure meant he had to keep looking to close the gap. The animal had turned itself partly inside out and reached the inside part into the mussel through a crack too narrow for anything to fit, and the film was thin enough to fit because it was not a mouth and not a tongue. It was a stomach that had left home.

He thought about what that meant and did not like where it went and went there anyway.

The starfish was not going to swallow. It was never going to swallow. There was no swallow coming. It had folded its digestion out onto its food the way you might spread a cloth over a table, and somewhere under that pale film the soft body of the mussel was already coming undone, dissolving in place, still inside its own shell, turning from an animal into a soup that the starfish would drink back up through the same door it had sent the stomach out of.

Soren became aware of his own stomach. It sat where it had always sat, behind his ribs, doing its dark quiet work on the crackers he'd eaten in the car. It had never once occurred to him that a stomach was a room you were kept out of. That his food went into him. That in was the only direction he had. He had a body with an inside and an outside and a rule, a strict rule he had never noticed because nothing had ever broken it in front of him, that the inside stayed in.

The starfish did not have the rule.

He looked at the orange arms gripping the shell, patient as a closed hand, and he understood that patience now. There was no rush. The mussel could not run because the mussel was already being eaten from the outside in, quietly, without a single bite, while it was still whole enough to look whole.

His aunt called something down the beach about the tide turning. Soren didn't answer. He wet his finger again and touched the very edge of the pale film, gently, at the seam where it met the shell. It was softer than the starfish's back. It was softer than anything. It gave under his fingertip like the surface of milk and did not tear, and he felt, faint through the cold water, the smallest resistance, the film adjusting itself around the place he had touched, going on with its work.

He took his finger back and shook the water off it, slowly, the way you do when you are not thinking about your hand.

Somewhere under the film the mussel was still there. Its shell still curved the same. From above, if you didn't know, you'd think it was only a starfish resting on a rock in the sun, doing nothing at all.

The tide slid a first thin sheet of new water across the pool, and the orange arms did not move, and the film under them went on quietly turning the mussel into something the sea could carry away.