Rebecca

I am a glass house with glass guts inside me. I wear a silver halo on my head. It is a tin hat: round and shiny like a puddle or a knight’s shield. I cannot hide what lives inside. I display my wares for all to see: discarded treasure, once tossed away, rejected and unwanted it sank into her deep and coursing embrace. It tumbled around and around like teeth in a sink until it came to rest between the stones, eyes skyward waiting to be found.

A sort of sunny nothing day brings me back. Particles of me collected, taken up by small hands and briefly jostling, pocketed. Then the small part is returned, one short drop and I am with my brothers. Individually, we are spectacular, a joy for little fingers to hold and roll in sandy palms. We are all different sizes and shades, but every one of us bears the smooth skin of our rough past. Together we crouch and cluster inside this glass pedestal. We cuddle and jostle for position, standing on one another to reach the top.

We smell of salt and estuary mud. We bear many different shades of green : an emerald rainbow from twisted hidden toad to yawning 5am mist. In your hand I feel satisfyingly cylindrically cold like a can of beer in a hot tub. My bottom has a round racetrack of bumps made by an ant’s tractor tyres. If I were a food, I would be salted caramel ice cream a wind-swept sweetness intermingled with cracks and crunches inside.

I’m important because I hold inside of me a collection of days spent together: the family spread out over a quilt of sand, filtering out the unnecessary in search of bright glinting treasure. The treasure of grinning wind chapped faces, of the sun on their sandy backs as they lie on their bellies sifting through grains. They quietly talk to themselves as they do it, making up stories in their heads. This is the opium of childhood. No TV, no distractions just a face-to-face encounter with mother nature, and each other. One of them will shout “I’ve found one!” and come running over proudly offering it up and when we get home they listen to the satisfying clink as it joins its family: home at last.