Mussel Memory

During the night, diving through bins, Les found an aluminum tin of fennel and paprika mussels with a peel-back lid. There was nothing on the box about keeping them refrigerated and expiry was still a year off, but someone had tossed it anyway. Les dropped the tin in the creek to cool, and walked along to Amy’s pressure-treated lean-to, the one behind the lightning-struck willow. Stopping in on an old flame, was how he saw it. Amy, though, said seafood wasn’t her thing, never had been, he should know that. She looked at him sideways, as if that was the best way to judge him. She admitted that nowadays, and to be honest, she wished he was someone else, someone more easy-going.  That might’ve saved you, she said, from all this, and she indicated with a level, surveying hand (as if she wasn’t part of it too) the encampment around them, the algaed water like a sea of gone-bad limes, like a velvet curtain falling behind them. He retreated from her, diminished in all the familiar ways, to his dying fire, and listened, while the batteries hung on, to old Pink Floyd.  Remember when you were young, Roger whispered, You shone like the sun. Above him, an airliner was an aluminum needle stitching sky to branch, branch to sky, over and over, making shelter.