33 Biggest Little City in the World
California
July
27th day of camp
The others were mad at her again.
They clustered behind her on the sand, watching as she stepped onto the wet ledge of rocks.
“What is she doing?”
“What are you doing?”
Ignoring them, she picked her way across tide pools, careful not to hurt the creatures underfoot—quivering purple anemones that retracted under her shadow, barnacles like blisters of stone.
All she wanted was a few minutes away from them. A few minutes alone to breathe in the cold wind off the ocean before the van delivered them back to the airless cabins, the dark chapel.
There were only ten minutes left in the game, and it would take her almost that long to make her way back across the slippery outcropping. If they didn’t return in time it’d be another mark against her.
She spotted something tangled in kelp, lodged between two flat rocks near the drop-off. So close to the surf. As if it had been carried across the ocean and snugged there, at the jagged edge of the world, just for her.
Stepping closer, she crouched, then flattened herself onto her belly. Her shirt and jeans drenched, her elbow scraped, she reached out but got only a rubbery handful of kelp.
She shut her eyes. If she looked down at the sea she would fall in like the doomed man on the keep-off sign behind her, a stick figure tumbling into scalloped waves.
Salt spray stinging her face, she fumbled through the squelching mass of kelp. Until her fingers found what they wanted and it gave, escaping its wet nest with a gentle sucking sound.
She knelt on the wet rocks as she examined her prize, brushing away green muck. The driftwood was longer than her hand, curved into a C. One end was pointier than the other, and in the center the wood splintered and cracked. But imperfect as it was, the resemblance was unmistakable, miraculous: a crescent moon.
Cur-di-lune, he’d said. I grew up in a town called Curdilune.
A strange, pretty name.
He’d drawn it for her in the dusty ground behind the craft cabin that morning. His calloused finger had sketched rectangles for the buildings. Houses and a church, shops and a park, nestled together against the inner curve of a crescent-shaped lake.
Curdilune. Cur is heart in French, he’d explained. Lune is moon. So it means Heart of the Moon. Then, with a light touch on her wrist—You miss home, too?
The others had walked by then, before she could answer, and he’d erased his little map, swirling his palm over the shapes in the dirt so quickly she knew it was their secret.
If she ran back to her team now, her find might help them win—a piece of driftwood was Item 7 on the list stuffed into her back pocket.
She glanced over at them and slid the wet treasure down her pocket, untucking her shirt to hide it. She’d give it to him instead.
It was a thank-you, an offering, an invitation. A cry for help after the long, bewildering summer.
June 2016
The invitation came on a Saturday.
I was taking Jett for a walk, and she was frantic with anticipation, nails skittering on the lobby’s tile floor, black fur spiking up so she looked more like a little dragon than a Lab.
“If you calm down I can do this faster, lady,” I said as I high-stepped to free myself from the leash she’d wrapped around my ankles. “Off.”
She retreated, settling under the bank of mailboxes. But right when I got my letters out, she sprang up and butted my wrist with her head. Perfect aim, perfect timing.