ODDITIES

Running onto the beach, I find that my little sister has been cutting open molluscs again.

         “Look, I got a big one!” she exclaims triumphantly, holding up the rusty boxcutter she had used to do the deed. We both stand and look at the pale-pink, fleshy offal slowly spilling out of the large conch shell at our feet.
         “Leigh... you’ve got to stop doing this. I can’t keep hiding this from Mom.”
         “But look at how pretty the shell is!”
         Leigh picks the shell up and scoops the remaining mollusc innards out of it as I try to suppress the urge to throw up. The pungent smell of rotting seafood fills the air, overtaking the salty sea-breeze rolling in from the water. 
         “For Christ’s sake, Leigh— could you at least do that somewhere else?”
         Leigh was right about one thing, though – it was indeed a big one. The conch was about the size of my forearm, mottled with pale salmon and brown, with a couple of old barnacles stuck onto it. The creature that had once inhabited it must have grown to be quite old, which made it all the more harrowing that its peaceful existence was ended by a sadistic twelve-year-old with a boxcutter.
         “Why did you have to kill it...” I say in a tone that was maybe once would have been filled with outrage but now was just a mix of disappointment and mild disgust. I already knew the answer, though. It’s been the same every time.
         “Mercy.” She scrapes some more mollusc tissue from the shell with her little knife.
         She has always claimed to have killed them out of mercy. She’s described how horrible it would to be stuck in the sun all day long, slowly drying up and feeling your insides shrivel in on themselves. Even though I keep telling her that when the tide comes back in in the afternoon, it’ll carry them all back to sea if they hadn’t been killed by the sun by then. Leigh, however, doesn’t buy it, and says that a quick, painless death must surely be better than the possibility of a slow and painful one. She also told me that if they died on land and got wash backed in, that would mean there would be dead stuff floating around in the sea. I told her there was always dead stuff floating around in the sea. She replied that at least there was one less dead thing now.
         I turn my mind to something more concrete, which is the boxcutter in her hand.
         “Where’d you get that?”
         She guiltily avoids making eye contact.
         “Kitchen.”
         “Where in the kitchen?”
She shifts her feet nervously. I already knew the answer, but it was worth hearing her admit it.
         “Did you go into the restricted drawer?”
         She nods sheepishly. The restricted drawer isn’t even a drawer, it’s a Tupperware box on top of the kitchen cabinets where our parents store things they didn’t want us touching. I wasn’t even aware of its existence until my older brother got caught sneaking cigarettes out of it.
         “Give me that,” I say, grabbing the boxcutter from her hand. It’s covered in a thick, clear goo, which drips down my elbow. I try to swallow my disgust.
         The boxcutter was a first. Over the years, she’d come up with a variety of creative methods to put her slimy little friends out of their misery, from scissors to butter-knives and once, rather memorably, a pair of my grandmother’s knitting needles. It was a game, of sorts, to her – she didn’t see a living creature, she saw a brightly-coloured balloon she could burst. She saw a cool trophy she could take home and put on her shelf.
         Leigh had started carrying out her miniature executions a few years ago, but only I knew about them. When she brought home the shells, she told our mother that she had simply found them empty on the beach. I believed her at first, but then I found out when I went to fetch her for lunch and saw her about to stab a sharpened chopstick into a starfish.
         I didn’t tell our parents. I suppose if they found out, they’d have put her in a psychiatric ward for the mentally unstable youth. However, even though she’s always been a strange kid, I don’t think Leigh is dangerous. She doesn’t kill them because she enjoys the act of killing. In her eyes, she’s saving them. She’s playing God in a pink t-shirt and leopard-print leggings.
         “This is gonna look so good in my collection,” she says gleefully.
         “What about that?” I ask, gesturing to the mound of pink slop oozing into the sand.
         “What about it?”
         “Are you just gonna leave it for someone to clean up?”
         “The ocean will clean it up.”
         “The ocean doesn’t come out this far and you know it.”
         Leigh sighs. She’s clearly impatient to take the shell home to clean it out in the bathtub like she always does.
         “Why don’t we bury it?” I suggest.
         “Why?”
         “Well... when a person dies, we bury them, don’t we?”
         “We set Grandad on fire, though.”
         “Cremated. And anyway, you’re not allowed to set fires on the beach.”
         She considers my proposal for a moment.
         “Fine,” she says, getting down on her knees and starting to dig a small grave.
         “Leigh, do you ever think it would have been more merciful to carry them back out to the ocean? That way they don’t have to die in the sun or be sliced open by you.”
         She pauses digging for a moment.
         “But the ocean’s far. I don’t wanna go all the way out there. Also, it’s really cold and the waves are big. And besides,” she says, resuming digging, “it’s satisfying to watch them burst and get all gooey and stuff.”
         “How would you feel if someone burst you open to see you get all gooey?”
         “Why’d someone do that?”
         “Maybe you were the one drying up on the beach. Maybe they saw it as mercy.”
         Leigh’s expression contorts.
         “But it’d like, hurt and stuff.”
         “Does it not hurt for the molluscs?”
         Leigh starts to scoop the pink flesh into the hole. She examines the goo between her fingers.
         “Dunno. They don’t have human nerves, do they?”
         “Maybe they have mollusc nerves.”
         “I don’t see any.”
         “Maybe they’re really small.”
         Against my best instincts, I feel the need to crouch down and help her bury the remains of the mollusc. When the last of it has been covered with sand, she smooths the surface to make it look as if there had never been a disturbance to begin with.
         “There,” she says, sitting back onto her knees. I reach for a nearby twig and stick it into the sand as a crude grave marker.
         As we both sit and look at the final resting place of Leigh’s victim, something unexpected happens. She starts to cry.
         “I’m sorry,” she whispers between quiet sobs. “I didn’t mean to hurt it.”
         I take her hand silently. For the first time in her exploits, she seems to have understood that she has taken a life, albeit one of a mildly repulsive sea-creature.
         “Come on,” I say, helping her up. “Let’s go home.”
         Leigh picks up the shell and wipes away the last of her sniffles with her arm.
         “Do you think the man in the clouds will be mad at me?”
         I look at her with a little confusion.
         “Do you mean God?”
         “No, I mean the man who sits up in the clouds and makes it rain when he’s sweaty. My teacher said he decides who’s good and bad.”
         I decide that the best thing to do is to just entertain her for now.
         “I think he’ll understand that you’re just a kid.”
         “Hey!” she shouts, indignant. “I’m gonna be thirteen in three months!”
         “Exactly. You have a lot to learn. Now come on. Dinner’s going to get cold.”

         I take her hand and we make our way back to the boardwalk, hoping that our parents will be merciful to us when Leigh presents them with her shell and the truth.