Shell

Michelle Grade 10

Shells of all sizes littered the floor: colors ranging from milky white to dark ocean blue. Phalene sat in the midst of her shells, her small red cheeks pressed up against two wide husks, her pale lips upturned. 
Silence rocked the house: no mice squeaked under the floorboards, no clomping steps of her parents, no wind tapping at her window. The curtains were drawn, and nothing penetrated them. 
Shifting on the floor, Phalene set her two shells down. Each was a pearly white with streaks of green and blue down the frills of their bones. Glancing at the scattered shells, she giggled. A single laugh soon swallowed by silence. Crawling forwards, she scattered shells about her, as she cleared a path through them, one by one.
She moved to a corner of the room, glancing around her as she stumbled across. Settling down in a clearing, she surveyed her new position, picking up an orange and turquoise conch shell, glistening with seawater, though there was no water within the room.
Tracing the swirling patterns, Phalene pressed the shell against her fingers, her milky nails gliding down the chalkboard. Gleaming white lines gauged onto the surface, scars on the tissue of the bone. The carcases around her trembled as she worked her way over the conch.

“Clean white bones scattered over the sea
Snap, snap, snap, goes the frames of ghosts.
Crack, crack, crack, goes the life from the soul.”

She chirped out various notes; her voice slicing through the conch that shuddered in her fist. Its color drained away, leaving only a carcass of white; white as a cleanly picked bone.
She raised it to her ear, motionless, listening.
Waves did not crash to the shore, no seagulls cawed, and there were zero hints of the wind howling through the domed sky.
Only a single note rang into Phalene’s ear. A single note that made her smile, that satiated her thirst a little while longer.
A scream.

“Clean white bones scattered over the sea
Snap, snap, snap, goes the frames of ghosts.
Crack, crack, crack, goes the life from the soul.”

A moth fluttered in behind the curtains as Phalene held the conch to her ears, rocking back and forth like a cradle. The moth fluttered around a light bulb that dangled precariously on a single string.
Phalene raised her eyes to the moth; it flew too close to the light and sizzled. Falling limply onto the ground.
Dropping her conch, she crawled to the moth, flapping helplessly among her shells, trapped within a cage of bone. She lifted it, and with a smile, pressed it against a small shell, the size of a pebble. Bubbling, it melted into the walls as the shell drained of color, leaving only a white piece of death. 
Pressed to her ear, she lay down on the floor, in a clearing of corpses. Eyes closed, Phalene listened to the flap of a moth and the sizzle of its final flutter as it flew into the sun.