Letter Two: The Shell Collector’s Warning

From Iris — unsent

Dear __,

I met someone today.
She was crouched by the rocks, pulling limpets from the tide pools and placing them gently into a basket lined with an old dish towel. I asked if she was collecting for something, and she smiled—small, not unkind—and said, “They tell you things, if you listen right.”

She wore a sweater that looked hand-knit, fraying at the cuffs, and boots crusted with salt. Her name was Elsie. She didn’t ask for mine.

She told me not to walk too far past the sea stacks after sundown.
“Things don’t stay buried here,” she said.
Then she shrugged and added, “But you’ll figure that out.”

It was the way she said it—like it wasn’t a threat, or even a warning, but a fact.
Like how sand swallows footprints or how grief arrives in waves.

After she left, I sat on the rocks for a while, watching the light bend across the surface of the water. It didn’t look dangerous. But I’ve learned that danger never does, at first.

When I came back to the cottage, I found a limpetshell on the windowsill.
I don’t know how it got there.

Maybe she left it.
Maybe the wind brought it.
Maybe some things return on their own, without needing an invitation.

I didn’t touch it.

Instead, I lit the old lamp in the hallway and let the silence settle again.

Some nights, the sea sounds closer than it is.
Like it’s breathing beneath the floorboards.
Like it remembers me.

—I.