Crella's Collection of Curious Things

The tide came in slowly that morning, the way it always did — hush, and hush, and hush again. Crella the little crab woke beneath a curl of cool, wet sand. She stretched all eight legs, then both claws, and listened hard. Somewhere out past the shallows, the sea was carrying something toward her… she could feel it in the pebbles.

Crella scuttled sideways to the water's edge, where the foam went fizzy around her feet. The wave slid back. And there, shining in the wet sand, lay a small round thing with four tiny holes in the middle. She turned it over with the tip of her claw. It was smooth as a moon, and cool, and lightly warm from the sun.

"What could this be?" Crella wondered aloud, tipping her eyestalks first one way, then the other. Perhaps it was a wheel for a very small cart. Perhaps a table for four extremely tidy snails. Perhaps — and this was her favourite guess — perhaps it was a button from the coat of a sailor who had sailed all the way around the world.

She carried it home in one claw, walking her funny sideways walk along the shining sand. Home was a hollow under a leaning grey rock, lined with dry seaweed and a scrap of net. Crella set the button down in the middle of the floor, stepped back, and looked at it for a long, satisfied moment.

The morning warmed. Gulls turned slow circles high above the bay, and the water made small silver noises against the stones. Crella tidied her seaweed. She swept a little sand out of the doorway with her claw. And every few minutes, she glanced back at the button, just to be sure it was still there. It was.

By afternoon she had decided something important. If the sea kept bringing curious things to her doorstep, then she would keep them — all of them — and she would learn what each one wanted to be. It was, she thought, a very good job for a small crab. Perhaps even the best job on the whole shore.

That night the water came up close and whispered against the rock, and Crella slept with her claw resting on the button, the way you might rest a hand on a friend. Outside, the tide went out again, quietly, patiently, already gathering the next curious thing… and the next… and the one after that.