BY Meg Cass
The first shells we grow are jingles. I wake one morning, and they adorn my chest like a necklace,
catch the light, an orange gold. They’re like the ones we used for collages back in undergrad, cheap
décor for our crummy apartment. You only work with glass now in a private studio. I still comb
thrift stores for denim jackets, embroider them with stories of gay werewolves, sea monsters, the
queer artists we didn’t learn about in art school.
It’s like some kind of fucked up rash, you say over text, send a picture of your scaled right arm, your
crawfish tattoo peeking through. We haven’t spoken in months. I go to call you, and a spiked gate
presses against my chest. I’m going to rip them off with tweezers, you text. I miss them, but I don’t want the
past on my skin like that.
Bivalves are part of the past now. The working theory: while we sleep, our bodies create vestiges of
the species we destroyed, the creatures we each mourn. All over my small city, people look like
sculptures in-progress, like walking mausoleums. Heads grow heavy with the horns of certain sheep.
Arms and legs fur like certain big cats. Backs bend beneath sea turtle shells.
Some people decorate their new growths with sequins and ribbon. Others leave them as they are, as
I do, their presence enough. Others choose removal, their bodies continuously bandaged, aching.
What haunts inevitably grows back. Still others deny the extinctions happened at all. They remain
the same, to the extent a body can. Such strangeness and beauty they also deny themselves.
Next comes a large conch shell; it encases my left ear. I think of my grandparents’ house on Long
Island, how the smell of the Atlantic stitched itself into my clothes for weeks after a visit, grains of
sand falling from my books into the bedsheets. I kept a conch on my nightstand to hear the surf, but
I’ve learned this was a myth. A trick of trapped air. The ocean’s voice never stayed with me, no
matter how much I wanted it to. The way sometimes I imagine you two houses down making
homemade pasta, sipping wine, singing Bonnie Raitt.
In fact, you live two states away. You live with a man who doesn’t like when I visit. We get too
rowdy, he complains, drink too much, sit too close on the couch. We wade into his decorative pond,
talk shit about the art world. He’s a successful building engineer. You say he keeps you grounded,
keeps you from getting lost in waves of ambition. I remember getting lost in them too; it wasn’t that
long ago. Red bull nights in our university studios, not eating enough, not seeing doctors. Art could
be our livelihood, our mentors said, if we just pushed harder.
And they would agree you’ve made it. Your jelly fish and octopi chandelier hotel lobbies and
corporate board rooms, float in the homes of the rich. Part of me is jealous, part of me ashamed. If
I was more innovative. If I’d kept working at the same clip. We make time for what is important to us,
you’ve suggested. If I’d gone to more of the right parties. At your last opening, I drifted to the
edges, the circle around you ever more elegant, more moneyed.
Neither of us call or text, so I don’t know if you’ve grown a conch, or something else.
In my dreams, oyster shells form up and down our legs. We savor the memory of their salty bodies
you taught me to slurp with Tabasco and lemon. We remember that last year of art school, that June
by the gulf. It was months before the oil spill. After our thesis critiques, we built a beach bonfire,
burned our lecture notes. Theories of white men’s art turned to ash, disappeared into the orange-
gold sky. Our mouths tasted of cheap beer, brine, and briefly of each other. When scallop shells
clasp over my eyes, I see your face done in nacre, your razor clam smile.
Meg Cass (they/them) is a queer, trans fiction writer and teacher who lives in St. Louis. ActivAmerica, their first book, was selected by Claire Vaye Watkins for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and was published in 2017. Recent stories have appeared in Ecotone, Foglifter, and Passages North. They co-founded Changeling, a queer reading series focused on works-in-progress, and teach in the English Department at the University of Illinois Springfield.