The Smallest Bone
The regret had been walking the beach for what it assumed was morning, though the beach forgot mornings the way it forgot everything — gradually, then completely, then with a kind of cheerful vacancy, as if forgetting were a service it offered.
It stubbed its pinky toe on a half-buried jar.
The pain arrived before the sound did. A white, stupid pain, the kind that asks nothing of you philosophically, that simply insists on itself the way a creditor insists, the way a name you can’t take back insists. The regret sat down in the wet sand and held its foot and made a sound no one heard because the beach had forgotten how to hold sound.
The jar was amber. It contained nothing, or something too small to be nothing.
You, the regret thought, addressing the jar, addressing itself, addressing the gap between the two.
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The beach kept forgetting the tide. The tide came back anyway. That was the problem with tides — they had no stake in being remembered. They returned out of muscle, not sentiment. The regret understood this and hated it the way you hate a quality in someone else that is also your worst quality.
Its toe throbbed. The nail was the color of a thought you’d almost finished having.
It had stubbed this toe before. Not here — or not on a beach that still remembered being this beach — but in other rooms, against other immovable small things. A chair leg. A threshold. The corner of a suitcase left out because leaving had seemed imminent for so long that eventually leaving became just the state of the room, not an event with a date.
The beach shifted. Not dramatically. Just slightly, the way the meaning of a sentence shifts when you read it again a year later.
The regret stood. The pain was already becoming a memory of pain, which was almost worse — already being curated, already softened at the edges into something it could carry. It limped a few steps and the sand rearranged itself underneath as though trying to forget the footprints before they finished forming.
The jar was still there. The beach hadn’t forgotten the jar yet.
The regret looked at it for a long time, one foot slightly raised, the pinky toe doing its small, insistent work. Then it walked on, not healed, not resolved, just continuing — which was its own kind of stubbornness, its own kind of beach.
