Gravedigger's Cottage by Chris Lynch

were fine. There was nothing wrong with the way we did things, and if Walter was suddenly seeing things in a different light—a dim, unenlightening light—then that was his problem. It was important that I not encourage him, especially on such a silly issue.
    I walked on, and picked up the most wonderful dead starfish that had washed up on the sand. It was a beauty, stiff but still orangish, and as big as my hand. Immediately, I brought it right up to my face and breathed it deep.
    I don’t know if it is a guilty pleasure or not, but I do know it is a pleasure. I have always held a deep, passionate affection for the smell of old starfish, even rotting starfish. I do not know what it is about them, but they have always called to me, like a siren song—or a siren scent, I suppose—from the sea. And as I stood there with the starfish, smelling it, feeling the oddly rough clingy pebbly texture of its back and its uncountable sucky finger things, I closed my eyes and smelled the smell, felt the beginning mist coming down from the sky and the rising spray coming up from the surf, washing lightly over my face. A seagull flew close by and let out a little scream, and I could not imagine much of a better moment all over. I could not.
    I opened my eyes again, and cast my gaze well on down the beach. It was an amazing beach, known locally as the Beach at the End of the World because you couldn’t actually see the finish of it in either direction due to the curving-away rocky edges of the land, the frequency and intensity of the mists, and, well, the huge endlessness of it. We heard all this from the real estate agent when she was busy not telling us about weeping walls and Gravediggers. Couldn’t blame her, I suppose.
    I looked, I smelled, I felt it on my face, in my mouth and eyes. You could pretty well deal with anything else if you had all this. And it sure would help things if we could bring as much of this perfect outdoors as possible into our indoors.
    My dad was going to love my starfish. He had a net, like a small fisherman’s net, that he was keeping in the garage, and he liked to attach some of these sea-based things to it, like a sort of organic tapestry he was creating. I knew my starfish was going to wind up entwined there, and I hoped it would all wind up on some wall in the house, any wall in the house.
    “Hey,” Walter said in my ear.
    I had my eyes closed again. I kept them that way. “Hey what?”
    “Hey, it’s starting to rain.”
    “That’s not rain, it’s mist.”
    “Still. Don’t you think we should get going?”
    I gave him a blind shrug. I liked the feels, the smells, the sounds of right here right now. Where does it say a person has to go in out of the rain? What is so wrong with rain?
    “You should do what I’m doing, Walter. Then you’d enjoy it more.”
    He didn’t say anything for a bit. Then he did.
    “Are we all right, Sylvia?” he asked, altogether too seriously.
    I opened my eyes. And there was his face.
    It made me very sad, the way I was seeing it now. His round, round face with the round, round eyes, always seeming somehow to become even more perfectly circular when he got at all forlorn. The moisture in the air taking his longish caramel-colored hair and smoothing it down to frame all around that face. His heart-shaped little mouth, pursing and poking out just before he spoke.
    “Don’t you want to have friends, Sylvia?” he asked.
    What kind of a question was that? Of course I wanted friends. I was very friendly. I loved having friends, and friends loved having me back. At the old place, at the old school, there was an actual waiting list to become my friend, because I just couldn’t deal with the volume all at once.
    I just didn’t always feel exactly up to it. The effort of it. That was all. That would pass. Probably, sometime. Being friends and having friends would not always be so hard as it seemed now. Probably.
    “You’re my friend,” I said.
    He pinched and