The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan

beard and shakes his head. “Then we have a problem. I’m sorry, lady, but I can’t just give you this. I’ve got bills to pay.”
    The woman rakes a step back from the edge of the table, and she wonders if she’s still strong enough to murder a human being, if she’s ever been that strong, and if it would count as murder if she killed this man, who makes his living selling things which should have been decently returned to the earth or sea or sky, or simply left there in the first place, this man who will never know and can never understand the theft of one’s true shape. There’s a small hammer lying on the table, between the chest and the scattered pieces of the fossil tortoise’s carapace. She imagines how it would feel in her hand.
    “Nothing personal,” he says again.
    She puts both her hands into her deep coat pockets, because it would be so easy to reach for the little hammer, because she’s still fast, and he doesn’t expect she would do such a thing, that the sealskin could possibly mean so much to her that she’d kill him for it. She worries with the shells and pebbles filling her pockets, limpets and mussels and polished granite, all her souvenirs, and they make their familiar, soothing, clacking noises between her fingers.
    She can still hear the wind calling her home again, the voice of the sea speaking from the old chest.
    “I could hold it for you,” he says. “I could hold onto it for, say, six months. That’s the best I can promise.”
    And then her fingers brush something that isn’t shell or stone, something smooth and cold, and she remembers the old coin she’s carried all the way from Prince Edward Island. She found it one evening, half buried in the mud of a tidal flat, glinting faintly in the setting sun. She removes it from her coat pocket and lays it on the table in front of the man. “I have this,” she says. “It is money, isn’t it? It is gold.”
    “Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” he says, and gives her a quick sidewise glance; she can see surprise and suspicion in his easy blue eyes. “Can I hold it? Do you mind?”
    “I found it, along time ago. You can have it, for the chest,” “But you said you didn’t want—”
    “It is gold,” she says again, raising her voice slightly.
    He picks up the coin and rubs at it with his thumb, then holds it up to the light. “It’s Roman, I think,” he tells her. “But I don’t know much about coins, so I can’t say what it might be worth. I’d have to show it to someone. I know a numismatist over on—”
    “It’s worth an old wooden chest and a piccolo,” she interrupts and licks her dry lips. “It’s worth a nappy, moth-eaten sealskin that you’re ashamed to put in your shop window. It’s worth that much, at least,” and then she turns and looks directly at him for the first time since the man opened the chest. And there’s a flash of something like fear in his eyes, something like awe or horror, and she thinks perhaps he’s glimpsed some dim sliver of the truth. Maybe he’s beginning to understand what manner of being she is, and what he’s let follow him alone into the back room of his shop.
    “Yeah,” he says, his voice grown flat and cautious. “I expect it’s worth at least that much.”
    “Then we have a deal?” she asks, though the words come out sounding less like a question than she’d meant them to sound.
    “Jesus, you’re a weird one,” he says, and at first she thinks he means the old Roman coin, which he’s holding up the fluorescent light again. “Do you want a bill of sale for that? Should I sign somewhere in blood? At any rate, it’s yours now.”
    “It was always mine,” she replies, and she takes the sealskin out of the chest, leaving it empty except for the piccolo. “But I should thank you, for keeping it safe until I found it again.”
    “Well, then you’re very fucking welcome,” he says, squinting at the coin so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I’m