Counting Creatures

Seven; Selkie's

Seven.

Seven was a Strange number. For Delilah Verdell it was especially abnormal, in the sense that things Happened in seven's. She broke her arm in seven places when she was seven days past seven years. She lived on the seventh house away from the seventh street in the city of Septet.

She took seven steps onto the beach of the Cove of Heptad when she saw seven men in the waves. The water crashed towards her and Delilah stepped forwards, letting the waves rolled to her ankles and pull at her long skirt. She could still see her house, it's windows dark without anyone inside to light lamps. It sat on top of the rise from the beach, a cottage with tomato plants winding around fencing.

The ocean receded, pulling her clothes with it. She didn't stumble.

She did wave when she noticed that one of the men had seen her. She didn't recognize them, but the city was scattered these days. People came and went, it was more than possible that they had only been there for a few weeks. Since the last time Delilah had walked the beach with her basket, looking for treasures.

He waved back, drawing the attention of his fellows who followed suit. Delilah waited, in case they were inclined to come back to land. They waited, in case she was inclined to leave it.

The young woman turned back to her treasure hunt.

She liked to do this. To walk the sand as the sun sunk into the water, burning away the day and its troubles. She used to do it every sunday, before she got so busy working with the lye. Now it was the first time she had been able to come out since the frosts of winter had left her window sills. The seals and the fish would be back to Septet soon, and with them would come the seasonal fishermen. Business would pick up for everyone in the town, from the baker, to the candler, to Delilah herself, with her soaps and richly colored clothes.

She had been preparing all winter for it.

Something pale caught her eye and she leaned down, plucking a broken circle from the sand. The creature that once lived within had been pecked free by the gulls already, leaving it an empty husk.

Delilah set it back into the sand and moved on, stepping lightly. Her footprints sunk into the sand, bare imprints marking her travel before the ocean took them away. The ocean took everything away, in the end. It gave and it took back. It brought in sand and dragged it away. It gave them food and took their land. It brought them travellers and took them away too. The ocean was where women bore children and where the clerics poured the ashes of the dead. It was their beginning and their end.

Delilah picked up a pink shell the shape of the moon. She ran her fingers on the rough edges before setting it in her basket. She wandered on, finding a ocean-smooth stone the color of a sunset. She collected long stick so worn by the water it felt like velvet to her fingers, a shell that had once housed a crab. The sea gave her two more stone's, one black as pitch the other white as snow. She kept the white one before she bent to collect a blackened sticker from the grains.

A shadow fell across her, cast not by the drowning sun, but a man. She looked up at him, squinting against the light that haloed his soft face and dark hair. There was a smile on his lips and when she accepted his hand and stood, Delilah was amazed by how handsome he was.

Even with a thin scar across his hairline he was still beautiful. It was a word she had never applied to a man before. Sometime between when he left the water and found her he had put on trousers.

"A shark's tooth." His voice was rich and warm, his smile matched. She looked down at the black point in her palm, held between them.

"Is that what this is?" she asked. The tooth had a roughness on a broad edge that had not been worn away yet. Part of the tooth jutted back, giving it the look of a letter she had never learned to read.