By Teresa Sutton
Late into the night, the new and improved Venus scours zillow to find the perfect match to complete her home. She checks listings for an affordable half of a scallop shell to fit with the half some Renaissance outsider painted her into thinking it suited her. Over the years, she made the best of her meager lot by scrubbing out the soft parts left in crevices of its ruffled edges carved by some poor creature that died. All the while, she envied others who lived inside grand chambered nautiluses, conchs with pearly pink insides, cockles, cowries, all too beautiful for their own good. She studied the scientific names of the rarest: spondylus regius with its artsy spikes, aplustrum amplustre with its tiger stripes, janthina with its deep purples. Clams, mussels, snails, horseshoe crabs: these are the everyday choices that wash up.
But who doesn’t long to scour beach drift and find a prize, a giant shell tumbled clean by the waves, turnkey, ready to move in. Electrons and dots of phosphor seep from the liquid crystal display of her laptop to her bloodshot eyes as she searches until she finds something perfect for a woman born of sea foam.
Teresa Sutton lives in Patterson, New York. She has three published chapbooks, “They’re Gone,” (2012), “Ossory Wolves” (2016), and the third, “Breaking Newton’s Laws,” won first place in the 2017 Encircle Chapbook Competition. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.