The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz

Author:Christina Schwarz
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Adult, Historical
ISBN: 9781451683677
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2013-04-01T18:30:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

WHEN I’D MARCHED a good distance up the beach, the steady rush and retreat of the surf, together with my own exhaustion, began to soothe me. I slowed my pace and took notice of my surroundings.

Almost at once a sea star presented itself, stranded on the sand by a wave. I picked it up and balanced it on my palm. It seemed alive, its body not light and stiff like the ones in our schoolroom, but heavy and surprisingly fleshy. Such a strange creature, and yet its five arms were so like my five fingers. Over a year before, I had dissected a starfish in Miss Dodson’s biology class. I remembered the smell of the oiled wooden floors of Gruber Hall and the wash of the bright morning sun. I’d cut along the creature’s underside, as Miss Dodson had indicated, and duly observed the means by which the animal took food directly into its stomach without the intermediary of throat or esophagus. Miss Dodson limped from girl to girl, a magnifying glass in a leather pouch at her hip, her gold locket tucked into her blouse so that it wouldn’t swing and knock against the specimens.

“You see the madreporite, Miss Schroeder?” she’d asked, touching a small circle at the center of the star with her ink-stained finger, the place where the animal let seawater into its body. I’d nodded and noted all the structures, but the creature had been only the peculiar basis of an exercise to me; I couldn’t conceive of it as a living being. And yet here it was, far more at home than I. I drew back my arm and hurled it as far into the ocean as I could, hoping to give it a chance to survive.

I wondered if Miss Dodson had ever seen a sea cradle or a nudibranch, the real live animals, not just pictures in a book.

∗ ∗ ∗

The valleys and the soft hills of California had been thick with oats and fruits and, finally, humanity again. In Oakland, we were met by a good old steam tug and ferried across the bay to San Francisco. The dock at night was a confusion of shadows and shouts. Men stalked up and down, swinging lanterns, and women, terrified lest their children tumble into the bay, swatted little ones behind their skirts. Dazed by the people who seemed to swoop around me from all directions, I clung to Oskar’s arm as he arranged with a Chinese pushing a wheelbarrow for the transportation of our trunk and consulted with a colored man about the location of our hotel.

I waited for a long time in a tin-ceilinged lobby while he talked to the man behind the desk. At last he turned to me, shaking his head. “We can’t stay here.”

Though Oskar spoke matter-of-factly, I was alarmed. “We wrote ahead. I’m sure we reserved a room.”

He shrugged. “They say there’s no place for us.”

“But what should we do? Where should we go?”

“The porter says he’ll store our trunk for us.

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