Legend

Eldana Saryn found her Snail Shells beneath a birch after a long rain. There were two of them, empty and light, their dark bands winding in a spiral right to the very centre.

In the season of autumn rains an old couple came to her. They walked under one cloak, and yet apart, as if each carried a downpour of their own. Their children had scattered across the world, the last of them that spring.

“The house has grown too big,” said the wife. “We sit in it like two stones.”

The husband said nothing, watching the wet grass where snails were crawling.

Eldana took the shells down from the shelf and gave them one each.

“Fit them together.”

They turned them over in their fingers for a long while, clumsily, until the shells met mouth to mouth. Together they made a single round shell. The husband laughed aloud for the first time in months, and his wife right after him.

“A house doesn’t empty when the children leave,” said Eldana. “It empties when two people stop turning towards each other.”

They walked home in the rain, slow as snails, each with a shell in a pocket. On Eldana’s shelf an empty space was left behind.