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When the sea around Shellbay suddenly grows still, ten-year-old Mina follows a whisper in her shell to the lighthouse keeper, then into the flats and beneath the mussel banks. With a lantern that shows hidden currents and unlikely friends, she untangles a lonely spirit’s knots and helps the tide remember its song, returning home with new promises.
At dawn, Shellbay smelled like warm bread and salt. Mina Marsh padded barefoot across the cool wooden floor of the kitchen and pressed her ear to the big striped shell on the windowsill. It had a rosy swirl and tiny chips along the rim from the time she’d dropped it on the jetty. When she listened, she usually heard a distant rush, a soft hush like a sighing crowd. Today it sounded like someone had tucked a blanket over a river.
“Anything?” her father asked. He stood at the table, dusted with flour, folding dough with the heel of his hand. He was a fisherman who baked on calm days—he said good bread made the nets luckier.
Mina squinted into the shell’s spiral. “Quiet. Like the sea’s holding its breath.”
He glanced toward the window. Beyond the glass, gulls bobbed on the railing, heads cocked, listening too, as if puzzled. The harbor lay slippery and still between the piers, a mirror of pale clouds. The boats didn’t rock; their ropes hung slack and straight. No chuckle of water at the pilings. The cuttlefish flag on the harbormaster’s hut drooped like laundry on a windless line.
Her father frowned, then smiled a careful smile. “Maybe we’ll have a day so calm my hat won’t even think about flying off.” He nudged her shoulder. “Eat. Granola or a honey roll?”
“Honey roll,” she said, taking a bite the size of a gull’s beak. It tasted of orange peel and summer. The quiet pressed against the window.
When she stepped outside, boards creaked under her careful feet. The harbor usually clanked and splashed and sent up a thousand tiny noises like beads in a jar. Now, even the nets hanging from pegs looked asleep. Old Mrs. Rook, who cleaned fish at the end of the pier, sat with her knife across her knees and didn’t move. “Mornin’, Mina,” she whispered, as if a loud sound might break something delicate.
Mina walked to the edge and peered down. She saw the barnacles on the posts, white as teeth, and the pale ribbons of seaweed drifting but not drifting. “Strange,” she murmured.
Her friend Owen clattered down the steps. He was small and sharp, like a tied bundle of sticks. “My grandad says the tide’s stuck.” He held up his watch. Its hands were drawn in with a marker because time fascinated him, even if his watch didn’t work. “It’s supposed to be out by now, but look.”
Mina held her shell up. “Listen. Does it sound different to you?”
Owen pressed the shell to his ear and made a face. “Sounds like when Mum puts a pillow over the radio and tells me to sleep.” He pointed to the far line where the sea met the sky. “No waves.”
A gull screamed and flapped off the rail into the silence. Its wings beat the air like someone clapping once in a solemn church. Mina felt the air on her cheeks, damp and cool. Somewhere, a bell chimed the hour from the lighthouse, soft and round. The note faded without any wind to carry it.
“I’ll ask Granny Lark,” Mina said. “She knows everything about the sea.”