The bay stretches its thin arms out far as you can believe, like a flattened crab. On the grey pebbles, there's an ancient tree, bleached and preserved. We both comment on how it looks like human bone. We question where it grew up. I theorise that it probably fell from a tall cliff, wrenched by a gale, then tide tossed until here. Nothing grows on a beach, life just drifts and leaves.
Now it looks like a sculpture, or the remnants of a mythic whale, with small patches of graffiti drawn in marker pen, and a pitch black bruise where someone lit a fire. It refused to be incinerated.
My girlfriend walks up and down it, says it feels like a femur, small holes pocked in the salt bark like blood vessels. Everything is an echo of the human body. Tree lungs and tide veins and waves of cartilage. I've noticed that the happier you are, the more things sound.