Fiction

Sea hare

My heels and toes pressed into barnacled rocks, sharp grey edges poking into my yellow feet, as I waited for flickers of colour to pass through the rock pools. I squatted down, my breath heavy and slow. Cold salt water drooled down my soaked braid and along my sun-warmed back.

That day brought the kind of heat that clogged your lungs and weighed down your head, bending your neck like a ripe navel orange pulling down a tree branch. I had tried to avoid wetting my head, as the thick hair would take hours to dry, but riding on a bus with a broken air-conditioner and sealed windows had melted my lip balm into a puddle and pasted my thighs to the leather seat. Then there was the long walk from the bus stop to the beach, stumbling over badly paved roads and gravel, switching my beach bag from one arm to the other. My thongs slipped and tripped me up.

When I finally arrived at the beach I couldn’t resist dunking my face into the delicious cold. Each loose string in my body suddenly threaded a sharp needle into my skin. I floated on my back until my ears burnt with salt and curiosity brought me over to the rock pools.

Scanning slowly, I spotted tiny starfish limbs glued to smooth rocks, a hermit crab tucking back into its mottled shell and fish like sunflower seeds swimming in clusters around coral. Just as they zipped past, I saw it. As thick and as green as an unripened banana. Speckled and frilled. Sliding over shattered pink and yellow seashells towards the sea moss. A sea hare!

Across the pool, four tiny hands swung a purple bucket between them. They saw the hare just when I did. String bean fingers pointed. “A slug! A slug!”

They clambered forward, stumbling over their small feet. The hare settled at the spot where seashells shifted into sand, its head peeking out, green skin glazed with water. Shaking with excitement, four tiny hands turned the bucket over and pushed the plastic lip down against the near-translucent tail.

My words stretched across the pool.

“Be careful.”

Three sets of eyes locked – mine and theirs – and we were all still. The excitement drained from their faces. I was a stranger. Their adult was somewhere on the sand talking loudly on his phone. He spoke in Italian and English, the words fighting one another.

I smiled, trying to cushion my words, and turned my head, pretending to be distracted by the sea anemone that tucked its tentacles away inside a blob of raspberry jelly.

I heard a snap and my eyes were pulled back to the sea hare. The four tiny hands had broken off the bucket handle and were using it to poke under its belly.

“Don’t hurt it.” The words slipped out before I had a chance to bite down on them. Again our eyes locked. I became aware of how big my arms and legs were, how much taller I am.

I looked over to their father. He was still on the phone, toes buried in the sand, shirt unbuttoned either side of a rounded belly, a silver chain gleaming in the sunlight. I stood up and forced myself to walk further down. Testing the rocks with each step, looking for those that could take my weight, where the gathering moss had not yet turned the surface to slime.

I squatted down again three metres away. A crab the size of my thumb pulled into shaded cracks in the pool wall at my feet. Its pincers grazed the rocks surrounding it and then moved back and forth from its mouth.

I hadn’t eaten breakfast; I was too eager to get out. I had packed a muesli bar but the yoghurt top was probably liquid. The nearby cafe would have thick crumbed fish fillets and salads with pear slices. The menu was tempting but the prices would be more than the $15 I had in my account.

I remembered a video about foraging for food on a beach. I eyed the seaweed washed up on shore and tried to imagine the texture on my tongue. Rubbery? Slimy? Maybe I could pop one of the sunflower-seed fish into my mouth and let it swim down my throat and into my belly. Maybe I could eat the crab, nibble its tiny legs between my teeth. As if it read my mind, the crab ducked back into the crack, out of sight.

I heard grunts of frustration and turned to see four tiny hands pushing the hard bucket down against the sea hare’s back.

Red liquid seeped out slow, trailing in wisps across the coral. The green frills twisted. I held my anger in tight fists.

“It pooed! It pooed!”

The hands dropped the bucket in disgust, sending shattered shells dancing and dissolving the dark red strings into clouds that fogged the water.

“It’s not poo.”

In the distance, their father laughed. It landed cold over my skin. Three sets of strangers’ eyes locked. I realised their disgust was fear and my anger slipped through my fingers.

They didn’t mean to.

The sea hare was still, now half its size. Its limp frills shifted only with the movement of the tide. Reaching into the murky water, I pulled out the bucket and put it back into four tiny hands. They didn’t mean to.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Sea hare".

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