The Relic

It looked like a bleached tongue pulled from a mouth, petrified and incapable now of letting a word slide over its calcified silence. I picked it out of the wet sand and held it in my hand. It had little weight, smooth on one side and pitted on the other. A cuttlefish bone. It was a marvel of engineering. My fingers followed its shape, took in its texture, the pleasurable feel of its form. I lifted it to my nose and smelt its salty, faintly fishy odor, sea washed to a clean unsullied smell. It had undergone a change into something beyond life, into an artifact of time. I kept it cradled in my hands, held it like a sacred relic. I have seen them too shrink wrapped in plastic bags on the end of supermarket shelves, a calcium supplement for birds to be hung on a hook inside of a cage. They were selling for $2.50 or thereabouts.