You are the animal.

Inside, the echo is pearlescent. The colors are the same as Aubrey’s plastic Little Tikes vanity, where she taught you to smear lipstick on your face and to aim for inside the lines. Where are the lines, you wanted to ask, because face was skin and lips were also skin, and it seemed hard to differentiate oneself from oneself. You didn’t ask, because you thought you ought to know where the lines are. That you ought to know how to lineate, at least, parts of your own body. When Aubrey asked you to play the princess, to call from the tower for help, you couldn’t because the weight of the lipstick was heavy on your face. Call, she said, now, she said, but there was a thin line of stickiness where your lips met, something magnetic to keep yourself shut. A way to be sure to not ask for help.

When she was called away by her mother, you wiped the lipstick off with the inside of your T-shirt and checked the door to make sure no one noticed. Aubrey didn’t care when she came back, and you played better when your mouth wasn’t stuck together. Your lips felt heavy and waxy till your own mother picked you up. Your sister asked why you kept wiping at your lips. You were reminded then. You are the animal.

Inside the oyster shell, the space where you stretch your legs (your animal legs) is smooth. It’s an oft-run rock in the river. It’s a curve made for you to lay in, to make yourself a curve, too. Isn’t it nice to echo something?

You think: who gets to choose the sound that follows the sound they make? Who gets to know if they’re the call or the echo?

Aubrey called and even as a teenager responded on the phone like she did when you were kids: Hello this is Aubrey speaking, may I speak with Freyja? When usually you’d make a joke, for some reason, your answer came out just as formal: yes, this is she. The buzz of silence was something like an echo. An echo of the distance between her house and yours and one long buzzing line to bring your voices closer together through corded kitchen phones. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about your mom. It came out too fast. The way she said it, you heard her own mother behind her, asking for her to call, standing by, making sure she did it. You could hear how Aubrey didn’t have anything else to say after that, and neither did you. So you said thank you and I’ll see you at school and hung the mustard-plastic phone back on the wall. Your sister stared from the open doorway to the living room. So that she cannot stare, you get inside the oyster shell.

Inside, the oyster shell is small when it wants to be (when it wants to be). The sound moves quickly from one side to the other, so it becomes something other than the first thing. An echo, still, is something different than the call.

Your sister wants to be your echo. Who will save her from that?

If you remember, you are the animal, so the flesh of you sends a kind of echo out, a breath, a heartbeat, and you become so alone inside the oyster shell, you think the echo belongs only to you. It’s foolish, you see, to think anything belongs only to you, so it takes you longer than it should to realize you can speak to the sound the oyster shell sends back.

“You are the animal,” you test, and the oyster reminds you who the animal is. This is how it goes and how it still goes.

The colors in the shell bleed blue to purple and then pearl-white; you know the pearl-white, a not-white, a reflective light, an in-between. It reminds you of new fiberglass, which you know well from when you leaned against the newly built bleachers at the memorial her job had for her. You remember how the sting was so many individual places at once. You remember, too, how the fiberglass wasn’t finished, and how your dad used tape to pull all the pieces from the soft skin on the backs of your legs in the single-person bathroom. You decided you wouldn’t cry, because you’d already been deciding that for a while, but because he was angry, you became angry, too. You pushed your eyebrows down because that made it easier not to cry. Someone knocked. The bathroom tiles were a type of white made blue by the fluorescent lighting. I have to get back out there, he said, and he handed you the tape, can you get the rest of it yourself? Rather than wait for your answer, he left. And it was easier, alone with the tiles, to cry after that.

Now, you think again about lines, where you’ve drawn them, and if you know where they are. You don’t wear lipstick. You don’t even like lip balm. Your skin already seems like something you must carry with you. It seems possible your skin carries, and keeps in, your everything else. It doesn’t harden like a shell might. Skin, you think, also feels like a line drawn outside yourself, but an animal as soft as you knows that a thin edge of skin isn’t enough. There are other types of protection, not skin, or shells, or skeletons we wear on the outside rather than the inside. There is the hiding, and the camouflage, and there is the slipping away. From there, many types of slipping away you have learned. There are ways to warp yourself, too, maybe not exactly your skin, but is your mind not also a type of flesh? A soft and shapable thing?

It is funny to you how many types of protection mimic death. Even you, the animal inside the oyster shell, pretend to look like a rock. But inside, the swirl of those colors is so much like living, echoes of the ocean, and the echoes you’re made of. You didn’t speak to Aubrey again because you didn’t want to. Because, from inside the oyster shell, you had your own echo to talk to. And because Aubrey didn’t know what to do with an animal for a friend. Your sister, who does know, leaves shreds of bread and scattered seeds outside the oyster shell and waits.

You are the animal, so you weigh yourself by your feathers, the abundance of your skin, and all the breathable space in between where something else might live. Just like how you now live inside the oyster shell (there is an animal inside of the oyster shell).

You made yourself a den after she died. It made sense, to get inside the oyster shell, because your skin hadn’t hardened enough for your liking. You know now how easy it is to get inside of a shell, and the slick soft inside cups you, a porcelain palm. You know what this looks like: an animal in the bottom of someone’s unclamped hand. Your sister showing you a ladybug, your sister asking to read your palm, even though the lines of it haven’t changed, only grown deeper. She asks now, to look at your palm, and today you’ve slipped outside your den for her, so you pass it to her. Relax your hand, she says, and runs her fingernail across the lifeline, then the headline, then the heartline. She doesn’t try to read your future. Instead, she holds your hand in her own open palm, tracing worn-over creases your skin makes from clenching and unclenching. You both are an echo of fingers faced upward, two halves of a cracked open oyster shell, layers of stone dark against pearl white: soft, breakable, animal.