Periwinkle Shells, Low Water Silt

The silt held them like a museum case — a scatter of periwinkles half-pressed into the exposed mudflat, each one casting a hard shadow in the January sidelight. I poured the collodion at the tideline and had maybe thirty minutes before the plate fogged from salt mist; that urgency is in the grain, in the way the silver pools unevenly at the lower edge. This is the intertidal zone as a kind of forensic record — small lives, briefly visible, already being erased.