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Original fiction written for Revision Library; no external source reproduced.
Nadia crouched at the edge of the rock pool, her knees pressed into the cold granite, and watched the water settle into stillness. Her grandfather, Idris, knelt beside her, a battered net resting across his lap like a sleeping cat. The tide had slipped out an hour before, leaving behind a scatter of shallow pools along the Cornish shore, each one a small, secret world stranded until the sea returned.
"Look closely before you touch anything," Idris said, his voice low, as though the pool itself might overhear. "A rock pool rewards patience far more than it rewards quick hands."
Nadia narrowed her eyes at the water. At first she saw only a fringe of olive-green weed swaying gently, and pale stones freckled with barnacles. Then, gradually, the pool seemed to reveal itself to her, the way a photograph develops in a darkroom. A hermit crab dragged its borrowed shell across the sand. A shrimp, almost invisible, flicked backwards into a crevice. And there, wedged beneath a ledge of rock, five orange arms fanned out like the points of a crooked star.
"A starfish," she breathed, hardly daring to move.
"Common starfish," Idris agreed. "Though there's nothing common about the way they eat, mind you. They push their own stomachs out through their mouths and digest their food outside their bodies, then draw the stomach back in afterwards."
Nadia pulled a face. "That's disgusting."
"That's remarkable," Idris corrected, though he was smiling. "The two aren't always so different."
He explained that starfish could also regrow a lost arm over many months, and that some could even regrow an entire body from a single arm if enough of the central disc came with it. Nadia thought of the small scar on her own knee, healed over long ago, and tried to imagine growing a whole new limb the way a starfish might. It seemed impossible, and yet here, in this ordinary puddle left behind by an ordinary tide, something so strange was simply going about its day.
She wanted to reach in and lift the starfish out, just to feel its rough, star-shaped weight in her palm, but she remembered what her grandfather had said. Instead, she watched it a while longer, memorising the pattern of its arms, before the two of them moved on to the next pool, and the next, working their way back across the rocks as the light began to soften and the distant sea, patient as ever, waited to come home.