The Rock Pool

Source written for Revision Library (original, copyright-free). This short story was written specially for this worksheet and has not been published elsewhere.

Priya crouched at the edge of the rock pool, her sandals abandoned somewhere behind her on the dry sand. The tide had slipped away that morning, leaving behind a maze of glistening pools tucked between the rocks like scattered coins. Her grandfather, Bapu, was further along the beach, his trouser legs rolled to the knee, humming to himself as he checked the crab lines he had set the evening before.

The pool in front of Priya held its own small world. A hermit crab dragged its borrowed shell across a bed of purple weed, and two tiny fish flickered between the fronds like stitches of silver thread. She dipped one finger into the cold water and watched the ripples spread and settle, spread and settle, until the pool was still again.

It was the glint that caught her eye first, a flash of green half buried in the sand at the bottom of the pool. Priya reached in, her sleeve soaking through instantly, and worked the object free. It was a bottle, old and thick, its glass the colour of sea foam left too long in shadow. A stopper of blackened cork sealed the neck, and inside, curled tight as a fern before it opens, was a scrap of paper.

'Bapu!' Priya's voice cracked with excitement, and she was on her feet before she had decided to stand. 'Bapu, come and look!'

Her grandfather straightened slowly, one hand pressed to his back, and made his way over the slippery rocks with the careful steps of someone who had learned, long ago, not to hurry near the sea. When he saw what she was holding, something shifted in his face, a memory surfacing like the bottle itself.

'Well now,' he said quietly. 'I have not seen one of these since I was a boy.'

Together they worked the cork loose, and Priya drew out the paper with the tips of two fingers, as though it might crumble if she breathed on it too hard. The ink had faded to the colour of weak tea, but the words still held their shape: I hope whoever finds this is standing somewhere the sea has just left. Keep something small today. Write your own message and send it back out. From a boy who once stood exactly where you are standing now.

Priya read it twice, then a third time, before she looked up. 'Do you think he ever found out if anyone read it?'

Bapu shook his head, but he was smiling, the kind of smile that reaches further back than the moment it appears in. 'When I was young, folk along this coast used to send bottles out with the spring tide,' he said. 'A message, a coin, whatever they had. Some came back years later, further down the coast or further up. Most were never found at all. I sent one myself, once, though I never told anyone what I wrote.'

Priya turned the paper over in her hands, feeling the years pressed into it. She thought of the boy who had written it, standing perhaps on this very stretch of sand, not knowing whether his words would ever reach anyone, and sending them out to sea anyway. It was, she realised, a small and stubborn kind of hope, folded up and corked shut and thrown to the water to look after.

'I want to send one back,' she said at last.

Bapu found her a stub of pencil in his jacket pocket, and Priya wrote quickly, before she could talk herself out of any of it. She did not show Bapu what she had written. She rolled the new paper tight, pushed it deep into the old green bottle, and pressed the blackened cork firmly back into place. Then, wading out until the cold water reached her knees, she threw the bottle as far as her arm would allow, and watched it bob once, twice, before the tide, patient and unhurried, carried it away.