wishes

The crab crawls across the beach, sand flicking away from his twisted legs in little furrows. The crab’s eye stalks wave towards the sky, searching for the shadow that brings silent wing-borne death. All that whispers from the air today is wind. Maybe, he thinks, the wind will bring a genie. Wishes will be granted, children will fly, and men will turn invisible. The crab skitters sideways to avoid the remains of a large shell. The crab wishes that his shell was hard as diamonds and that it emitted a seagull thwarting scent. The shell wishes that it still rested under the sea, where the surroundings were cool and no one picked it up and set it to molder on a shelf. What about the genie? Does it get a wish? The genie just wants to dissolve into the wind and float around the world in a vague, disparate, cloud, untroubled by the desires of man or crab or shell.