Before we begin: The Settle is this same story, told slower, longer, made for falling asleep to rather than following. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite app.
Captain Coral arrived at low tide, which was his preference.
Prince Freddie had not seen him since the Pearl of Granada. Captain Coral was waiting at the tide line, a shell resting on the sand before him.
Captain Coral sat very still in the shallow water. His crown-spine was raised in formal greeting. His armour was deep amber in the early light. His tail curled around a piece of weed. The shell rested before him on the wet sand, the size of Freddie’s paw, conical and pale grey.
“Prince Freddie,” he said. “I have been looking for you.”
“Captain Coral,” Freddie said, sitting at the water’s edge. “It’s good to see you.”
“I owe you a debt from the night of the pearl,” the captain said. “I have been thinking about what form it should take. I have brought you this.”
He nudged the shell forward. Freddie leaned in and took it carefully in his mouth, and set it on the sand between his paws.
“It is an old shell,” Captain Coral said. “Very old, from further down than I usually go. It has a particular property. Shells this age tend to become opinionated about their keepers. If you hold it to your ear, you will hear not the sea as it usually sounds. You will hear it as it sounded at the last time someone held it.”
Freddie looked at the shell. It was ordinary-looking, smooth with age.
“The last time someone held it was a long time ago,” the captain continued. “Before the lighthouse had its current lamp. I cannot tell you more precisely than that. The deep does not keep dates the way the surface does. But it is from before. I thought you would want to hear it.”
“Why?”
The captain considered. He was precise about such things. “Because you keep this coast,” he said, finally. “And it kept itself before you. I thought you might want to know what that sounded like.”
Freddie picked up the shell and held it to his ear.
Five seconds.
A wave approaching. The particular hiss of it on sand before it breaks. Then the break. It was clean and whole, not loud. It was at the exact volume of this shore on a calm morning. Then the recession. The water pulled back through the wet sand. The sound of a thousand small stones settling. And within all of that, threaded through it, a quality of the air. The specific atmosphere of this coast, which was unmistakable. The salt and the warmth and the stone of it. The way this long bend of shore holds sound differently from any other.
Then silence.
Freddie lowered the shell.
The morning around him was the same shore. The hiss, the break, the recession, happening now as it had happened then.
He sat with this.
“Thank you,” he said to Captain Coral.
“The debt is settled,” the captain said, which was how he spoke of things that mattered. He uncurled his tail from the weed. He turned with the quiet deliberateness of something from deep water, and was gone beneath the surface before the next wave arrived.
Freddie sat for a while longer. He kept the shell beside him. A child came down the beach with a bucket. They investigated the tide pools some distance away. They went back. The yoga man swam with his usual purposeful calm. He emerged and walked up the beach. He was not looking at anything in particular.
Freddie picked up the shell carefully. He walked home with it. He came along the path where the lavender from Señora Benilde’s garden reached him. It came from behind the wall. It was soft and exact.
At the cottage he went to the bed. He set the shell on the small ledge above it. His human came through the room. They saw it. They did not say anything.
Freddie circled once, twice, three times. Lay down with his back to the room. He faced the wall. The shell sat on its ledge.
Outside, the wave came in and broke. It had done this before. It would do it again.
The End
Rest well, Prince Freddie. The wave came in, broke, and went back. The next one is already forming.
Now’s your turn to try The Settle - is this same story, told slower, longer, made for falling asleep to rather than following.
Press play, and let the day settle.
