by Jordan Sheeres
Of course, you know they’re a fossil of sorts. You know they wash up at the beach. You know they are abundant and pretty, valueless things. You know how it feels turning over in your coat pocket, shedding sand and sea. Grab it if you have one handy, check the craft drawer, the flowerpots on the sill. See the sunburst? See the radial symmetry of the fossilized petaloid? Look closer. In the middle, a perfect specimen will have a five-point star cluster of perforations at the nexus of the petals. Five nostrils for live gas exchange. Now, of course you understand we’re talking about a dead thing here, a rusted frame in the yard. But it used to crawl on millions of feet—look again at the petaloid, the constitute hatch-marks of the petals are scars from cilia. While alive, they slide over the sand, lean into the surf and catch nutrients like a net. They use cilia to pass food bits along to the mouth, easily identifiable by flipping the shell. You can learn the age of a sand dollar by counting the scale-patterned rings of magnetite blooming from the mouth. Mine was six years old when she died. I say she because you can reliably sex any sand dollar with this simple heuristic: if larger than four centimeters, it’s female. Sand dollars only express sexual dimorphism through their size. Now take your sand dollar between both hands, hold her like a wafer, and break her in half. Let the doves tumble into your palms. The doves were her teeth; they processed the sea. The ocean washed out her organs. Teeth are the only things left in the shell. A tooth is a seed, and a seed is a shield, the armor-shell of future growth. What helps us endure endures in us. Cup your hands, take the teeth back to the flowerpot, the craft-drawer, the seashore, and scatter your doves. Bury them in April, sleep in the sand, cycle the seasons and track through next year for the petaloid, sunburst.