I watch their bare feet sink into the mudflats of their ancestors.
I imagine the cool, grainy mud sliding between their toes.
I smell the seeping stench of rotten eggs
from the many creatures who inhabit it.
The mud was carried from the streams our ancestors once fished.
They’d skin their salmon near the creek, hang the fillets,
and lay the skeleton on the bank facing upstream,
“so their souls would find their way home.”
They feel a prickle from something hidden within, a mussel, a crab, a snail, a clam?
They giggle at its’ touch;
so young, so unaware.