The Beast and the Pocket Full of Hearts

       Once upon a time, there lived a young girl with a pocket full of hearts.  Really, the hearts were stones and the pocket was the upturned bottom of her swim shirt, but she didn’t care.  To her, the hearts were sun-baked and beautiful, and came to life fluttering when she nestled them in her palm.

       One day, with her salt-soaked hair braided and tucked behind a headband, she walked through the waves to her favorite scavenging spot: a little alcove filled with seaweed, shells, and rocks.  There, she collected a handful more of rocks that fluttered in her imagination, and practiced her cursive in the sand.  To make room for the seventeenth attempt at her name, she used a stick to push aside a large pile of damp, stinky weeds.

       “Ah!” She yelped when the underneath of the mound was revealed, quickly retreating to hide behind a boulder.

        There, lying wounded where the seaweed had just been, was a sea beast.  It was terribly ugly, with long tentacles sticking from its sharp, spiked body.  The head was lined with two rows of horns, and the mouth was filled with thin spears for teeth.  It was, the girl thought, entirely petrifying.

       But as she watched it, her fear lessened and her compassion and curiosity grew.  Yes, the beast looked as if it could easily devour her, but it also looked weighed down with pain and injury.  

       So our little hero crept out from her hiding spot and lingered a few feet away.  “Hello?” She whispered, trying to conceal the quivers in her voice.

       Two eyes, ocean blue and swirled with yellow, blinked open to meet her gaze.  She expected for them to flash with warning, but they instead were full of pleading.

       The girl inched closer because of this, and reached out her hand.  This time, she was met with a snarl, the beast’s eyes glinting with a hint of the expected wrath.  She didn’t back away, though.  Rather, she dropped the sharp piece of shale she had originally picked up as a precaution.

        “Please,” she said, “I just want to help.”

        And to her surprise, the beast relaxed as if it had understood.  It nodded its head at her and rolled over to reveal a terrible gash.

        “Where your heart should be,” she breathed.  “How did this happen?”

        Using a tentacle, the beast drew a crown and a stick figure-adjacent sketch of a monster similar to itself.  When those were complete, it pointed to itself and swept away the stick figure.  When the ocean-and-yellow eyes returned to her own sky blue ones, the girl realized they were awaiting an interpretation.

        “You… attacked someone?” She guessed, and was met with a nod of approval.  “And then… the queen took your heart as punishment.”

        Another nod.

        “I’m assuming the queen expects you dead now, since the other beasts don’t want to help you,” she sighed with sadness welling in her voice.  “You are scary-looking.  And your kind doesn’t sound all that forgiving or thoughtful.”

        Again, the beast agreed, and its eyes glazed over with what seemed like regret.

        “You did something horrible, didn’t you?” She asked, looking down at her pile of heart-shaped stones.  Sadly, she picked one up, tracing a finger along the thin white line circling the middle of the rock.  That stripe was what made the stone her favorite; her mom had taught her that lines like that would grant her a wish.  Well, that and the fact it was colored light pink.

        The girl had already planned what she would wish for, but in that moment, all she wanted was for the beast to have a second chance.  Perhaps, she thought, it would teach it not to be a true monster.

        And so she wished.  And as she did, the stone began to truly flutter.  It wasn’t the beating of her imagination, but of genuine magic: the rock was transforming into a real heart, brimming with the thrum of life.

        She looked up at the beast with a grin stretched across her face, pure astonishment dripping from her eyes as tears.  “The universe agrees with me,” she said happily.  “If I give you this heart, will you promise to do nothing that will get it ripped out again?”

        When the beast nodded, its eyes were wide with gratitude, a promise that it agreed.

       So the girl nestled the fluttering heart into the gash.  The scales began to regrow around it, and soon, it looked good as new.

        The beast gave the girl one last nod, this one of thanks, and a gift before slithering back into the sea.  She tucked the gift, an ocean blue scale swirled with yellow, into the heart-shaped locket she wore around her neck.  She clutched the necklace as she waved goodbye, forever smiling at the sea.  As she splashed back to the main shore to meet her mother, she still carried a pocketful of hearts.

        Now, though, when she touched her necklace, she would always remember the day she truly brought one to life.