I asked the pair of them. Jen’s eyebrows knit together. A little lopsided ‘y’ formed in the folds between her eyes. It was cute. But then, everything she did was cute. “I’m not following the train of thought here,” Peter said. He seemed to be emptying the entire sugar container into his coffee mug. “I mean, you’d think it was a stone or something, right? Some little rock with a neat pattern in it. At least at first. Then when you walked down the beach and found another with the same pattern, you’d get to wondering. Then you find another. And another. Dozens of them, all with nearly identical, improbably intricate patterns. ‘Okay,’ you’d think, ‘clearly somebody is making these things. This is proof that I’m not the only human out there.’” Nobody snapped at the bait. “You’d think it was a sign, but it’s nothing. It’s not even a stone, it’s an animal. It’s just nature. There are all sorts of patterns in nature,” I said, and I pulled out my finishing move.
