Once when I was very small my dad came home unexpectedly from work in the afternoon, which didn’t happen too often because he had a very busy position in his work life, and in his personal life, but he came home and asked me to go outside to the driveway with him. Being small and of a slightly guilty constitution I immediately thought that I must have done something really wrong.
Dad’s voice was always rather stern and he had the look of punishment in his eyes that were blue as the sky. Maybe he had found out that me and my sisters had spent the afternoon throwing chewed forbidden chewing gum onto our next door neighbour’s outside wall and making a mess that took days to clean up, or perhaps that I had busted the stem of the grand old conifer in one of my fantastical voyages behind its thickness. It was hard to tell with my dad’s expression.
My hands trembled with anticipation as he reached for the front door. We can’t be going far, I thought, because I still have my carpet slippers on. Dad stopped when he got to the door of his blue work van. It was a glum day and the air felt bland in my mouth, but I was probably swallowing more of it than usual because of my nervous stomach.
He pointed at the back of his van.
“Look in there,” he said. It was almost a whisper.
Lying half-wrapped in a blanket right there in the van was a seal. It was alive, I noticed straight away. It looked up at me with eyes like sparkling food plates and opened its mouth gently. I laid my child’s hand on its side and felt its heartbeat.
“It got washed up on the beach,” my dad told me. “I have to take it to the shelter.”
I could barely breathe as my dad drove the seal away.
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