The Tide Pool at Low Water

The ocean pulled back its blankets just after breakfast, the way it did every morning, and left behind a little pool of water sitting in the rocks like a bowl of soup nobody remembered to eat.

And inside that pool, a hermit crab named Barnaby woke up.

"Oh my," said Barnaby, clicking his tiny claws. "The Big Water's gone again."

He lived in a borrowed shell — a pretty one, spiraled like a cinnamon roll, with a chip on the edge that he pretended was a doorway. He peeked out from inside it and looked around at his world.

The tide pool was small. You could step right over it if you were a person wearing rain boots. But to Barnaby, it was everything. It was his neighborhood, his park, his grocery store, and his sky — all wrapped in one shimmering puddle.

"Good morning, Barnaby!" called a voice from the pool's rocky wall.

That was Opal, the sea anemone. She looked like a flower made of jelly, with soft purple tentacles that waved in the water like fingers saying hello. She couldn't walk or crawl or swim. She was stuck right where she was, every single day, attached to her rock.

"Good morning, Opal!" Barnaby called back. "Anything exciting happen while I was sleeping?"

"A piece of seaweed drifted in," Opal said. "It bumped my tentacles. I thought it was breakfast, but it was just seaweed."

"That is exciting," said Barnaby, because he was polite.

He scuttled across the sandy bottom of the pool, past the cluster of dark blue mussels who never talked to anyone, past the tiny garden of bright green sea lettuce, and over to the deepest corner where the water was coldest.

"Percy?" Barnaby whispered. "You awake?"

Two long red antennae rose slowly from behind a rock. Then two beady black eyes. Then a whole tiny shrimp appeared, no bigger than your pinky finger, almost completely see-through.

"I've been awake since the water got quiet," Percy said. "I don't like the quiet. When the Big Water leaves, everything feels too still. Too small."

"The Big Water always comes back," Barnaby said.

"But what if it doesn't?" Percy's antennae twitched nervously.

Barnaby didn't know how to answer that, so he just sat next to Percy for a minute, and they watched a little bubble float up from between two rocks and pop at the surface.

Sometimes sitting with a friend is better than saying something.

Then — PLOP!

Something crashed into the tide pool from above, sending ripples across the whole world. Barnaby tumbled sideways. Percy shot backward into his hiding spot. Even the mussels seemed to flinch.

It was a fish.

A small silver fish with round, surprised eyes, flopping and spinning in the shallow water. She was much too big for the pool. Her tail smacked the surface. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed.

"WHERE AM I?" the fish shouted. "WHERE DID THE OCEAN GO?"

"You're in our tide pool," Barnaby said, trying to sound calm even though his heart was hammering inside his borrowed shell.

"I need to get OUT! I need deep water! I need ROOM TO SWIM!" The fish — whose name was Minnow — zoomed in a frantic circle, which in a tide pool this small meant she basically just spun in place.

"Please stop spinning!" cried Opal. "You're making waves and bending all my tentacles backward!"

"I CAN'T STOP! I'M PANICKING!"

"Well, panicking isn't helping!" Opal said, which was true.

Barnaby crawled right up to the edge of the spinning fish. "Minnow! Minnow, look at me."

The fish stopped. She was breathing hard, her gills fluttering. She looked down at the tiny hermit crab in his chipped shell.

"You're stuck here," Barnaby said gently. "For now. The Big Water left, and it won't be back until it's ready."

"So what do I DO?" Minnow's voice cracked.

"You do what we do," said Barnaby. "You live here. With us. Until the water comes back."

Minnow looked around the pool. The rocky walls covered in bumpy barnacles. The little garden of sea lettuce. The purple anemone waving gently. The see-through shrimp peeking out from behind his rock.

"It's so small," Minnow whispered.

"It's small," Barnaby agreed. "But there's a lot in it."

And slowly, carefully, he showed her.

He showed her the tiny crabs — even tinier than him — that hid under the flat rocks. "Baby shore crabs," he said. "If you tap the rock gently, they wave their claws like they're dancing."

He showed her the snails that crawled along the walls of the pool, leaving shiny silver trails that glittered when the sunlight hit the water.

He introduced her to Percy, who was shy at first but then told Minnow about how he could clean parasites off bigger fish. "Not that you have any," he added quickly. "You look very clean."

They visited Opal, who told the story of the seaweed that bumped her that morning, and honestly, the way she told it — with dramatic pauses and gasps — it was a pretty good story.

And Minnow started to breathe more slowly.

"Look down here," Barnaby said, leading her to a spot where the sand was fine and white. "Watch."

They waited. And then the sand moved. A tiny flatfish — so perfectly camouflaged it had been invisible — shifted slightly, and suddenly Minnow could see its two little eyes looking up at her.

"There's a FISH in the FLOOR!" Minnow gasped.

"That's Fletcher," said Barnaby. "He doesn't talk much."

Fletcher blinked.

As the morning went on, the sun moved across the sky and lit up the tide pool from different angles. At one point, the light came through the water just right and the whole pool turned gold and green, and the ripples from Minnow's gentle swimming made patterns dance across the sandy bottom like magic.

"Oh," Minnow said softly. "That's beautiful."

"It does that," said Barnaby.

Then Percy shouted from his corner: "I HEAR SOMETHING!"

Everyone went still. And yes — there it was. A low rumble. A whooshing sound that got louder and closer. The water in the pool began to tremble, just barely.

"The Big Water," Opal whispered, her tentacles stretching tall.

The first wave reached them gently — just a trickle of cool, fresh seawater sliding over the rocks and into the pool. It tasted like salt and open ocean. Then another wave, bigger. Then another.

The pool began to grow.

Minnow felt the water rise around her. She had room to turn. Room to stretch her fins. The tide pool wasn't a bowl anymore — it was connecting back to everything.

"It came back!" Percy shouted, his antennae wiggling wildly. "Barnaby, you were right! It came back!"

The water kept rising. Soon the rocks that made the pool's walls were underwater, and the tide pool wasn't a tide pool anymore. It was part of the ocean again.

Minnow hovered in the growing water, looking down at her new friends. She could leave now. She could swim out to the deep, dark, endless sea where there was room for a thousand frantic circles.

"Will you be okay?" she asked Barnaby.

"We'll be fine," he said. "We do this every day. The water goes. The water comes. And in between —"

"You live," Minnow said.

"We live," said Barnaby.

Minnow flicked her tail. She rose toward the surface. But before she swam away, she turned back one more time.

"Your world isn't small, Barnaby," she said. "I was wrong about that."

And then she was gone, a flash of silver in the blue.

Barnaby watched her go. Then he crawled back to his favorite rock, settled his chipped shell into the sand, and let the cool, fresh ocean water wash over him.

"Same time tomorrow?" Opal asked.

"Same time tomorrow," said Barnaby.

And the tide pool waited, quietly, for the ocean to pull back its blankets once again.