The walrus and the carpenter were fighting for the crown, thought Ramona as she skipped barefoot along the sand, appreciating the way the water lapped in soft foam around her toes and caused them to sink a bit before receding again. No, no—the unicorn! It was the unicorn. He wanted the crown. The walrus and the carpenter wanted oysters. She paused in her girlish movements, looked up in puzzlement. But why? Why would a carpenter want oysters? That seemed silly, didn't it? It seemed more logical that he and a walrus would argue over a crown. Neither of them could've been very wealthy. A carpenter, after all—though a walrus might've been some sort of sea king. He might have wanted some oysters, fair enough, being a creature of the ocean, but surely any intelligent human would prefer a crown to some oysters. Why, she'd eaten with her family at a restaurant in town last night, a seafood restaurant, and her father had ordered oysters. They'd looked like boogers in shells! Ramona had laughed to see her daddy slurp down the quivering, grayish, gelatinous mounds. Ivan had made a show of gagging when Ollie tried one out of good sportsmanship, and their mother had kicked him under the table. It'd been fun.

The Curry family had already been at Blackswallow Beach a week, and Ramona loved it. She loved most things, in spite of her parents' constant need of reassurance. Parents. They were so silly sometimes.

Her doll suddenly fell from her hand when a particularly chilly wave lapped at Ramona's feet. The girl sighed as she reached down to retrieve Bloomy. She brushed the sand off her dress, realizing sadly that the dampness would take a while to dry, and glanced back at the beach house. Daddy sat in a chair on the deck, and she waved at his small form; he waved back. He'd allowed her to wander a little farther on her own each day, today stating she could go down to the rocks about a half mile, so long as he could see her. She was wearing a bright coral-colored sundress with mother-of-pearl buttons down the front, and it billowed around her knees when the wind picked it up; she could be spotted a mile away along the clear sunlit stretch of beach. So as long as she stayed within viewing range of her father, she was free to carry on.

Ramona surveyed her doll. Bloomy's painted face was all right, though her yarn hair was soaked. She wrung out some of the salty water, scolding her friend as if it'd been the doll's fault she'd dropped it, and began her trek along the shore once again, stopping every so often to collect a broken shell or curious object, sometimes running to frighten a bird. At eleven, Ramona existed as something of a paradox, radiating that bright, unaffected joy of childhood not yet extinguished but outwardly (at least in expression and usually in presentation) solemn. This was partially due to the contrast and severity of her complexion, which did give the impression the child might alone be experiencing an eternal and isolated chill. However, Ramona's physique was additionally more delicate than that of most children her age. The bones of her wrists moved visibly just beneath her tender flesh, as did the bones of her ankles and the ribs along her sides; her limbs resembled those stick-thin legs of the willets that darted about along the seashore as she moved through the surf. She was a delicate child, though nothing about the way she skipped across the sand suggested her understanding of that.

Lilia had worried often during Ramona's early years that she'd been ill. The child had never eaten particularly well or followed her same-age peers in rambunctious pursuits on the playground, but no doctor had ever found anything physically worrisome. Her apparent fragility hadn't resulted in broken bones or uncontrollable viruses. Her quiet hadn't resulted in any off-putting behaviors, and though she'd never become close to other children, her teachers claimed she was well-liked and got along with everyone. Academics? She'd excelled in those, was above grade level in most subjects. If Ramona's teachers ever expressed any concerns at all, it was to mention that she was a bit of a daydreamer, but her imaginings had never been a detriment to her learning, so no one had been much troubled about them. Still, the sense that something was off about the child had long been one of the few things Lilia and Arthur disagreed upon—Arthur just hadn't seemed to see what Lilia had—but she'd learned long ago that to broach the subject would lead only to a dead end. Arthur's blinders in regard to the child could be infuriating.

The elephantine black rocks loomed nearer, though the girl approaching them barely noticed. There were no people about, not here. Most of the action on this beach seemed to be around her brothers, who'd had no lack of other teens to spend time with each day. Some other beachgoers, locals or vacationers, walked dogs or sat in chairs with their fishing lines, laid out under the sunshine to toast their bodies or watched their babies tap fat little feet into the water only to scream and waddle back when the waves caught them unawares. Ramona didn't mind being on her own; in fact, she felt the same when she was alone as she did when she was with people. She never experienced loneliness, nor was she plagued with fright. That was one thing her parents hadn't had to worry about, at least—their daughter having any irrational fears. Ramona hadn't even any rational fears.

Caution, though, she did have, so when after she'd climbed upon the smooth, low-lying rocks and rounded the top she caught sight of the human figure seated on the other side, she paused.

Ramona stood barely three yards away from him, but had he not been on the other side of the rock, she'd have surely seen him a mile away. The man was absolutely enormous. She'd never seen such a large person in all her short life, and she doubted her parents had seen one in their long lives. In her estimation, he must have been a thousand pounds. Most of his flesh was on display, burgeoning from the burdened velvet fabrics he wore as matching mauve pants and tee. His impressive head (the manifestation of a melting bowling ball), dusted with a mop of dark hair, sat dwarfed atop massive shoulders which ballooned into mammoth arms over his absolutely preposterous gut. Ramona had the impression of a cat-like creature she'd seen in a Japanese animated film once, a gargantuan feline critter upon which a little girl not too unlike herself had curled up and slept. Of course, she wasn't sure this gentleman would appreciate her sleeping on his belly. Nor was she sure she'd want to impose, anyway. His legs contended with his arms as to which of them could pass as tree trunks, though rather than end in painfully thick fingers, his calves whittled down into inconceivably tiny black Mary Jane shoes. As to the man's face, Ramona saw as she drew warily nearer, clutching her doll to her heart, that it possessed diminutive black eyes above a petite nose and an even tinier mustache, but most striking of all were the thick streams of clear liquid running constantly down his bulbous cheeks, dripping from his jowls.

He startled when he saw Ramona, tried to rise but was too heavy and too awkward for quick movements, and fell back down.

"It's just me!" she cried, as if that meant something, adding gently, "I won't hurt you."

That must have made sense to him, for he calmed. He made some sort of moaning noise, something no one but a child might have comprehended, and the girl seemed to read the message, for she offered a brief smile and nodded her head before proceeding to settle down nearby.

"I'll stay with you, just for a little while," she said. Ramona smoothed the folds of her dress over her knees, wiggled a bit of the sand out from between her toes, and positioned Bloomy primly on her lap. The man watched her in mild curiosity as she did these things, and when she turned up her chin to face the misty distance of the calm gray sea, he did as well.

The two of them sat in silence for some time, he continuing to shed his mysterious tears and she keeping him company while he did so, disinterested in asking him any questions whatsoever. Neither of them minded the other's presence.

Occasionally, pelicans soared overhead, or willets strutted about in the shallows, dipping their snaky heads to forage. Ramona's thoughts wandered. If she'd been asked what she thought of, she probably couldn't have answered. Cabbages and kings, or whether pigs have wings, or if the sea were boiling hot somewhere far out distant—who could say? She might have thought of the peculiar spider she'd seen that first night in her room, the one her mother had tried to squish and on which she'd fancied she'd seen a face. The arachnid hadn't returned, not to her knowledge, anyhow, and even if it had, Ramona assumed her eyes had played tricks. Sure, she hovered between childhood and adolescence, but she wasn't so credulous as to believe small things like spiders had human features. Yes, she may have thought of the spider, or she might have thought of the continuing strife between her parents, which they didn't even try to hide. Her ridiculous brothers might've been distracted enough by their own lives not to sense the changes, but she was a spider herself, in a sense, at the center of a tender web, and any time a little fly disrupted a thread, the frangible center of her world trembled. She might have continued along that string of thought to consider that this family vacation held more importance than any of them quite realized, even herself. Yes, spiders and parents might have crossed her thoughts. The rats that'd brought them there—she might have thought of those, too. Her father had mailed them to his friend in Charleston (funny, to think of some dead rats traveling through the mail), and she'd not heard of them since, though she remained curious. It would have been only natural for Ramona to wonder what had become of the rat king.

But perhaps she thought of none of these serious or strange things. Perhaps she thought of nothing at all.

The sunshine warmed her back as softly as a fleece blanket around her thin, bare shoulders, not hot enough to burn her. The gentle waves offered a soothing complement to the man's intermittent snuffles. He didn't bother to hide or even wipe at his continuously flowing tears, showed no shame in front of Ramona, and she never even considered asking him the source of his sorrow. Maybe that was because, being a child, she understood that one needn't always have a reason for something like tears.

After an indefinite amount of time, hours or minutes, a new sound reached Ramona's ears, something like a—an accordion, only one with pipes, toy whistles or flutes, like the pan flutes small goat-men played in the Greek myths. What was the name of the instrument she thought of but couldn't quite name? The circus one? A calliope! She hopped to her feet as suddenly, before she could wonder any more, a short figure in a black-and-white-striped suit clambered up the rock alongside the fat man. He had around his neck a heavy box painted in once bright but now faded colors, its words impossible to read. The awkwardly chipper music was coming from that box as the man turned a z-shaped handle protruding from its side. Over his head he wore a rubber mask, a clown mask, the sort one might buy for halloween, with a foolish red grin and sprouts of colorful hair, a large red nose and holes behind which real eyes darted.

Upon seeing the newcomer, the fat man became visibly excited, clapping his seal paws and turning his moans to laughter. The clown stopped before the man and nodded wearily. With his spare hand, he pulled a dirty handkerchief from his pants pocket and farcically mopped the brow of his mask before tucking the rag back into a different pocket. Then, never stopping his music, he reached into the front of his box, the side facing his chest, and miraculously retrieved a large waffle cone with a generous scoop of cherry-red ice cream on top. He handed it to the fat man, who took it and began slurping with relish.

Ramona watched this exchange with slowly widening eyes. Even for an imaginative child, the scene sat ill within her. It wasn't quite the unexpected appearance of an ice-cream-wielding, calliope-playing clown that was strange—instead, it was more specifically something about the clown's eyes, a watery, absent sort of look, as if the fat man had wept his sorrows away from himself and right into that clown. Ramona had felt . . . unsettled when he'd glanced at her, and as the clown approached her now, hobbling across the rocks and nearly stumbling into a crevice, she maintained a suitable skepticism and placed one foot firmly behind the other in case necessity prompted her to turn and run.

Never once did the small clown stop his calliope music, that strangely cheerful piping, even as he reached the girl and retrieved a second ice cream cone from within the box leather-strapped around his neck. He handed it to her, held it in the nothing between them while his bloodshot, pinkish-blue eyes glistened.

Ramona tipped her head to one side. As apprehensive as she was to take some food from this stranger, she was even less keen on the fellow sticking around. The thing behind the mask didn't entirely appear friendly, and she didn't like being unable to see the rest of its face. So, at an encouraging nod from the fat man, she took the waffle cone, thanked the clown, and watched as he turned and shuffled oddly off. His quirky piping followed him until both he and his instrument were out of sight.

Able to breathe a little more freely once again, the girl glanced from the crimson confection beginning to sweat atop its diamond-patterned cone and up to her formerly weeping friend, who sat watching her in anticipation. As he'd turned to face her, she saw him at an angle she hadn't before, and she realized he wore a nametag. It was not a sticker but a rather official-looking pin, rectangular, enameled porcelain, white with gold paint around its edges, and in fine black lettering was the word Elmer.

"Elmer?" Ramona confirmed, meeting his eye expectantly.

He nodded, his cheeks pinkening.

"It's all right to eat?" she asked, holding up the cone.

Another nod, followed by another lick off the top of his own treat. His tongue, she saw, was as red as the ice cream, as red as his stained lips.

She looked down at her doll. "Well," she said, calling it by the name only she and the doll knew, not its nickname Bloomy, "it does look refreshing, and if Elmer likes it, I suppose I can trust him." One taste convinced Ramona that this ice cream was, indeed, the best she'd ever, ever tasted, cool and sweet and tart and refreshing, gliding down her throat as easily as fresh water from a garden hose, a glass of lemonade from a neighborhood stand, a sno-cone at a summer carnival.

By the time her father had wandered down the shoreline to claim his daughter, the sun was beginning to set. He'd been able to see that little spot of bright coral on the rock, but he'd grown anxious of waiting any longer. She was alone when he found her, his little girl, lying on her back and looking up smiling at the pastel clouds. Her cheeks, her lips, her teeth, her tongue were smeared with reddish-almost-black, and nearby, out of sight from their side of the shore but visible once Arthur had mounted the top of the rocks, was the carcass of a seal, at least several days dead, its belly carved into by scavengers.