Mud

The intertidal smell of mussels opening and closing as the skin pulls back. 
The black mud speckled with piss clam tunnels. 
Boys with flat sticks wiggling bare toes, a jab and thrust, clams in the air.
 Jabbing and thrusting is what boys do, piss clams flying through the air. 
Fiddler crabs peering out sideways from their hideouts. 
The boys scurry sideways to mimic the crabs, throwing long ribbons of seaweed at one another, in their hair, slapping their faces, flying though the air.

There were girls here the night before, girls and music. 

The boys swirled through their faint, sweet fog. 
The scent opened something hidden. 
The deep inside them mixed with the fog and doors opened everywhere. 
There are not always enough locks or keys to go around. 
Some of the doors are closed forever. Some doors are hanging off their hinges. 
Someone said once that everything has been thought of.

The boys think of these girls over and over again, they think of almost nothing else, they dart here and there after fiddler crabs as the bright light beats down on their bare skin and they think of girls. 

To stand on the water, to stand in a boat in the water, the salt drying in white streaks on their skin, their skin that longs for the girls hidden in the sweet, dank mud of desire before they even know it. 

Before they even know it they are thinking of girls again and again, even as they are covered in mud and seaweed and laughing sideways at each other they are still jabbing and thrusting though the sweet, sweet fog again and again and even, again.