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Lou had been dreaming of ShellCreature. Ever since then her dreams had been gentle – too gentle – like something in her was trying to be soothing, calming, counter-revolutionary. The first night, she had dreamt the sweetest bliss she had ever encountered in a dream, lying with fish languid in a bright pool on a cliff edge, watching them glitter and drift. She woke up bewildered, forgetting for a moment who she was. Later, when her mind was less desperate and the need for soothing less urgent, she dreamed closer to the sea. She dreamed an amethyst lagoon with a blackness in its depths like the water itself was opaque. That was where she had first set eyes on ShellCreature, as a ridged brown curve embedded in the wall of the lagoon just at the point where the water started to swallow light. She had known, straight away, what (who) was in the curve of shell. She had known the way you know in dreams, as if she had become ShellCreature for a moment, curled in the dark desperately looking for detail in which to unravel her fury. She woke up with a start and salt on her lips, and the image of red hair at the shell’s curving, and the rage that had ruptured the dream’s balm like a kiss echoing in her body. She went outside and crushed a snail shell in her hands.