The surgeon holds the tip of the pen
against the target tissue for three seconds, then the
water droplet is
sucked through a long plastic tube directly into a mass spectrometer.
She can just make the crab out, shadowed and distorted, trundling sideways across the rock, and she pursues it, kicking her feet to stay pressed down
against the bottom, and then she lays her hands on the cold crisp shell, somersaults in the
water, and surges upward into her own plume of hair, up along a passage of black rock, pitted and winding, gaping windows alterately fountaining
water or
sucking it back, the weeds moving rhythmically in and out with this labored breathing, some trick of the light making the pool's surface into a shifting mirror, and though she should look up and see her grandpa bent over the pool, she can not.