Oyster Shell
By Sam Mueller
The thing that really pissed Amy off were the emojis.
It took hours of careful research and cross-reference, but slowly the patterns materialized. Jacob was snowman and the girl was rabbit. They sent those throughout the day when they were thinking of each other. Rabbit girl sent lots of winky kissy faces and Jacob responded with the smiling blushing face. They used the yellow heart at the end of their miss you love you see you soon texts.
Amy had only ever received the standard red. First page of the keyboard. Easily accessible.
Some emojis were straightforward. Baguette symbolized hunger, but in some cases meant that rabbit girl wanted to eat at the French bistro downtown for dinner. Others, like the oyster shell (often sent with a haha or lol) remained obscure. Car meant stuck in traffic, running man meant please hurry, light bulb indicated something exciting they should discuss in person.
And the bird’s nest emoji meant she, Amy, his girlfriend of three years, was gone and it was safe to come over. It was often accompanied by the eggplant, which didn’t need translation.
“Amy, honey, this isn’t healthy.”
She showed the archive of messages to her friend over coffee, explained with zeal her hypotheses about the oyster shell, only to look up and find the other woman’s face full of concern. Amy knew she inspired much discussion among their mutual friends but little actual sympathy.
She found the messages by accident. In the aftermath of their breakup she sifted through the digital debris, deleted phone numbers and changed passwords, unfollowed his friends on Facebook and Instagram. She discovered an old backup of Jacob’s phone on her laptop, and with it an archive of every text message he’d sent in the last year. At the top was a message thread with a little rabbit emoji instead of a name.
Amy knew, in a deep, shameful way, that if Jacob hadn’t broken up with her he could’ve gotten away with it for years. Her own dumbfounded disbelief was almost worse than the infidelity.
No one saw it coming, her friends had said. You were busy with work. Distracted. Overtired.
Oblivious. That’s the word they were looking for. Naïve. Amy knew who she was, though her friends seemed to think she didn’t, and what’s more that they could protect her from herself if they lied well enough.
She spent four hours at the kitchen table that night, plowing through the archive and a bottle of wine with academic intensity. At times the actual text was so sparse it felt like scrolling through a picture book or Rorschach test. Heart. Smiley face. Rabbit. Snowman. Oyster shell. How do these images make you feel? What unconscious message do they convey?
Her first instinct under stress had always been to catalog and quantify. When her childhood dog was put down, she’d gone to the library and checked out several books on veterinary euthanasia and the process of decomposition. The librarian had given her that look of concern and phoned her parents.
Her friends begged her to delete the archive. She promised she would and spent the next evening making a spreadsheet of all the messages, logging frequency and time sent, ratio of text to emoji, context used. She had discovered a secret hieroglyphic language for two. It was exhilarating, foreign, impersonal. It was up to her to make it all make sense.
She found herself scrolling the archive on her lunch break or while watching TV, reaching idly for her phone and letting her mind crawl through the messages like fingers over a scab, searching for any new tidbit of meaning. The context of the running man was slightly different here, as seen by rabbit girl’s response. Jacob only ever used the winking face when he wanted to have sex. Texts with fewer emojis tended to be either very emotionally serious or completely inconsequential. For example, the one where he announced his plan to break up with Amy contained only a single yellow heart.
But then a familiar quirk of language would jump out and scald her—a word Jacob always misspelled, a preferred text shortcut. She would have to stop then, closing the document and staring at her reflection in the darkened screen.
She got on the apps, mostly so her friends would stop telling her to, but her research had unlocked a horrible second sight. Emojis waited with deceptive nonchalance in every profile—tiny beacons of hidden meaning. Texting became impossible. Would a red heart seem too invested? What about the white? Was the smirking face ironic or earnest? Someone sent her an emoji of two people hugging and it felt so strangely intimate that she unmatched them immediately.
These people had no idea how vulnerable they were to her, how much of their inner lives she was able to see. She felt guilty, voyeuristic. She couldn’t stop thinking about the oyster shell.
The closest she ever came to texting Jacob was one night after she’d combed the archive for hours in bed, her head ringing with snippets of messages she now knew by heart.
what does it mean
She typed the message, added the oyster shell. The cursor blinked at her for a long minute. The last message Jacob sent was three weeks ago, when he’d asked to come pick up some things at the apartment. She had noticed early on that their texts contained barely any emojis at all. Where snowman and rabbit girl’s correspondence sparkled with life and hidden meaning, Amy’s messages were flat, almost obtuse in their simplicity.
How could you articulate something like that? There in the archive was some deeply authentic piece of Jacob, something so miniscule and innate he couldn’t even be conscious of it. Yet this lexicon of hand-chosen images told her nothing. The oyster shell would never mean to her what it meant to him.
Jacob didn’t like seafood. He couldn’t stand the smell or texture of it. Once, she had tried to impress him with a lobster dinner. It was early days, before they’d ever talked about moving in together or seen each other hungover or with their faces half-numb after the dentist. Before they’d ever argued over whose family they’d visit for thanksgiving or whether they had to go to her friend’s wedding in Utah. Before any of that she had made him lobster and he had tried with great bravery to eat it. His face white, his mouth tight with a smothered grimace—the sheer determination made her laugh so hard she wasn’t even upset. She’d overcooked it anyway.
Admitting their defeat, they ordered pizza and sat on the floor in front of the TV. Together they listed their least favorite foods and colors and genres of music, laughing, amazed at how long they’d gone not knowing things that seemed so basic, so obvious.
Alone now in the remnants of it all, she nestled deeper into the covers and started messaging everyone on her match list,
what’s your favorite emoji?
She sent it with a yellow heart, to see if it felt any different.
THE END
Author Bio: Sam Mueller lives in Maebashi, Japan where she teaches elementary and middle school English. Her work is published or forthcoming in The Belletrist and Archetype Magazine. In her free time, she sings at her local jazz bar, writes music, and reads tarot.