Mary Anning stood, on the verge of the ocean, the waves waning and waxing...in a calming fashion. Snapping out of a trance, she urged her muscled, though aging, body to the soil, and began to rake her eyes over the silt, hoping to catch a glance of a white flash of festered bone. Kneeling for hours, she thought of her times on the beach throughout her entire life, and a hollow feeling crept into her mind, keeping her motionless on the brink of the water. Mary knew her life would come to an end in only years, and she knew she should make the most of it, but this wasn't enough to fuel her tired body into searching for fossils she would only be robbed of her credit from.
A crackling sound rang out clear over the waves and seagulls, and Mary's resting eyes snapped open, vigilantly searching her surroundings, perhaps for falling rocks that had been the cause of her father's and faithful dog Tray's deaths. Instead her eyes fell on a small shell, one of the kinds that littered the beach, one of the kinds that hardly sold well in the fossil shop. It was moving. Mary closed her eyes again, catching her breath, dismissing it as a common hermit crab.
Another sound again broke the familiarity of the beach, and Mary looked again, not out of fear, this time, but out of puzzlement. A small bug-like creature with a shiny black body seemed to be squeaking shrilly as it crawled out of it's shell. Mary leaned closer to the bug, trying to examine the bug, and then identify it. It was nothing as she had ever seen on the beaches of Lyme Regis. Then, without warning, the creature jumped into Mary's face, and she blacked out.
Mary awoke on the beach, feeling as though weights were pressed against every inch of her body. All of her body's aches had increased, but she soon realized she also had a tumor-like knot on her chest. She mustered her energy and sat up, staring around at the beach, hoping to find the bug she had disregarded as a hermit crab, and there it was; staring straight at her from a large rock not too far from her. It seemed to have grown in size. Mary could now see it looked like a rather thin beetle, with large glassy eyes, but it also seemed to have mussel-like qualities on its underbelly. Mary wondered if it could be one of the tiny fossils she had discovered, one of the types of bones that shriveled and collapsed when touched. She wanted to somehow study it, but she began to think she would have to kill it to retrieve sufficient data.
Thunder crackled loudly and suddenly, and Mary realized that huge storm clouds had rolled in when she had been unconscious, and told signs of a large storm. Mary hitched up her heavy skirts and ran to safety, forgetting about the bug for the time being. All through the next year, Mary's health was decreasing rapidly, her hair falling out, the tumor growing in size. She also hear strange clicking noises, just behind her, a crackling that sounded familiar. . . . Mary tried to push it out of her mind as she wandered the beach in her steadily worsening condition.
Another two years had passed, and it was now a crisp March, when Mary realized the crackling was getting fiercer, and now she remembered where she had first heard it. For some reason, the bug had been gone from her mind, as though it had been erased, but now she thought long on it, she remembered going unconscious, just before being attacked by the bug, and the symptoms she had been suffering since the event. Mary had barely time to wonder on this strange occurrence, when the cracking noise returned. Mary slowly turned on the spot, only spying ammonites and other small fossils inside the small space of house at first, but then, she spotted an elephantine bug that was perched on her ankle. Gasping for breath, she faintly wondered how she had missed the bug, but now her vision was getting dizzy. Mary collapsed, and was no more.
