Huge, knobbly flints still turned up in the village gardens, too. Sometimes they were larger than a man’s head. They often looked like heads, too. They were so melted and twisted and curved that you could look at a flint and see almost anything—a face, a strange animal, a sea monster. Sometimes the more interesting ones would be put on garden walls, for show.
The old people called those ‘calkins’, which meant ‘chalk children’. They’d always seemed… odd to Tiffany, as if the stone was striving to become alive. Some flints looked like bits of meat, or bones, or something off a butcher’s slab, in the dark, under the sea, it looked as though the chalk had been trying to make the shapes of living creatures.