Sand CrusheR

The same thing had happened 20 years before. Walter stood below the fresh growth of blue-eyed grass and watched the children fighting on the beach. He felt the years of sun upon his back, layer upon layer, like their annual rounds of back to school shopping. The air was thick with salt, sand, kelp, the drying and cracked shells of horseshoe crabs, mussels, and other mollusks, as if all the days between then and now had been packed into this one day.
The day that Walter went to the beach was warm. The sky was cornflower blue, sparse white clouds feathered across its expanse. His mother’s dress beat against her shins and flapped like fins in salt water wind. The blanket fluttered as they held its corners, lifting it and letting it arc and fall onto the sand. Gulls sat upon the calm waves, bobbing up and down before they hit their apex and crashed into themselves, turning from slate blue to white, the foam dispersing along the shore.
The beach was an unpopular one. Not due to any deficiency of the fault lines. The cliffs which loomed about the sand and water were severe. Seaside daisies clung to their sides with sisyrinchium bellum, the blue-eyed grass which kept eternal watch over the shores below. If sis could speak, she might tell passersby to direct their attention to the northwest where a boy plays near the alkali sink, anchored in the dunes.

Walter sat on the blanket and dug his toes under the sand, patted it smooth, and wriggled them to watch the granules break apart and slide down the sides of his feet. He tried to grab ever larger handfuls of the dry top layer, feeling it rush through his fingers as they curled in towards his palms. He waited as patiently as any boy could for his mother’s call to get dropped so she could dig into her purse and give him the sunscreen. The lesson to wear sunscreen was fresh on his skin, and he waited anxiously for her, thinking about how it had stung when he peeled himself off the sticky hot leather of the the car, and how much hotter the warm water had felt on his back than it had felt on his hands.

As he waited he noticed a girl and her brother playing near the shore. The girl’s back was to the ocean and she let the water rush up and touch her skin for an instant before it rolled back and down into the sand. With a trowel, a bucket, and a plastic cup, the girl was building a castle. The castle was well-crafted. The sand she used was packed tight and damp, built with wide bases and narrower turrets. She cried as she built, wailing when her brother would take a running start and long jump into her castle. Walter noticed the boy’s swim trunks were pulled too high, as if his mother had lifted him by the seat of the pants and said ha!

He probably deserves it. Walter thought.

Walter’s thoughts on the matter concluded there, however, because at that moment the wind picked up his mother’s cell phone signal, and carried it out to the Farallon Islands. At the same moment that his mother started screaming, a gull called down a warning to the people on the beach; more to come, more to come. Walter jumped up and pulled his mothers arm as he bounced up and down and asked for the sunscreen and his trowel and pail. He smeared a thick coat of sunscreen over his arms, chest, face, and what he could reach of his back. He tossed his tools down the warm dune and rolled down after them, standing up at the end covered in sand. It was the only way to make sunscreen fun. Covered in sand, pausing to pretend he was a statue, he slowly made his way to the water, where the sand was wet and malleable.

It was there that Walter made his masterpiece, though no one would ever see it. It was there he toiled, there where the water lapped at his legs, and the sun beat down on his back, and the sand fleas jumped to higher ground. When it was done, Walter stood back and admired his work, and, surveying it’s magnificence in comparison to the coastal scenery, he fixated upon the California Oat Grass, and ran to get some to use as flags upon his castle.

Time is not linear. Hours can pass without a major event and feel as long as an eventful minute. While Walter ran to get the grass, a wave followed his lead and crept up farther than his predecessors. The wave crashed, spreading foam and water towards Walter’s castle. The water lapped at the edges of the castle and eroded the base, causing the roof to cave. The castle which had only just been miraculous, had now turned into a mushy puddle of sand.
Walter returned to the castle, at least, he returned to where he thought the castle should have been. A moment passed in shock, until he looked up from the sand towards the girl and boy he had seen playing when he first got to the beach. The boy was skipping back towards his sister, dragging a stick and acting careless. Walter was filled with rage. His vision filtered out all but the back of the boy’s shoulders. He dug his toes into the sand and pushed himself off, fists full of grass raised in the air and screaming his war cry.