Another short story from my collection of older material, I'm hoping to post it all before I start moving on to new stuff, I wrote all these to be read, years or months ago but never did anything with them, it's time to get rid of the backlog before starting a journey with new short stories and rambles, anyway, here we go.
Blue sea, white sand.
The sun is up, the beach is busy.
Families, couples, dogs and their owners.
The quiet lapping of the ocean is mixed with the yells of delighted children and a portable speaker in the background.
A boy and a girl, young, naïve, innocent and untainted by the world, meet for the first time near the shore. A budding friendship, they will experience this many times in their lives but fewer and farther in-between as they get older.
They share their names, laugh and smile, run away from the waves and play in the sand. They’re happy and carefree, enjoying what the world has to offer and now that world has offered them each other’s company.
They decide to build something in the sand, together. They set out on their mission to build a sand castle, not just any sand castle, the boys voice gets carried by the wind
“It’s going to be the best sandcastle in the whole world”
Excited and determined they set out to build, each doing one half, its close enough to the shore so that they can get wet and dry sand, but not too close that the waves will destroy it, only lightly touch its walls.
The castle starts off strong as they laugh and chat non-stop the way kids do, both halves are immaculate and for a short while it was the best castle on the beach, in the world to their eyes.
But then the first edge of a wave hits the foundation, a couple pieces break off and the boy seems annoyed. Why would something they’ve worked so hard on get destroyed so easily. The girl is unphased laughs and says
“its ok silly, look, we can just fix it”
And so they do, each fixing their half and carrying on with their important work. But now the boy knows more waves will come, his side is not as perfect as their first attempt, the foundations are weak. Sure enough when the next wave comes his side crumbles while hers is only slightly damaged. She gets straight back to work, determined. He is losing interest.
While she works to repair the damages the boy starts looking around at the other kids, his parents and the ice cream van in the parking lot, he wants to leave but he can’t she’s working so hard, even fixing his side. When the next wave comes in and the weak foundations cause more than half the castle to break he’s had enough, time to go make new friends, move on to other things. She wants him to stay, she wants to build a castle with him but he’s already gone, the only thing left of him is his footprints in the sand.