The sea looked calm unlike the other days as he walked barefoot in the wet sand with his black sneakers hanging from his two fingers. One of the laces dragged itself on the moistened ground, leaving an invisible trail of uneven straight line. The sun turned itself into a gorgeous red ball as it continued with its journey into the end of the horizon in the far away west. The two crabs that were having their war for victory gave way as he approached, now dragging his feet through the sand. A piece of broken glass that lay hidden deep in the sand pierced through the nail of his left thumb, but he didn’t seem to notice the pain that was slowly starting to plague his finger. He continued to push himself forward, holding his sneakers .
A child, no more than ten, who was busy constructing a sand castle that looked more like just a load of dump with finger-pierced holes everywhere, felt a dang of uneasiness as he passed by with a bleeding toe covered with sand. The child sat motionless with a firm grip on his plastic spade and looked at the man with unbuttoned shirt walk closer towards him. He regretted not paying heed to his mother’s words and coming to this end of the beach to play. His eyes brimmed with tears and he trembled as the figure came closer and stood in front of him. With eyes as wet as the sea, the child looked up at the man. His unmanly chest lay exposed in the evening breeze. His drool foamed out of his lips and the blood-shot eyes brought an unimaginable horror on to the child’s face. He concentrated all the courage within in his ten-year old self and ran away from the beach holding onto his plastic spade into nights of haunting nightmares where he would see the man smile at him, blood-shot eyes and foamed lips, collapsing onto his sand castle that had taken his four hours in the making. He ran away from the everlasting sands of horror as fast as his tiny legs could carry him.
As his senses darkened, he felt the kid run away in fear. With a smile still on his face, pressed into the pile of sand, he welcomed the forever darkness, the mysterious world. He knew that she would come here as promised and it would kill her to see his lifeless body on the sand. The letter in his pocket would make her live the rest of her life between the terrible walls of guilt. She would crumble within. She would go through the same pain. These being his final thoughts, the darkness of nothingness swallowed him, followed by the sea.
The tides never saw another person on the beach for the next few years.
