The Seahorse

I flipped through the papers in my desk, things I had forgotten about and hadn't seen in years. It was mainly old math papers that I had kept, but on one sheet was a drawing of a seahorse, on the side of the sheet it said that it was a robot that was supposed to clean up trash in the oceans. I could still remember the day I had come up with that idea. I had been walking along the ocean one day on the beach and I noticed all the trash in the ocean. My dad had taught me about littering that day.

"People often are too lazy to put their trash into the trash can and so they just drop it" my dad explained to me. I was both confused and horrified. I had asked why people didn't just clean it up, he just chuckled in response. That night I went home and started designing a robot to clean up the trash. I was so certain that I would create this but I forgot about it and the paper sat in my desk for years.

I pulled the sheet out of my desk and thought of the idea again, it could work, I thought it might be able to work if I could get some help. So the next day I brought the design to my science teacher and she helped me create the robot I had designed years ago.

The day it was done I went to the beach to release it into the ocean. The sun was just rising and it cast an orange light on my hands in front of me. Sitting in the palm of my hand was a small mechanical seahorse, the light made it look almost alive, like the second that i put it in the water it would swim away. The beach was a small beach on the side of the ocean, when I was younger I used to call it pigeon beach and I would go there every weekend to pick up some of the trash that had floated in from the river. I felt like I had accomplished something major even if I hadn't. The sunlight washed over my face as I bent down into the snow, putting my hands into the cold water. I turned on the seahorse and it sunk for a bit before starting up and swimming away. It would collect as much trash as it could every week and then would go back to this beach every Saturday at sunrise, where I would meet it. I stood up my hands were wet and the cold from the winter morning bit into them more than before, but all I could think of was the seahorse.