One week after the children’s day cruise went missing off the coast, the beach artist of Carambola Island broke a decade of silence to announce he would finally unveil his masterpiece.
I hadn’t heard about the beach artist before. I’d only moved to Carambola Island a year ago.
The missing children’s cruise, on the other hand? Of course I’d heard about that. How could you not? It was all over the news and social media.
The whole thing made me sick whenever I thought about it. One week earlier, the fourth grade class of the local elementary school had gone out for its annual three-hour day cruise to explore the reefs off the coast. But an unexpected rerouting of an eastbound storm had sent harsh waters and heavy rain toward the boat’s path, and it didn’t have time to make it back. All the boat’s GPS and tracking systems went dead. Satellite phones, which had been stored on the boat in case of emergencies, went unused. Rescue helicopters were sent out, but visibility was terrible. By that night, a full-on chaotic search was underway, the helicopter pilots scanning the chops in the waves.
Already there were calls for lawsuits, this amidst a general outrage that a boatful of 18 fourth grade children and two teachers could be sent out into such risky weather with just one captain, a captain whose competence was now clearly in question. Parents of the missing children sobbed and raged on the nightly news. Conspiracy theories bloated the comment sections on Facebook and Twitter. People changed their profile pictures in solidarity. #PrayForCarambola was trending. The search for the boat continued, but it had disappeared.
To the bottom of the ocean, we admitted to ourselves when we were alone.
What other explanation could there be? Out in public, we agreed we should wait; we should hold out hope. But with each passing day, the rescue mission was obviously becoming a recovery mission.
We all knew it.
It was during this cloud of chaos and despair on the island that posters appeared on the windows of the shops and storefronts around town. Someone must’ve put them up while the island slept, because the posters were there one morning on the outside of the shops as I walked down Main Street to my art studio.
I always felt self-conscious calling it that — my “studio.” The space, which I had rented out a year earlier, was filled with wicker couches and armchairs and side tables where women rested their glasses of complimentary Sauvignon Blanc atop lace doilies. Only the back corner of the room, where my easel sat, was used to create art. The rest was ambiance. Floral candles were always softly burning, candles which I bought on Amazon and resold as if they were locally made, and which, I hesitate to admit, made up an embarrassingly large percentage of my overall income. Along the walls were my other main earners: watercolor paintings of the island – paintings of sunsets and seagulls and sand dunes and fog – each one destined to hang on the walls of some grandmother’s living room or above the toilet in a beach house bathroom.
Was I happy with my work?
I’d been on the island for a year, as I said, and I was grateful after decades spent bouncing around between art teaching jobs. But by then I suppose I felt much as the waves on the beach must’ve felt: sloshing back and forth in the same place, over the same sand, waiting for something new to wash ashore.
Then one fine morning, as the island community was still holding its breath over the missing children’s day cruise, there was a poster taped to my studio door, the same one taped to every door down the street.
I paused, keys in hand, to read it:
Hello.
The Beach Artist of Carambola Island would like to invite you to a special unveiling of his final show.
This will be the final statement from the artist, the culmination of his life’s work.
This will be a one-time-only event that will disappear with the tide.
Be on the beach facing the cliffs at Southeast Shore at 6 a.m. Saturday, June 5.
No RSVP necessary.
I peeled the poster off my door and carried it with me inside. Flipping on the lights, I took a seat on the wicker couch, my body sinking into the pastel-colored cushions.
“The Beach Artist,” I read again. His name, or his title I suppose, was capitalized for added importance. Who was this guy? I was one of a few artists on the island — beach towns are a lure for our types, with its swarms of wealthy tourists — and yet nobody had ever told me about this individual.
My instinct told me this was just some social media stunt from a local blowhard, or maybe a viral marketing campaign.
So that night, when I went out with some artist friends of mine to a local bar, I expected us to resume our week-long speculation about the search for the missing kids off the coast.
But no.
All they could talk about was the reemergence of the beach artist — and what his master work might be.
—
Music wafted through the barroom that night, a gentle slosh of sound over the voices and people wading through conversations, the clink of glasses, the scooting of chairs over hardwood.
Myself included, there were four of us at the bar, our usual cohort of fine taste and artistic bitterness. We may have been artists by profession, but we were haters by practice. For every vase we molded, sculpture we crafted, watercolor we painted, or photograph we captured, there were entire litanies of grievances and frustrations aired over the state of the art world, politics, social media and, most of all, our neighbors on the island.
We were all self-aware enough to admit this to ourselves but deluded enough to do nothing about it.
Wine helped.
And yet when it came to the beach artist, all those frivolities fell away, like extravagantly decorative flower petals, and what remained was that rarest of things: the sturdy root of sincerity.
They were, simply put, in awe of this guy.
“Don’t fret over the beach artist’s posters, because he’s entirely free of ego,” said the potter. “Merely a matter of getting the necessary information out to the public.”
“His work is… oh, how can I describe it?” said the photographer. “Fleeting, obviously, which is of course by design. But in their temporal state, they reach a transcendence that I can un-ironically call sublime.”
“He’s the shit, straight up,” said the sculptor. “I would cut off my right testicle to do what the beach artist does,” he added, gulping down his beer.
And then there was me, the relatively new arrival, who had never even heard of the beach artist before.
“So what about his work is so spectacular?” I asked.
I was on my second glass of wine by now, itching for my third, because such sincerity from this group was bewildering. We were seated by the window; it was near nightfall. But the air was already dark as more cloudy weather had spread over the sky, and a haze of fog cloaked the street. The people I saw passing by on the sidewalk out the window appeared to be dissolving as they moved. Everything felt different, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The weather made me uncomfortable and oddly anxious, as if I’d walked into my bedroom and found the furniture rearranged, yet only by a matter of inches, just barely enough to notice something was wrong.
At last, the potter — the oldest and longest-tenured islander in the group — responded to my question about the beach artist.
“He’s singular,” she said.
“Singular…” I repeated, letting the syllables linger on my tongue.
The potter nodded over her gin and tonic. “Unlike any other artist I’ve ever come across. And he’s been gone 10 years, working on a single project, or so he said when he disappeared — promised he’d be gone until he could unveil his masterpiece. So now here we are, a decade later… but for me, the mystery really is, how can he be working that long on a project when he doesn’t even know what he’s working with until he arrives on the scene?”
I asked her what she meant, and rather than toss me a simple answer, she waded gently out into a full explanation of the beach artist’s process.
“First off, my dear, he wasn’t always a ‘beach’ artist at all, strictly speaking,” she said.
In his early years, he’d been a land artist, the potter explained. Land art: it was a far less common artistic niche now than it had been in the 1960s and ‘70s, back when the potter herself was starting out. Artists back then had been restless, she said. Stifled by the commercialization and petty politics of the gallery art scene of New York, and lured by the prospect of creating meaningful work that could engage the culture while remaining pure of sheer monetary interest, new artists back then were venturing forth out into the nation’s deserts and coasts, creating massive monuments of human contradiction in nature.
Some of these “land art” pieces strived for permanence. There were mountains carved away, tubes laid and artificial mounds risen from the earth, like abstract ruins, which would nonetheless last for decades.
But there were also pieces that made no attempt at permanence whatsoever: patterns drawn in dust, sand scattered over grass, flimsy toilet paper unrolled over the precipices of dead waterfalls.
The beach artist of Carambola Island was among that second group, according to the potter. His work was meant to be witnessed fleetingly before it disappeared. No one knows exactly when he shifted his focus to beaches exclusively, but by the time he’d arrived on the island, his process was established.
He would arrive at the beach only in the hours before an unveiling. That was his ritual. He would not prepare in any way, or at least in any discernible way. Instead, he would step on the beach and then scavenge the sand, looking for anything he could find — rocks, twigs, shells, bundles of algae, the sand itself. Then he would arrange them in a display during low tide, completing the art piece just before the tide shifted and the waves washed them away. The viewer had but minutes to witness the life and death of the art.
Explaining this to me, the potter said she herself had grown to appreciate this approach more and more as she’s grown older.
“Any notion of permanence is merely a human’s whimsey — or arrogance, depending,” she said, her wrinkled and veiny hand strongly gripping the glass of her gin and tonic. “It’s something young artists especially cling to, as if they can defy mortality through pretty brushstrokes. But relatively speaking, my dear, one of my clay pots or one of your paintings is about as permanent as a sneeze. Even the fossils of dinosaurs are young, geologically speaking.” She lifted the glass to her lips, the liquid touching her mouth gently.
From here, I asked the group a series of questions about the artist. Did they know his real name? (No, they did not.)
Did they know where he came from? (There were rumors he originally hailed from somewhere in the Midwest, but these were unproven.)
Had they met him before? (Not in so many words, although they had witnessed him work as he prepared past displays, albeit from a distance.)
So what did he look like? (He was of a normal build, not too thin and not too large, not too short and not too tall, but he always covered his face with a bandana or other covering, and concealed his eyes with tinted goggles, and obscured his head with a wide sunhat, which they assumed was in some part a practical means of protecting himself from breathing in particles of sand and avoiding sunburn, but surely it was also a means of protecting his identity – or perhaps, to be less charitable, a means of manufacturing artificial intrigue.)
Had they seen him at all in the last decade? (Hard to say; he may have hidden himself away, or he may have been walking among the islanders secretly this whole time, no one recognizing him.)
Finally, I asked if they had any pictures of the beach artist’s work. This seemed to me a perfectly logical question, and yet I was met with contrived smiles from all three of them.
“The short answer is no, we do not have any photographs of the work itself,” said the potter. “I’m sure a Polaroid or two of some of his past displays do exist in someone’s junk drawer somewhere, but in truth, once you see the work, you won’t even think about taking a photograph.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
She took a deep pull from her gin and tonic now, wiping her mouth as she looked down at the table, as if attempting to translate to me the reflections she saw on the varnished wood. “Well, to use a belabored analogy, it would be like taking a photograph of a sunset,” she said at last. “No matter how fancy the camera, how perfect the lens, it just doesn’t translate. A sunset on its own is beautiful — perfect. A photo of a sunset? Well, that’s suitable only for the hallways of a chain hotel or a motivational poster in a soulless office cubicle. Do you understand? You have to see the sunset for yourself, yes? Smell the air, breathe in the scene, observe the light in person. The sheer scale of it. My dear, there’s a reason Mark Rothko or Helen Frankenthaler are so misunderstood by people who only see their work in images online. A photo would be like the corpse of the artwork,” and she looked up at me now, a memory still floating over her face.
“No life in it,” she said.
—
The day before the beach artist’s unveiling, they called off the recovery mission for the missing children.
The weather had picked up. Rain clouds stormed offshore, and more fog was drifting in. You could barely see the lighthouse beaming its vision out into the water. It was too dangerous for the helicopters and boats to go out.
But the parents of the missing children were furious.
“Who does this? What kind of psychopath does this?” said one of the mothers, appearing that morning on the 7 a.m. local news broadcast. Her voice was so loud as she sat in the TV news studio, screaming at the hosts, that the audio on my small old kitchen TV made raspy popping noises.
I was seated in my breakfast nook with my morning cup of coffee. I watched as the woman pointed a finger at the camera, shouting, “This bastard disappears for 10 years and then shows up now — and for what? To showboat over us? To make it all about himself? Just when we need more support than ever?”
It was only then I realized she wasn’t talking about the helicopters and boats temporarily calling off the search.
She was talking about the beach artist.
“What is this trash?” she said, waving one of the artist’s posters at the camera.
The mother’s name was Lucille, according to the on-screen graphic floating below her as she raged. Her name, it turned out, was the only thing about that morning’s broadcast that was fixed and anchored in place. Otherwise, Lucille was a hurricane. Her nine-year-old son PJ had been on the boat when it’d gone missing, and Lucille had been brought on to discuss an island-wide call to send more boats out once the weather cleared. But soon the news anchors were stumbling over themselves as they awkwardly tried to keep some measure of calm while Lucile cussed out the beach artist to his face on live TV.
“Fuck your art!” she said. “Fuck your pretty little shell sculptures! My son is real! These are our children we’re talking about!”
Right about the time the broadcast cut to a sudden commercial break, I finished my coffee, setting the mug down in the sink, and I said aloud to this woman: “Oh you poor thing, you have to know by now.”
After rinsing out my mug, I switched off the TV and grabbed my work bag for the day. Closing and locking the door behind me as I stepped outside, I could barely see a few feet in front of me. My street was unrecognizable. Heavy quilts of clouds shrouded the sky, blocking the sun, and the air remained in a perpetual chill as I got to Main Street.
I had the strangest feeling of being trapped within a phase between night and day, submerged in the instant the sun sinks fully beneath the ocean.
Most of the island appeared to be shut down. The beach was closed. Shops hadn’t opened up and likely wouldn’t all day, so Main Street was silent. I walked toward my studio as if this were a normal day, but it was hard not to feel uneasy.
The fog, normally burned away by sunrise, had only lingered and grown like an untended weed — its tendrils spread and curled in alleyways, spiraled around lampposts, suffocated the sewer grates. I tried putting my thoughts in some order, yet I felt dizzy and disoriented just walking down the empty street, as if I were being slowly choked without realizing it.
The fog only seemed to dissipate when I approached it, yet when I turned to look behind me, it had erased where I’d been.
The longer I walked, the further my mind drifted back to that mother, Lucille, from the morning news. Her face floated over the fog in front of me. Though she must’ve only been in her early 30s, Lucille had prematurely gray hair, which had appeared long and glimmering and beautiful in the light of the TV news set earlier that morning. And her eyes! Even on my small kitchen television, I’d been able to tell how vivid her sea-green eyes were. There was something both young and ancient about Lucille, and more so than anyone I’d met since arriving here a year ago, she seemed entirely of the island. She reminded me of a polished ocean rock: gleaming and clean and new, yet thousands of years old, tossed through currents in the unfathomable depths of the ocean for generations, seeing things we never would.
Somehow, with those eyes staring back at me through the fog, I wandered.
I got lost.
—
I don’t know how I ended up standing at the overlook above the Southeast Beach that morning.
I must’ve gone way off at the end of Main Street and even farther across a field of uneven sandy grass, as long as two football fields. This was the open stretch of half-land, half-beach at the edge of town where teenage islanders were known to gather at night. They would huddle down in the rippled dunes and mounds, hiding like soldiers in fox holes to dodge the beams of car headlamps and adult eyes that barreled over them, and therein lie still, whispering to one another between sips of beer, puffs of joints and tangled limbs, the sound of the ocean hiding their voices, before the beach patrol sends them scattering.
But somehow I’d found myself so distracted with thoughts of Lucille in the fog that I’d navigated up and down this battlefield of high school romance and found myself at the edge of a humble cliff, looking out at the waves of the ocean way beyond.
Straight below me, in a pocket of clear air, was the Southeast Beach.
The spot of tomorrow’s art show unveiling.
It was easily the worst beach on the island. Even getting down there was a danger, which was why even the most daring high school kids tended to stay back on the dunes. There was no good reason to climb down the thirty feet of sheer rock to get to the sand. The beach itself was only about the size of a moderately small parking lot. The rest was a slope of rocks and sharp stones that descended toward the water on either side.
But even saying that does not fully capture how confusing this beach was. So while the waves fall back, let me take this moment to explain.
There was the cliff I was standing on that morning – I could see the beach below, the foggy water beyond. This cliff formed a half circle, looming over the beach, almost like the stands in a colosseum. Now, if I were to climb down this cliff, I would reach the beach; I would be on the sand. As I said, it was a small beach. A person could run from one edge to the other in seconds before being forced to stop.
And why would they stop? Well, to keep from toppling down a ravine.
This is what I mean when I say it was a confusing beach. On either side were steep cliffs that would send a body tumbling over sharp rocks, jagged plateaus, dark pockets where caves curved and twisted. Yet if you were to walk to the center of the beach, you would find the water lapping gently over the sand.
How is this possible? I am no geologist, but I will describe it this way. Nature had somehow seen fit to create natural levees of stone on either side of the beach, like the walls of a dam, which were just tall enough to funnel the ocean water gently to the sand, while keeping the same water from sloshing into the dangerous bowls on either side, where crabs, lizards, snakes and slugs dwelled in damp, sharp darkness. Sometimes the waves crashed against the walls, sending sprays of ocean mist over the chasms, but that was it.
This morning, however, like so much in town, those steep caverns were obscured by the fog. Only the beach was visible, by some bafflement of air movement, sunlight and rock formation. I didn’t go down there, but I did wonder what the beach artist could possibly see in this deranged plot, this sad canvas.
Then I spotted someone.
Not on the beach, but far out into the water.
A man, floating waist-deep in the fog.
He must’ve been 50 yards out past the beach to the right, beyond where the water crashed against the stone walls. My first instinct was to call for help. I could not make out his appearance well. Still, he appeared stranded. But as I watched him, I saw he did not move. He was not bobbing in the ocean itself, adrift. Even with the fog so thick around him, I could tell he was rooted firmly. Standing on something hard — a rock, I assumed, for he appeared like a rock himself, while waves splashed all around him. Still, I could only see the soft caress of the fog around his body. I stood there so long, hearing the invisible waves crash on the invisible rocks, everything deleted by the fog.
And the man floating above it stood the whole time without moving. He was like a forgotten statue, a calcified figure of barnacles and mussels and stone.
And I could’ve sworn —
He was looking at me.
I would’ve kept watching him, but a wave of fog rolled toward me, and when the fog had cleared enough to see out again, he was gone.
As if he’d been sucked back into the ocean.
Once again, I was looking out at a blank canvas.
—
The next day, well before sunrise, I met my artist friends at the cafe by the beach. It had opened early for the crowds already gathering to see the beach artist’s unveiling. We had to squeeze together with our coffees and tea in a small table in the corner, ruminating over what we might see in the next hour.
“I am trying to go in free of bias,” said the potter.
“I’m just curious how he’ll structure it given the lighting and the layout,” said the photographer.
“I just hope to see the bastard himself,” said the sculptor.
Groggy, I let them talk.
I’d just awoken from a night spent dreaming of men emerging from the ocean, one by one, and then walking toward me. But instead of nightmarish monsters covered in kelp and coral, splashing their tentacle arms angrily against the surf, they were all the beautiful young men I’d loved in my youth. In my dreams, they were naked and returning to me, not paunchy and angry as they’d become, but gleaming and hopeful as they were in my memory.
Now wedged in the corner of the beach cafe with my artist friends, I rubbed the wrinkles under my eyes, in between gulps of black coffee.
Eventually I told them, “I think I’m going to go scope out the lay of the land before the show starts.”
I shimmied my way out of the cafe and emerged into the light blue dawn the island offered daily to those devoted enough to rise with it.
Some people were gathered now in a large group by the front of the cafe, but no one I could see had yet made the trek across the grassy, sandy field to the edge of the cliff. These people were content to wait patiently in the lobby, so to speak, before the show got started. I walked by the group and heard them talk to one another. They seemed giddy. They suckled at their to-go cups of coffee. A few even bounced up and down on their heels, beaming smiles at one another.
Something about the group filled me with an illogical hate, so I decided to begin the trek on my own across the undulating fields of sand and grass toward the cliff edge overlooking the beach, leaving the giddy crowd behind me.
It wasn’t only the increasing distance between myself and them that made me feel isolated. It was their enthusiasm that did it. Because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt like those people, so excited by the prospect of seeing art.
Decades of study and practice had wrung that out of me.
As I walked across the sand, up and down the moguls toward the beach, my knees aching with each rise and fall, I tried to recall what that felt like, that sense of pure wonderment at art’s possibilities. I knew I had once experienced it, that joyful mix of awe and admiration. Otherwise, I never would’ve become an artist in the first place. But by now those old memories had been drained of their emotion, leaving only a clinical process of images and moments – the photographic negative of the emotion, rather than the emotion itself.
As I was nearing the cliff edge overlooking the site of the beach artist’s unveiling, one memory – or series of memories, I suppose – did return to me. I recalled those afternoons as a child, decades ago, when my mother took me to the Renaissance paintings at the museum in the city. These were fresco paintings on display, meaning the artists had painted directly onto a wall of wet plaster, so that when the plaster dried, the art was a permanent part of the wall. The museum had transported these walls whole and set up them up within the bowels of a cavernous basement in the city.
Walking through these displays was astounding to me; the notion that people lived in rooms whose walls were adorned with this art was fantastical. The paintings did not conceal their emotion. They were bloody and loud and alive. I can remember being amazed by the display of movement upon the walls – the angled bodies, the pointed and accusatory fingers, the unsheathed swords and woeful displays of mourning. They were like real people frozen in time. Hundreds of years ago, and yet here they were. Mouths caught mid-shout. Glorious battles. Blades halfway stabbed through bodies. The eyes of a man who knows he is dead in seconds but he is not dead yet. Even the random people at the edges of the canvases that were these walls, the extras in the scene, held multitudes within their expressions. Were they afraid? Were they excited? Did they understand the significance of what they were seeing? I wondered for years what those people must’ve been thinking to experience such a dramatic moment.
It seemed to be everything I had been so desperately waiting for in my own life.
By the time I’d reached adulthood, I realized art had already collapsed in on itself like a dying star, becoming only insinuation and space and nothingness, streaks of color, impressions of light, a urinal tipped upside down. It was the closure of the ellipse that had begun with cave paintings before the dawn of civilization. There was nowhere else to go with it. What was the point anymore of being an artist? It had all been done. The space was filled. The land explored. But in my lowest moments, I always clung to the simple display of humans in sublime chaos offered by the Renaissance, painted in the most beautiful way possible.
Even as I’d spent years by myself painting seagulls and lighthouses.
Substituting passion for a paycheck.
--
Now as I reached the cliff edge overlooking the Southeast Beach, any sound of the excited crowds back at the café far off behind me had long since faded, replaced by the crashing sound of waves over sand down below.
Even at the very edge of the cliff, I could not see those waves. Fog covered the beach, fog thick as ocean foam. I could hear the ocean beneath it but I could not see it — that is, there was only the fog sloshing gently back and forth in the natural bowl of air currents created by the rock formations that bordered the beach. I nearly assumed the art show would be canceled, for there was no way anyone could see anything down there.
But that’s when I saw a monster, or the impression of a monster, before me:
The silver fin of a large sea creature rose out of the fog covering the beach, way down below.
Just as quickly, the fin dove down again, then reappeared a few feet forward, like a blurry dolphin slicing open the surface of the ocean.
The vision made perfect sense until it didn’t, when my mind put together the obvious reality: I was not witnessing a creature rising out of water, but rather something rising out of fog.
It must’ve been something moving over the sand. It was pacing back and forth in a circle, the flash of silver catching the pre-dawn light as it appeared and disappeared in the fog, moving around and around the beach.
My mind should’ve conjured images of sea creatures learning to walk upon land.
But somehow, even then, I recognized her.
There was a path to get down to the beach. It was steep but not impossible. I climbed down, and it took a long time at my age. Rocks slid out from under my feet, and I had to turn around and crawl backwards, careful not to slip and tumble down onto the sand.
When I had reached the beach, pulling myself up on aching knees, I turned around and saw her pacing closer to the water.
Down here, within the layers of fog, she was still blurry, but her body was clearer now. Each time she turned, her long hair was caught in the wind off the shore, billowing ripples of silver upward in a streak over the fog, like a flashing fin, before it settled again.
When she turned and saw me, she stopped. Her hair floated around her face like seagrass. “You’re not the one I came here for, are you?” she said.
“Who?” I asked.
“The beach artist.”
“Not the one you’re looking for,” I said.
Lucille turned back around, trying to part her way through the fog, presumably looking for the artist in question. Even a few feet in front of me, she was a ghost.
I wasn’t surprised to see her. If anything, I’d been expecting her to show up early. From her appearance on the morning news show, she didn’t seem the type to let the beach artist off the hook.
By now the color in the air had changed. The sun had not yet risen but the sky above the fog, I could see, was ablaze with purple, pink and deep reds that bled around us as the earth tilted toward day. I looked up at the sky, seeing the refractions and ripples in the atmosphere, which seemed so close I could swim up to it, touch it, break through.
“I saw you on the news yesterday morning,” I said when Lucille paced past me again. “I’m sorry about your son.”
“You know they’ve allocated two officers here for the unveiling?” She spoke without even facing me, as if she were talking to the fog through which she moved. “Two officers who could be out conducting search and rescue for PJ, and they’re coming here to walk around the crowds and watch some nutjob arrange seashells in a pretty spiral over the beach – or no, maybe he’ll make a neat sandcastle, wow! Or dig a hole! Can you believe it?”
She spun around, taking a step toward me, and it was only then, when her face was close enough to feel her breath disrupt the fog between us, that I could see the bioluminescence of her eyes, darting over my own face.
“Don’t you tell me you’re sorry about my son,” she said, her tongue flashing over her lips. “He’s still out there. Swimming toward me. Swimming home.”
—
Within an hour, the whole island was down on the beach, or so it seemed. Police showed up. More than just two of them; I counted five officers, all in uniform, bobbing in the fog without purpose. They weren’t the only public servants to show up. So did teachers. Bus drivers. Parking meter attendants. Island city council members. And then there were cooks from the shore restaurants. And some of the young beach lifeguards, though none were ever on shift here. There were teenagers, young parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren. So many small kids running around, kicking up sand as they chased each other in the fog. All of us crammed together as though the beach were a lifeboat.
The fog — it made me nervous.
I was standing close to the water with my artist friends. They were talking but it was as though the fog muffled their words. I only heard soft thrums of syllables beside me, like irregular heartbeats.
Meanwhile, I kept looking out at the water, wondering what was about to happen. It was the only thing that changed, other than the chorus of bodies moving around me. The beach itself was inert. But the horizon — I could see its colors gradually shifting as the sunrise approached. And when it did, cresting the ocean, it also served to burn away the fog on the beach. Bodies began to appear around me. Then faces. Then, expressions. The crowd was washed naked, even with their clothes on. Swirls of colorful emotions and scrunched noses moved and contorted as the sunrise bled over us. Seconds later, the air was clear, all our bodies freshly exposed to the sun as we moved over the sand.
Then I saw Lucille, her body facing the wind like a tilted wooden mermaid at the bow of a ship.
She was looking down at something by the edge of the ravine to the right of the beach.
The crowd followed her, and let out a collective gasp —
There, the first glimpse of the beach artist’s masterpiece was revealed, arranged over the rocks, where it’d been hidden beneath the fog this whole time…
Part 2/2 coming tomorrow…