You are sitting on a beach and your mother is here. You have no actual memory of this but know through the shifting truth of the dreamscape that this is how it must have been: the two of you recomposed side-by-side, sitting in the sand, a golden heat.

   Transmuted, you are almost four years old. As in the way of memory, the mise-en-scène unfolds from above. It is Pieter’s fourth birthday and he is dressed all in white especially for the occasion. Certain things seem more significant to you now than they possibly could have been at the time. The details matter — not because they are the last that you, the dreamer, already know that you will have, but because they are the last that he, Pieter, would have had. But how could anyone have known - especially a four-year-old - what kind of fate awaits each of us from above.

   A warm breeze blows from behind, your mother is talking to someone and the hat that has been forced onto your head is too tight. Sun a resplendent warm globe, the ocean a vast blue metronome. Mostly you and Pieter are aware of one another. Finally, there is the sand, soft and warm and innocent to the touch. Your consciousness knows it was sand, not stones, nor grit, nor shell, because you have been there, to that beach, once and alive and fully awake. On that day, all those years later — that stark and perfectly mundane day, the truth shook and shivered beneath your feet, and still, you could make no more sense of it than you do your dreams…

   In which Pieter is grabbing the earth by the fistful now, letting it fall through his fingers, blissfully ignorant of his place upon it.

As the last few grains slowly slip away, does he get a sense of what is to come? of an immutable and indifferent end? – not knowing that Time destroys all beings, even those yet to comprehend what time means.

   When Pieter’s time comes does he look up? As you in your dreams look up. Does he get to see it then, that fickle and fractious quantity, stand still for a brief eternity, illuminating all possibilities except for one?

Are there enough grains of sand left to fall through his fingers in time for him to scream, like you scream now?

Does he awake, somewhere else, in a different place, a different bed— sweating, shouting— calling your name instead?

 

   Julia’s cool hand soothed the back of his neck, he must have shouted again. She whispered to him that it was a dream, just a dream — but his damp skin bore physical testimony to the ongoing tragedy. 

   “Pieter?” she asked.

   He turned to look at the alarm clock on the far side of the bed, stiff red lines reporting 2:22 from every side.

   Pieter’s life echoed through the phonetic of all-knowing, its voice axiomatic and terrible. It showed him how age is destined to placate men’s hearts, so that when we become old, and it becomes time for us to die, the loss is made easier on the young by the sight. The deep contour lines and ancient water maps which make a spectacle of the skin; the jaundice that weeps at weary eggnog eyes; the apple-brandy smell of the inner organs as they denature within.

   But to take a child…

   In David’s subliminal state he could still comprehend, through little less than a prick of light, the cosmic weight of the reverse: how when the young die something other than time gets taken from the living. A great carnivorous debt becomes owed the world; impressed upon the beleaguered and the broken and the beggared; a curse.

   He forced himself to sit up, to breathe. He would resist for as long as he could before being drawn back into that vitreous half-place where memory permits the present to die that our dreams may briefly come alive.

 

Years later, when David had gone to visit the place that haunted his nights; to see how it was, not how they told him it had been (for how little of what is remembered in life is what was seen?) — the beach, with all of its worldliness and willing participants, was far more surreal than his imagination could have ever rendered it. A pink platoon of puppets lay star-spangled on a blanket of golden sand; appendages akimbo on cotton towels; colourful hats. Laughing, bathing, sleeping; the plasticine scent of sunscreen; the innocent sounds of children screaming, warm waves rolling in, ice-cream vendors peddling their wares and, above them all, the seagulls circling like furious sentinels, sending their announcements of impending doom high into the air.

   He had wanted to warn them then, even though he hated them — for their ignorance, their callousness, their unconcern – to run. To get up and turn and flee as fast as they could. To leave their romance novels and their skimpy clothes and floppy hats and head straight for the stone stairs in a wild panic. To not stop until they had reached their stone-cold homes, where brothers slept safely and ceilings were reinforced and beliefs couldn’t be broken. Could they not see there was blood in the sand?

   He didn’t know the spot, couldn’t possibly know it. — Still, he walked around the killing ground like he could sense it; knew that he would know it when he found it just as surely as the killer had known its mark, found it. All the others, the desperately unaffected, stopped to stare as he passed them by. A hollow man dressed in all his clothes, carrying with him the kind of seriousness that does not belong on beaches, combing zombie-like in and around but mostly through them — dispensable extras playing the part of an equally important life. An honest detective searching for the scene of an old, unsolved crime; a do not disturb sign hanging across his eyes.

 

And so, in due course they dismissed him. How could they not, having no true sense of what was? This was his life, his real life, he of all God’s begotten creatures belonged most of all. The sand on the beach his now as surely as the poppies on certain fields belong to the widows of war; but David could not find the place. Of the millions of grains that had borne witness all together, that one poppy growing from the guts of a particular loved one, the biggest travesty of all was that none were left to attest to it.

   After some time he stopped to sit on a boulder. Only then did it cross his mind… surely not this one. He hadn’t thought about it up until that very moment – turned the scene inside out, but why not? Where had it gone? He imagined that there must have been a precedent for this type of thing – for dealing with murderous rocks… or perhaps it had been set there and then, in stone. How often could this have happened, once or twice, never? Because certain things in life don’t happen — until they do.  

   All over the country there would now be procedures and rules; protocol to follow. Additions to The Directory for Events that Never Happen, Should They Happen Again; the particulars of this case outlined. The correct way of handling and disposing of what? A disobedient stone, a rogue and rampant rock? A rule book per se in all the ways to subjugate tragedy through proper practice.

   And who would have set the precedent? A young policeman, or would they have sent in the full cavalry? Chief Inspector Mills and his non-equal, equally inspecting, Junior Constable Fuller? Perhaps it warranted the entire local seaside force, not excluding an extra man to disperse the gathering crowd. Official Ants in Hats. There would certainly have been things to be done, folks to be dealt with: the women shielding their children, hands over open mouths, not knowing the correct sounds to make so making none at all. The men, brave but not strong enough, looking up, moving the harmed out of harm’s way, but unable to move the object of the actual harm . The sick on the sand a mere inconvenience compared with the singularity of that seeping crimson stain.

   Then of course there would be her, his sister, Karen, standing in the middle of Her Tragedy, her grief incandescent, blazing out of the centre of her chest like a supernova. 

   There would have been the medical men, all dressed up for the occasion and with much more experience in dealing with, and disposing of – what? ‘Medical waste,’ or was it termed some sort of ‘evidence’ now? Human remains. Only this time even the medical men lacked the sufficient tools for the job. Precedent again must have been checked, and so far as The Directory For Events That Do Happen was concerned, the fire brigade must surely have been called in. The inevitable question asked: how to get a truck down 143 stone steps to a beach, even if it was no ordinary truck? Even if it was the right colour red – a healthy everyday deoxygenated hue. There would have been a structural engineer, too, if only to figure out how to get a truck from where it didn’t belong back to where a rock did. Rounding it all off, a journalist, suit pants rolled up standing in the wash, barefooted, bare-bulbed, bereft.

   David couldn’t help but feel that these were not the only spectators and facilitators, that on the day there were more sinister elements at play. The waves that reached closer with each incumbent crash as the sea investigated its rightful claim. Surely flies know instinctively when someone dies? What of the seagulls? Sitting, waiting, inspecting. Did they? Could they? Would they have dared? If people had to be dispersed by deputy Constable Fuller, then what of dispersed people? As if enough dignity had not been lost that day already for them to go hungry as well. 

   The Junior Constable would have drawn up the crime scene. Yellow fluorescent tape pulled taut around neighbouring, already conspicuous boulders. All of them silent, staring witnesses, unmoved by the horrors of the day. Somebody had to have some reliable information, something had to be culpable. (Not that anybody knew what the right questions were to ask, nor even where to direct the wrong ones.) The junior being a junior by trade failing to realise that the tape, separating what was from what was done, was far closer to the true heart of it than he or Chief Inspector Mills could possibly have suspected; that these stoic stone witnesses and the culprit may have been accomplis to murder-by-fait right from the start; that they would never talk and that the true scene, the only one worth making now, resided in the hearts and minds of those that were left behind.

   

Perhaps, someone thought, they should all go home, and the sea and the gulls should be left to wash it all away and tomorrow they would all rise, and nothing would be amiss, and they would all be relieved to discover that this too had been a terrible dream from which we must all soon awake.