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in the 84 page perfect-bound issue...
Down in the Dirt magazine (v080)
(the March 2010 Issue)




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Sand Castles in the Storm

Matthew Dexter

    It was a frigid Monday afternoon on Martha’s Vineyard. The wind was blowing bubbles off the waves. The early October moon hung over the sea like a balloon, and I knew this was the best summer of my life.
    Some people presume that Martha’s Vineyard is full of rich snobs, but most natives are not loaded. The island is exorbitant and we all rely on tourism for those four interminable summer months; but winter is when we hunker down, hold our breaths, and count our pennies. My father unloads fish and my mother pitches boat tours out of a beachfront hotel where I work as a concierge.
    It was just another ordinary autumn day when I fell in love with a man the same age as my dead grandfather. The tide was rising. I walked across the blue-eyed grass onto the cool white sand and watched the waves carving their names in cursive across the shoreline. I swore I saw a ghost swimming in the riptide. That image cut through my mind like a fishing knife as the current faded back into the horizon and the clouds glided into the sinking sun, as if being pulled downward like dreams into the past by a vast celestial anchor. It was that magical time of afternoon by the ocean; every five minutes the sun would be inches closer to the horizon and the breeze was blowing and my mind was flowing with hope and anger as I left footprints in the sand behind the paw prints of Dr. Jekyll.
    Henry Jameson was sitting in the sand digging a sandcastle. He had been staying in room 7 all summer and refused to leave when we closed down the hotel for the season to save on electricity and utilities. He apparently carried his two suitcases an extraordinary distance—dragging them nearly a half mile across the rising shoreline. There were no footprints remaining other than Dr. Jekyll’s meandering inscription and my more monotonous signature in the sand. Old man Jameson was sitting thousands of yards away from the hotel, but I wanted to warn him to stay off the beach.
    “Mr. Jameson,” I said. He was hard of hearing and the wind was picking up. He was facing the other direction, working on his sandcastle. There were remnants of destructed sandcastles in the sand; clumpy mounds indicating where the water had taken the kingdoms. There were seven which I could see, each set about three feet apart, growing gradually larger as they proceeded farther away from the Atlantic and closer to the dunes.
    Mr. Jameson was sitting between the dunes and the sea, his khakis soaked at the ankles all the way up past the knees. He was covered with sand and I knew there was some other shallow sadness hidden deep beneath the surface. I had heard that his wife died while he was on vacation here. Many locals say he has no home to go back to, others think he is simply too afraid to go back to an empty home. Either way, the castles have now become his estate, and he rests his arms on the battered suitcases like a king.
    “Mr. Jameson, are you alive?” I asked. I was within a few yards of his shivering body and he raised his head at my inquest. “I know you can hear me Mr. Jameson.”
    He was ignoring me and had returned to paying attention to his latest castle. As I stepped in front he finally looked at me and spoke. “I have paid my bill in full,” he said. “I just wish to sit with the sea for awhile and listen to the whispers.”
    “That’s fine,” I said. “But there is a nasty storm approaching so we must be going inside before it gets too dark to prepare. You are welcome to stay at the hotel one more evening, Mr. Jameson.”
    “Thank you for your hospitality,” the old man answered. “I have overstayed my welcome here and the rains have not yet begun to fall. I want to feel them upon my shoulders and flood the final moat I dig. Oh yes my man. I dig castles in the sand.”
    “But we most go in now, we cannot build castles in this storm,” I told him.
    “It is a good storm and we can build what we want,” he said.
    “Maybe so, but it’s not safe to be here so close to the water, even if the storm is not approaching till morning. The waves will pick up and the rain will be here any minute—”
    “Then bring on the rain. Go inside if you wish, but leave me alone. I am building sand castles.”
    It was like reasoning with a baby. Mr. Jameson was obstinate and raised the pink plastic shovel as if he was digging his own grave. He seemed to have a purpose well beyond the courageous ignorance of his actions. He carefully lifted the purple pail and a perfect tower was constructed on top of his latest castle. It had all the power in the world until a wave came crashing into us and submerged the castle beneath the surface of the sea. Coughing, Mr. Jameson smiled and spit out salt water, while I watched it drip back into the Atlantic from his hairy nostrils as he rose to his knees from the shallow grave where he was embedded in the sand and smiled to the heavens as if he had just seen a ghost.



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