"SEA GIFT"
by Michelle Garren Flye
Grandmother laughed at beachcombers. “Fools,” she’d say. “If the sea wants to give you a gift, she’ll lay it right at your feet. There’s no need to go walking up and down the beach looking for it.”
So when I went to the beach with Grandmother, we’d stand, hand in hand, at the water’s edge as the tide rolled further and further up the sand. Shells and fragments of shells would wash onto shore and back out again. We never returned to Grandmother’s tiny house behind the dunes empty-handed.
Grandmother rests now in a grave covered with the seashells she loved, but I am still determined not to play the fool. I stand, my back straight, my eyes on the sea and wait as the tide rushes in to play at my feet. I can hear happy families, children playing in the surf, mothers calling anxiously, fathers laughing.
My arms ache with emptiness. Even the band of gold on my ring finger feels cold. Tiny fragments of shell cut the soles of my feet, but still I wait. Give me something, I think. Give me something to hope for.
The water far out to sea is a deep blue becoming pale green closer to shore and finally churning brown with sand and shells at my feet. The waves rise higher, grasping further up the sand, flattening a sand castle here and soaking an unsuspecting sunbather there. Soon they will reach equilibrium and the ocean will cease stretching its limits. The waves will stop bringing sea gifts to shore.
I spot a sand dollar about fifteen feet away. Is it for me? Is this my hope? “If you traipse all over the beach searching for a gift, you might take someone else’s by mistake,” my grandmother would say. I hesitate and a man walks past behind me. The next wave picks up the sand dollar and rolls it to a stop at his feet. He trips, then pauses mid-curse with a look of wonder as he accepts the gift.
Soon I must go. Somewhere on this beach, a man whose gold ring matches mine waits. Today perhaps there is no gift for me. One last wave washes over my feet, and as it retreats, something hard cracks painfully against my ankle. My heart thumps as I fish my gift from the water.
I cradle the whelk shell in my palm. Less than four inches long and pale yellow. The sea has worked on this one for a long time. I run my fingers over the surface, smooth and cold. I hold the shell to my ear and listen to the sea’s empty echo.
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Michelle Garren Flye writes fiction and lives in North Carolina. For more information, visit www.geocities.com/mgflye
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