I waited till the evening, when the sands were quieter. I walked away from the main bay, from the beach swings and trampolines, the bodies stretched over the sand. I walk away, across the sand. The sand was high, reminding me that the beach is an ever shifting place, an edge but also a moving thing, a place that only tricks us into thinking it is ever the same. The steps down from the concrete walkway at the base of the clips were buried, the hand rail plunging down into high banks.
The tide was running out, leaving chalk knobbled rock pools thick with dark green weed. I stared into a couple, determined to find life, but life was hiding from me. I kept walking, adding my footsteps to those of birds and dogs and other walkers. There were twists plaited into the sand where tributaries had run dry with the escaping tide. There were craters, too, where hours earlier the water pounded, moving the beach into a series of tiny canyons.
I spotted a crab skeleton, then another, and another. There were so many of them, flipped to their backs, insides gone. I picked up a lost arm, it’s crenellated edge decorated purple. It was still fresh enough that the joint moved with my help and I flexed the elbow, opened and closed the pincer.
I spotted a sea wash ball, greyish and puffy, the young whelk hatchlings long gone. Many of them don’t survive, eaten by their stronger siblings. I spotted one then, in a dark swirled shell, inching across the still wet sand. I crouched and watched it move, a two pronged line behind it, slowly dragging itself toward the far off sea.
Bonnie Radcliffe 