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I hope you enjoy reading my short story "Lobs' Castle"
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Excerpt
Lobs' Castle
The sun was burning her back; it was almost already
red, but she did not notice it.
Stephanie was building a castle. A sand castle.
Sitting on the beach sand, focused on what she was
doing, Stephanie was busy using her bucket, some old plastic beer cups she
found on the sand, shells and, of course, sand itself and she did not feel the
sun hitting on her back.
The sand was grey, it wasn’t a ‘White sand holiday
promo advertising photo catalog’s beach’ and in the sand around her she could see
some oil spots from the recent crude oil spill.
But for her that didn’t matter at all.
Three days she waited to finally be able to go to the beach, that was
closed due to the oil spill. An
underwater pipeline ruptured, spilling thousands of gallons of crude oil into
the Ocean, contaminating the beach. The
more than 100 000 gallons of crude oil spilled into the ocean and covered what
were once clean beaches. Clean up crews were
working to clean the beach since long before the school holidays started.
The Coast Guard said that the spill had killed one
dolphin, ten pelicans and an untold number of fish and similar beings.
*
Stephanie wanted to help the cleaning crews in the
days before, but children should not be on clean-up crews because they are more
sensitive and it can cause them difficulty breathing, headaches, dizziness,
confusion and nausea. Children are not
immune to the effects of an oil catastrophe and its pollutants. In fact, children are more likely to have
serious health problems from crude oil spills than the adults around them. They
breathe more air per pound of body weight, and can absorb more through their
skin than adults. This had not prevented
her to try to go to the beach every morning, waiting impatiently for when it
would be possible again to play on the beach.
It was weird for Stephanie to see a public, and always available beach,
be shut down. It was like a freedom cut. How can a natural public space be
closed? It can, when it became dangerous
to human beings or animals to be there, when it became threatening to the human
species.
Kids can very quickly and easily absorb toxins
through their skin, or even swallow crude oil residues by transferring them
from their hands to the foods they eat.
So much as she did want to help, it was forbidden,
so, there was nothing else to do than to wait for the beach to be “friendly” again.
“What about the animals?” she thought. “I cannot go to the beach, but they are
already there. How can the cleanup crew
keep the baby animals out of the beach?” They could not. Many of them would die due to the oil spill.
Volunteers working on
the beach piled up plastic bags filled with blackened sand, and the stench of
oil could be smelled from miles around.
Workers had made significant
progress on the beach but some rocks remained coated in oil.
As the beach was starting
to look a lot better than it did a couple of days ago, Stephanie was allowed to
go to the beach again. The beach was
again open and filled with kids, dogs, and grown ups.
Finally Stephanie could enter the beach with her small bucket and start to work on her castle.
After three days’
waiting, she did not want to take a break or be interrupted; she already had
the image of the castle in her mind and wanted to realize it.
*
The main Castle tower was made using an old bucket as
matrix. Filling it with sand, turning it
upside down, knocking softly on the bucket and removing it carefully, she made
the main tower; for the smaller ones, she used the plastic beer cups, some
remaining drops of beer falling over the sand, but she did not care about
it. She was busy, making the castle.
Around the castle she excavated a moat to protect
it from enemies, not that there would be another oil spill again…
Kids playing around, people jogging on the beach,
dogs, all the world noise around her was like background music. She was focused, inside of her own activity
as would she be in a parallel reality…far away from all noise around her, hearing
the sounds of the ocean and the sound of her own ideas and imagination.
“Now that all towers are made, I need some water,“
said Stephanie to herself.
Walking to the water, looking at the spots of oil
on the beach, she saw a bigger spot; it was a dead baby lobster. Stephanie stopped for a while, picked it up, as
would it be a shell, and brought it to her castle.
As Stephanie sat down with the dead baby lobster in
her hands, she could hear some screams interrupting her:
“Sorry, I can’t stop! Sorry! Sorry!”...
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1 comment:
A wonderful and imaginative story. Well done!
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