Blue Memory

            The first thing that should arise in your mind when you think of children building sandcastles at the beach should not be fear or sorrow. It shouldn’t be an inescapable trench of buried grief and guilt. It didn’t used to be.

            Eli wasn’t like the others. He wore pants that stopped at his calves and mismatched socks. He wasn’t like the others because he didn’t like the feeling of the sand between his toes. He preferred to stand off to the side, gazing at the children with critical grey eyes. And later he wasn’t like the others because he wanted to tell.

            It was an overcast day, the last one that they all spent together at the haunted place. They were building a sandcastle unlike any mundane one you would see at a tourist’s beach. This was no mound of dirt with a leaf stuck thoughtlessly in the center. It was a grand work of architecture; the walls were only a few inches shorter than the tallest boy, and the moat, dry of water, was a deep and treacherous thing.

            They were running around playing knights and princesses, using sticks for swords and magic wands. Everyone was happy. Everyone was at peace. Even Eli – he was sitting on the edge of the sand, knees drawn to his chest, contently observing the others with a small, curved smile on his pasty lips. Mostly he liked the clear blue of the ocean and how it looked with the waves moving so swiftly, effortlessly ebbing in and out. Everything was okay.

          It would have been, at least, had a boy, the postman’s son, not tried to stand up to the older ones. Everyone agreed, even Eli, that the rankings of the children were not to be challenged. The younger children endured the daily abuse of the older; it was simply how their world functioned. It was his own fault, they said, that he ended up in that moat. No one could have anticipated what would come of it. The children were always climbing in and out of the trench; it was a common thing to do. The tide was what ruined them.

            It had been steadily rising for the past few hours, but this wave was the one that passed into the farthest territory. The boy, small in stature, screamed when he saw the water crashing over wall. The moat was steep and, unfortunately, very well-constructed. The children ran towards the edge of his trap. They clawed helplessly at the sand piling over their friend’s head. Another wave crashed over the moat. And another. Another.

            A frantic cry. “Dig!” they screamed, as if no one had yet thought to do so. “Dig!”

            There was not enough time. Not enough time to rescue the boy drowned in sand and muck. Everyone ceased their frantic digging simultaneously when they finally saw him. His lips were as blue as the water that had ended him, that was what Eli first noticed. That shade of light indigo was what was etched into the boy’s mind, and what leaped to the front of his thoughts when he so much as heard the sound of the ocean.

            He was the one who suffered the most, perhaps, because at least the suffocated boy did not have to overcome the consequences of the accident. He did not have to carry it around with him for the rest of his life, because he no longer had one in which to carry things.

            Eli was the one who insisted they tell what had happened. He stood with small, clenched fists and gazed steadily at the others, who were so afraid of what would come next. He had helped to dig, the only time in his life he would ever put his hands in the sand with the others. The oldest boy had grabbed him by the collar and swore him to the postman’s son’s fate if he were to speak the truth; it was a hollow threat, but one the young gullible boy believed.

            Instead, he carried the secret around in the pockets of his pants that stopped at his calves. He kept it stored in his mismatched socks and trapped in the back of his throat. Every mention of the beach or the boy sent him reeling, into the attic or the bathroom or the back of the closet, anything to hide, to push it down into the oblivion of his mind. When it happened, even if he extinguished every light possible, he watched the blue as it stung his mind and spread throughout.

            He kept the guilt stored in old shoe boxes and in the lining of his bedsheets. He often found it in the recesses of a conch shell and beneath the floorboards of his room. Whenever he happened upon it, the thing would jump up and barrel into his chest at full force, with no warning beforehand or apology afterward.

            Eventually, the boy would be forgotten; his relatives all died, and the children grew up and moved away, even Eli. Maybe the others forgot naturally, with time, or simply the suppression of the memory. They would not remember the accident that they told lies about for years, that the boy had jumped in on his own and not listened to good reason, not climbed out when the others told him so. But Eli’s occasional memory remained, only resurfacing when he came across it in a hole the dog dug in the front yard or alongside a spare dollar bill in the pockets of his pants. And when he did, he thought of the sand and the children and the lies. But most of all he thought of the blue.