The ocean met the bay.
In one hundred years, the bay wouldn’t exist at all. The twenty-mile barrier island would disappear into the Atlantic Ocean as if it had been a quaint sandbar, an untouched strip of land giving way to a cosmic blip of human joy and then faded from memory.
The arrogance to build on it, to laugh at the ocean and say, “You don’t understand. You don’t understand the power of man.
“We’ve discovered fire, created tools, crossed ice bridges and traveled thousands of miles on foot, bent wood into massive vessels, sailed over your back, met your storms, and survived.
“We’ve built shelter along the beautiful, ragged edge of your body and it belongs to us now. Try to take it back. We dare you to try to take it back.”
The ocean met the bay.
An afternoon sandbar at low tide. Children ran the length of it, skipping past puddles and collecting the best shells and sea glass.
Or they built the kind of castles they couldn’t hope to create on dry land where they could manage only bucket runs of the concrete-like sand buried under the water.
Younger kids sat in the still pool between the shoreline and the plateau of damp land as their parents enjoyed a relaxed guard.
The ocean met the bay.
The sandbar wouldn’t last. Didn’t matter how clear the view to the horizon. Didn’t matter if there were no whitecaps to the waves. The tide would rise. Children would be called back to higher elevation. The ocean would wake in a fury, claw back the land that had risen during its slumber. The ocean would throw clenched fists—crests rising three, six, ten feet high before breaking on the sand.
Did the sandbar ever exist at all? It was hard to imagine when the ocean was awake and thrashing.
Twenty miles of sandbar. A low tide that lasted a century. Man built small houses at first, single-story shelters decorated with what they stole from the sea. Not satisfied with merely living, man built toys. And man wasn’t satisfied with the land anymore, either. He extended his reach into the ocean, nailed concrete pilings into its body and created more land for himself. He gorged himself on what he caught from those piers. He mocked the ocean’s motion with his most triumphant toy—a rollercoaster that mimicked its peaks and valleys.
And he placed the toy on one of those piers extending hundreds of feet into the water. Man invited more and more people to the sandbar. They arrived and their houses grew taller and their toys became a complex tangle of machinery showing the limitless potential of their minds, promising better and bigger and more delightful toys.
The ocean met the bay.
Jackie Corley has been a reporter, a drone operator, and the publisher of Word Riot. In the current one, she’s VP of Content for Townsquare Media. She received an MFA from the Bennington College. Her fiction has appeared in BULL, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills, among others. She lives in the Hudson Valley, but will always be a Jersey girl at heart.
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Heavy Feather Review 