“Herrrfffwahhwie.”
The baby doesn’t clap and laugh and rock back and forth. The baby just stares up at the blank surface where its mother’s face should be. The skin stretches and pulls as the place where the mouth used to be tries to make words. Words like help and please.
The mother can see this too, through eyes that are now imbedded on her cupped hands, rolling around backward to look up at the hideous, empty canvas.
The baby knows to try and put the hands back up, maybe to put the face back, maybe just to cover it up. But try as they both might, Mommy isn’t where she’s meant to be anymore.
EVERYTHING’S OKAY UNTIL THE FROGS DISAPPEAR
I’ve always been a nervous kid. I don’t think it’s my fault—I grew up in a place where a lot of scary stuff goes on. It’s a little town at the edge of the world, called Black Sand Beach, and I swear there’s something really spooky going on here. I don’t think normal towns have monsters in the woods or shipwrecks that show up in the middle of the street, in the middle of the night. I don’t think nice places have ghosts that pour blood in your mouth or a sheep that keeps coming back to life no matter how many times it hurls itself in front of cars or off cliffs. Have you ever heard of a beach where the sea is too rough to swim in, even though there’s no wind?
So, I think it makes sense that I’m a little bit nervous. I think it’s smart to be on alert.
My parents used to tell me to stop worrying so much. “Everything’s going to be okay,” they’d say, over and over. I never believed them.
My teachers always want to talk to me about why I’m so scared of things, and when I tell them all the things I’ve seen at Black Sand Beach, the things I know they’ve seen too, they just stare at me blankly like those things are just a part of life.
I guess at Black Sand Beach they are.
A little while ago my grandfather came to visit. I like my grandfather. He’s smart like me, and he makes fun of my mother without her noticing. On his first night at our house I heard my parents talking with him about me. They were telling him all about how nervous I get, how much they worry about me because I’m just so afraid.
Maybe if they didn’t worry so much about me, then they’d have room in their brains for all the things they should be worried about. The whole world could burn down at any minute.
The next morning my parents were gone when I woke up. Not gone like they’d been abducted or eaten, not gone in the way that I had imagined so many times, they’d just gone out for a walk so my grandfather could talk to me alone.
“Sit down, grandson,” he said, pushing a chair out from the little red table in our kitchen. “I want to talk to you about frogs.”
* * *
—
I sat down. I didn’t like the sound of this. I wondered what was wrong with frogs. I wondered why I needed to worry about frogs now, too.
“Did you know that frogs are nature’s warning system?” he asked. “The first sign that things aren’t going to be okay is that the frogs start to disappear.”
I had read this somewhere in a book about river pollution. It was true. When something changes, when something starts to go wrong, the first sign is the absence of frogs.
“That’s why we need to get you a frog,” he went on. “So long as you have a frog you’ll know that everything is okay.”
That morning, before my parents came home, my grandfather and I went to the pet store and he bought me a small glass tank with a little plastic pond that really looked like it was made of stones. He bought me a bag of dried flies and some little flakes called Croak Crackers, and he bought me my very own pet frog.
I didn’t think it would do any good, but having the frog, feeding the frog, naming the frog, all these things actually made me feel a little better.
Every morning I woke up and said hello to my frog. At first it was my way of checking he was still there, but pretty soon I got used to him and it became just a part of my morning ritual.
I’d worry about him when I was at school, but less and less with each passing week. I’d make it through math and recess knowing that my frog would be there when I got home.
I fed him flies and Croaker Crackers and I watched him hop around in his tank and in and out of his little plastic pond.
Then, one night, I woke up to a tapping sound. I turned on the lamp by my bed, and in the dim light I could see a tiny bit of movement coming from the tank. I rubbed my eyes and walked over to see what was happening. My frog was awake and he was smacking his little foot on the side of the tank as hard as he could.
* * *
—
Something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. I thought that maybe some food would calm him down, but when I turned around to get the little box of flakes from my dresser, my frog hit the side of the tank so hard that it tipped over and smashed on the floor of my room.
I was confused, and still a little bit asleep. I watched him hop across the room to my bedroom window, where he started again to furiously smack his foot against the glass.
That’s when I noticed the other sound. Really, it was the same sound. The sound of thousands of tiny feet smacking on surfaces. I wandered over to the window and opened it to see what was going on. My frog jumped up on my shoulder and out into the night. I looked out to see where he was going and saw something that made my blood run cold.
There were thousands of frogs, frantically hopping down the street; bouncing on parked cars and window ledges, up onto awnings and lamp posts and roofs; hopping up into the sky and disappearing.
I watched until the very last frog was gone and then I closed the window and checked that the latch was closed tight.
I sat on the side of my bed and waited for morning, for everyone else in my house to wake up, absolutely certain that everything wasn’t going to be okay anymore.
STOLEN HEART
I won’t sugar coat it: Black Sand Beach is a weird place to spend a summer vacation. I think it would have all been so much worse if I hadn’t met Indira that first week. She was just skating by me when I stepped out of this little local diner. She was enchanting.
The second time I saw her was down by the ocean later that night. She was just dancing in the sand with no idea that anyone could see her. Normally I’m pretty shy, but I’m on vacation and nobody knows me here, so I talked to her…and she talked back.
After that, the summer turned around. I wasn’t jumping when I saw something move in the shadows, or staying up late to listen to the tapping in the walls or that rumbling sound like the earth is breathing. Instead, I was with Indira, laughing and talking and dancing and singing. I’ve been in love with a lot of people, but always from afar. This time felt special.
That’s why it hurt so much when she betrayed me.
It was during the last week of our relationship. Before my family and I went home, I was building up the courage to tell her I liked her as more than a friend. She had asked me to meet her in the middle of the night at the edge of the woods. She said she had something to show me. When I got there, she wasn’t alone, she was there with someone else. His name was Josh.
I hoped maybe they were brother and sister, maybe cousins. She said they were friends but I didn’t believe her. The night started out wonderful and magical and overflowing with joy, then she’d say something to Josh instead of me, and it would all come crashing down. Every time she reminded me he was there was like being stabbed through the heart.
What she had wanted to show me was pretty incredible. We had to go in the middle of the night because it was the only time it’s quiet enough to hear it, to hear the heartbeat of the woods. She’d been out walking the night before and heard it, the thumping pulse of the forest. I followed her into the woods.
Josh followed too.
The sound got louder as we got closer to the Heart Tree. We stepped into the clearing and stared
up at it. It was magnificent, and as old as anything I could imagine. The trunk stretched far into the black sky, and it was covered in carved hearts, each with a single set of initials.
The thumping of the pulse was so loud that my ears were ringing.
“Touch it,” said Indira, placing her hand on the trunk.
I’d do anything she asked, and I needed her to see that, so I pushed past Josh to do it first.
Once I was touching the tree it didn’t feel so loud, in fact the sound almost completely disappeared. It was like it was synched to my own heartbeat.
“Isn’t it amazing?” asked Indira, stepping back to take a picture of all the hearts. “I asked my sister, and she told me there’s this whole local legend about it. Apparently there was this woman who lived here a hundred years ago who fell in love with a man from…I dunno, somewhere else, somewhere far away. Anyway, she loved him so much, and he was on a ship sailing here to be with her. But then the light went out in that old lighthouse, and his ship crashed on the rocks.
“According to my sister, who heard it from her friend Rick, who lives here, this woman saw the ship crash because she was standing out on the beach waiting for him. When she saw the wreck her heart was broken, and she ran into the woods and just cried and cried and cried. She died of a broken heart, right here, and this tree grew up around her, watered by her tears.
“Wow,” I said, determined to show her I was paying more attention to her than Josh was.
“That’s not the saddest part. Her boyfriend didn’t even die in the wreck. He made it to shore, and when he came looking for her, he found the tree and carved a heart into the bark with just his initials in it to let her know he’d love her forever, to let her know that she’d stolen his heart.
“So, now, when people are alone and are absolutely certain they’ll never meet anyone new to love, they give their heart to this tree. They carve a heart in the trunk with just their initials, they give her their heart. That sound is all the hearts beating together with hers.” Indira stared up at the trunk that disappeared through the canopy and into the dark sky. “I bet if you climbed all the way to the top you’d find the very first initials.”
It was a perfect moment, and Josh had to ruin it by being there.
We all walked back and went our separate ways. I went home to bed and imagined Josh and Indira together, holding hands, saying those words that I hadn’t had a chance to say to her. I awoke in the morning and I knew what I had to do. My one shot at love was gone, it was time I carved a heart into that tree, a fitting tribute to what I’d lost.
The woods are confusing and I couldn’t find the tree. I wandered in circles for hours, getting angrier and angrier about what Josh had done, then about how Indira had led me on. I couldn’t focus, I was so filled with jealousy and rage. It was nighttime before I found the tree.
I knelt down in front of it and took my little pocket knife from my backpack. I’m not ashamed to admit I was crying. This was a sad moment—I’d lost any chance for love. I flicked out the blade and began carving the heart.
One side, then the other, then Indira’s initials.
I took her heart and gave it to the tree.
If she wasn’t going to love me back, then she certainly wasn’t going to love Josh or any other person she might want to rub in my face.
The next morning my family and I were leaving Black Sand Beach. We were packing the car when Indira’s sister came running down our driveway. She was crying, she looked hysterical.
“Indira’s dead!” she sobbed, grabbing me by the shoulders.
“What? How?”
“No one knows. She was just…she didn’t wake up this morning, and when we tried to wake her there was…there was no pulse.”
I pulled away from her sister’s grasp. “No pulse?” I asked, immediately understanding what had happened.
“Yeah, we called a doctor and when he examined her…it’s the strangest thing. He said her heart was completely missing.”
BRADLEY
If you meet Bradley and he asks you to play with him, you have to say no.
I remember my first summer here, when I met Bradley. He was about the same age as me, or at least that’s what he told me. Bradley told me so many things and almost none of them were true. Bradley was a very good liar and a very bad person.
The first day we met, we played together down at the beach, at the bottom of the cliffs. We were digging for treasure and not finding anything. Bradley got bored and dared me to go in the water. The water at Black Sand Beach is really rough, especially around the cliffs, and my mother had told me I was forbidden to even splash in the shallow parts.
Bradley called me a chicken.
I told him I’d go in if he came in with me, but when I turned around to make sure, he was gone. Then a huge wave knocked me down and I splashed around helplessly for what felt like minutes before dragging myself back to shore.
When I got back to where my family was camping I was soaked, cold, and out of breath. My mother was furious with me.
The next day I was out exploring the farms, and I saw Bradley running through the grass looking really worried. He was holding something in his T-shirt, but I couldn’t see what it was.
“Go away, Bradley!” I yelled. “I don’t want to play whatever dumb game you’re playing today.”
“Sorry, I was too scared to go in the water, and then I hid because I didn’t want you being mad at me!” He was lying…I thought he was lying, but the way Bradley looked at me, something in his eyes made me want to believe him. He was a very good liar.
I scrunched up my face at him and tried to look as angry as I possibly could, but I couldn’t hold it for long. I sighed. “Fine, but you better never trick me like that again. I got in all kinds of trouble when I got home.”
“Listen, I need your help. Do you know anything about the Underdirt Lizard?”
I didn’t. I’d never even heard of the Underdirt Lizard, but I wasn’t going to let Bradley know that. “Of course I do.” I stuck out my tongue at him.
“Well,” he said, stepping closer to me and holding out his shirt. “I found a whole nest of their eggs. I think they might be invading the forest, and if we don’t stop them, they’ll kill all the birds.”
I looked down. In his shirt he was carrying about a dozen little eggs. They were blue and speckled. “Those are birds eggs,” I sneered.
“No. My dad’s a reptilologist,” he insisted, “and he taught me how to spot them. See, they have these darker speckles on them, which means they’re definitely lizards. We have to smash these eggs if we’re going to save the forest.”
I looked closely at one of the eggs. The speckles did seem a little darker than I’d seen before. I nodded slowly.
“Here’s the thing,” Bradley went on. “If we break these eggs and even one live lizard gets loose, then they’ll just go and lay a million more. I need you to smash there, and I’ll stand here to catch any lizards that come out.”
He took the lizard eggs over to a big old tree stump and laid them all down, careful to make sure none rolled away. He picked up a rock from the ground and handed it to me.
“Here,” he said. “This should be big enough to crush them all at once.
He knelt down on the ground by the stump and put out his hands, ready to catch the lizards. I picked up the rock and slammed it down as hard as I could. I closed my eyes, but I’ll never forget the sound of the shells cracking and all the baby birds inside being squished.
When I lifted the rock Bradley started laughing. “Gotcha!” he cackled.
I was so mad, so upset, but then I heard my mother behind me yelling my name. I whirled around and saw her marching toward me, telling me she’d seen the whole thing.
“I didn’t mean to,” I protested. “Bradley tricked me!”
I turned around, but Bradley was gone. My mo
ther grabbed me by the arm and marched me back to the campsite.
That was when I decided I was never going to play with Bradley again.
My mother said I wasn’t allowed to leave the tent for the whole of the next day. She told me she was disappointed in me, disgusted by what she’d seen me do. I think hearing that was the worst part.
My mother went out to catch some fish for dinner, and I was left all alone. I was reading my book and didn’t even notice him come in, but when I looked up, Bradley was in my tent.
“You wanna play today?” he asked, a big grin on his face.
“No, Bradley. I never even want to see you again,” I said. I didn’t raise my voice, I didn’t scream or yell. I wanted Bradley to know I was serious.
Then Bradley grabbed my book and ran out the door of the tent.
“Hey!” I cried, and scrambled out after him. “Come back here with that!”
I chased him across the field and into the woods. He was laughing the whole time, which only made me madder. He skipped over tree roots and around vines and shrubs, and I could barely keep up with him.
I came around a corner and there was Bradley, stopped right in front of me. His arms were folded and he had that stupid smug grin. I tried to stop in time, but I was running too fast. I fell straight into Bradley.
I fell straight through Bradley.
I fell into a hole in the ground, tumbling and crashing down into a dark underground cave. I landed with a heavy thud.
* * *
—
I don’t know how long I was knocked out for, but when I woke up it was dark. I tried to climb the walls to get back out of this deep cavern, but my hands were slippery. I couldn’t grip the rocks.
Then Bradley appeared behind me.
Black Sand Beach 1.5 Page 3
