Joseph Green

A Day at the Beach

There was no more sand on the beach there, not even beneath the debris. Plastic and metal all the way down. Bottle caps, aluminum cans, shards of broken bottles, rusty coils tetanus-sharp on both ends, tens of thousands of latex gloves and unwrapped condoms, televisions, old landline phones with coils tied in knots, egg cartons and pizza boxes waterlogged to pulp. There was the odd bone. A fish’s spine, the hollowed out husk of a crab, the occasional fragment of what could be a skull. There was never any meat on any of them. And there were no more seashells.