The Treasure of Atlantis

The morning after the storm, the boy headed for the beach to look for the remains. The sun emits a soft light on the beach, transforming a melted seabed into a kaleidoscopic splash of color - red and yellow, green and blue, a rainbow of pieces of plastiglomerate glistening in the light, like strips of paint scattered on a sandy soil.

The boy watches the moving colors dance under the flowing water as the muddy wave continues on the shore. His eyes are learning back-and-forth cadence, a rhythm that accompanies loose plastiglomerate ground movements.

After the boy, an angry voice roared, "When I was your age, I was collecting shells on the beach. Not old scraps." The timbre of the voice has a quality that is in keeping with the weather as if changed by a multitude of ocean waves.

The boy turns to face his approaching grandfather, who is holding a black box wrapped in his hands. He rolled his eyes at the boy.

The remainder. The boy's grandfather patiently opens the box.

Inside is a stone that the boy has never seen before. The boy swings to and fro because of the curves of the rocks, like the waves of the sea being tossed about by the waves. And the rock is a hole, with an open mouth that can swallow one of the boy's fists.

"What's going on?" Asks the boy.

“A seashell,” replied Grandpa. "I found them on the beach. At least until the beaches started to look like they were covered in candy."

The boy remembers hearing sweets from his grandfather before. Trying to visualize the taste of the candy flowing in his tongue, the old sense of color turns into a taste - chocolates, peppermint, drops of gumdrop, a spectrum that contains everything from crimson swirls of luscious strawberry to electric raspberry services.

Then the boy heard his grandfather continue, "Back then, I was on a treasure hunt. I always wanted to find the lost city of Atlantis."

"What wealth did Atlantis have?" the boy wonders. "Sweden?"

Grandpa laughed. "Maybe. I wouldn't have known yet. I didn't end up finding a place."

The boy is the first to find it later that morning. Something torn by the storm and buried in a section of the plastiglomerate sediment, an area adorned with rusty and wrinkled surfaces resembled a raging sea.

Grandpa sees something. Once they were common, back before the plague. Before the virus infects cities and leaves the abandoned traces of human civilization at the mercy of the invading oceans.

"License plate" barked grandpa. He explores its obscure place. Most of them are too rough to read, but you can say one word. "Florida."

"Florida?" repeats the boy.

"That's how the place was called years ago," replied my grandfather, pointing to rusty metal. "The name is written there."

"I see only bumps."

"Not the bumps," growled Grandpa. "Books." He grabs a rough stone and then continues to scrape several loop shapes in the polychromatic ocean area.

"What are you doing?" Asks the boy.

"It's time for you to learn to read and write. It might be helpful sometimes."

"What is the point of the letter c? It always sounds like k or s."

"That's a good question," replied the grandfather. "I don't really know. The way it was done at the time."

The boy's face lit up. "This literacy thing doesn't make sense." The boy stares at the horizon, where the sea stretches lazily to meet the sky.

Grandpa knows what will happen next.

"Let's take a break!" exclaimed the boy, who hurried off before his grandfather could answer.

He breathed a sigh of relief and smiled before he followed.

A huge black mountain creeps over the land spread out like a corpse too big to be properly buried. From the top of the mountain, the boy and his grandfather look down on the beach, watching as the sunlight shines through the surging waves.

"At that time," said Grandpa, "every story was written in letters and words."

"All the news?" the boy repeats. "How many characters can it take?"

"There are so many you can count." Grandpa walks on foot in the dark mountains of the mountains. "Like the dust particles that make up this mountain."

"Lah-no-duh," the boy sighed, a little at first. Then, too, "Land!"

"The world?"

"Read it for yourself!" The boy points to the ground, where a four-letter word comes from the dust. As he wipes his face, more bullets come out of the ground.

"Can you learn more?" whispering to his grandfather.

A_A_A_Land-fih-lah-lahA_A_A_? A_A_A_

"Garbage dump," snapped my grandfather. "We're standing in an old garbage dump."

The boy tries to visualize a pile of debris piled up in the air, piles of rubbish piled up in heaps, engraved on every mountain. They are as numerous as the characters in the story.

The idle boy looks away, where something pulls him.

It's another mountain. Another story.

When the boy and his grandfather reached the bottom of the hill, they were greeted by the yawning mouth of the cave.

Inside, sunlight streams through the gaps on the roof, glistening in the muddy pools that cover the floor. Silence like a graveyard fills a space, emphasizing the foul odor that hangs in the air.

In the center of the room, hungover rusted metal belts, lies the dusty body of an old winged machine. The central part of the machine appears open, like an animal that is ready to be separated, with a white bone of light that cries out under the stacked stalks.

And running alongside the machine is one word.

"Ah-huh," began the boy. "lah-an-ss ...." He rolled his eyes. "Atlantis - we got it!"

Grandpa shakes his head as he looks at the spacecraft. "Yes," he said softly. "Yes, we are."