THE EMPTY BEACH

The beach seemed silver in the moonlight, in the distance, the shushing of the waves of the incoming tide, the only sound. At first, the beach seemed empty, lifeless, but then tiny movements of little somethings moving below the flat even surface of the sands began to disturb the grains of ancient ground-down rock that had become the beach and tiny heads poked out to glimpse their world for first time. It was not long before the whole beach was alive with little turtles, scrabbling upwards, scraping their way out of their sandy prison, away from the broken eggs that had nurtured them while they grew, scrabbling, scrapping, hurrying for their lives across the beach and down into the welcoming sea. One after another they raced to the safety they would find beneath the waves of Mother Ocean, their home for the next thirty years. In thirty years, the females will return to this beach, this empty beach, to lay their eggs as their kind have done for a million years – let us pray, for their sake, that the beach will still be empty when they return.

© 2021 Storm