You’re in a desert. The sky is cloudless above you, the sun bearing down. There is nothing on the horizon in any direction, save more sand.
You want to build a sand castle. You only have your hands, no buckets or shovels, but that’s all you need. You are a skilled sand-castle-builder, people have told you.
You scoop some sand up. It’s warm, rough, but not unpleasant. You let it sift through your fingers, figuring out what you’re dealing with. To build a good castle you must understand the concept of a grain of sand. And each one is different. So you must always adjust your perspective.
After swirling your hands through the sand, you begin building your first castle. You start slow, gathering sand into a pile, pulling it heavenward, forming spires and windows and a door. You stand to look at it from farther back. It’s beautiful. It reminds you why you build castles.
Then out of nowhere you’re pelted by a sandball. Yes, a sandball. It’s like a snowball, but it’s sand, and unlike snow, it doesn’t stick to you, it just rolls down your skin and gets stuck in your shirt and your shorts and your shoes. The sandball, the moment it hits you, shoots an image into your mind. A picture. A picture of a castle. It’s a lovely castle. The best castle you can think of. Genius.
So you kneel down. Scoop up sand. Start forming this second castle.
Another sandball hits you. Another image, a different one. For a new, different castle. You grab more sand, start a new pile. Then another sandball. A new image. You start another pile.
You soon have seventeen piles, all at various stages of incompletion. You need to finish a castle. You go back to your first unfinished pile. No, wait, this pile over here is for a smaller castle, you can finish that one faster. Wait, another sandball just hit you. You gotta get that one started so you don’t forget that design. Now hold on a minute, with that castle there and that castle there, you could combine them and make one bigger, better castle! Another sandball. You have nineteen piles now. But you love them all and you will build them all. You just need to pick one to start with.
You focus on your fifth pile. You get a decent mound going before the eighteen other piles and their images start bouncing around your mind. They’re calling you. They want you. Need you. They won’t live without you, you must craft them.
You hop to the sixth pile. You work for two minutes before piles three, five, seven, and eight wail at you, wanting your attention. Your knees are bleeding from the friction of crawling in the sand. But you don’t care. You have castles to build. You rush around, throwing sand onto the piles, hoping something sticks in the name of progress. You love it, though. The rush you get when something sticks, when the sand surprises you. You finish a castle. Finally. Then another. And another. You have four castles done now. But while you were working on those, you had to stop and start eleven other castles. You can’t lose the images, you see. You know that. All castles deserve to be built, and you want to build them. You have twenty-seven piles now.
It’s when another sandball hits you and you start the twenty-eighth pile that you realize something.
You’re not moving fast enough.
It takes you an average of ten minutes to complete a good castle. Twenty-five to put the finishing touches on a great castle. But another sandball gives you another image of another castle every seven minutes. At this rate, your sandball images will always outnumber your castles. And you can’t have that. You’re a sand-castle-builder. You love this. You cherish every castle idea you get, because you learn with each one. You will become good in your own eyes once you build all these castles. You need to catch up.
So you grab a fistful of sand and bring it to your mouth.
You eat the sand. It tastes like rocks. It congeals between your teeth and turns your tongue dry. But you’re desperate. You shovel more and more and more and more into your mouth until you vomit it back up because the texture becomes poison but you need to build the castles you need to capture the images you saw. You try again. You think consuming the sand will help you to sculpt it better. Help you to focus on just one at a time. Let you unlock the secret of the grains so you can struggle less on making the structure hold.
You look at the eighth pile. That one looks promising. You get a solid base going before another sandball hits you and rains grains down your hair and mingles with your sweat and despair. You start a twenty-ninth pile.
You eat more sand. You finish a castle, but you have to start five more. You try ignoring the other piles, forcing yourself to stay with just one. But the others haunt you—their images dance in your mind, obstructing the image of the castle right in front of you.
You dig down. You bury your legs. You’re stuck in front of pile fourteen, and you cannot move until you complete this castle. Your hands shake as they try to make the sand stick. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t care. You need to get this image out of your head and into the world. Build the castle. Make it beautiful for its own sake, because you’re all alone in the desert, no one but you to appreciate the castle. Does that make it worthless? You don’t know. And you can’t worry about that now. You have castles to build.
You’re still not fast enough. You have forty-nine piles now. And only eight of them are remotely close to being sand castles.
You need a break.
Yes, maybe that’s what this is.
You lie back. Stare up into the empty sky, squinting into the hot sun burning you and baking your already-fried brain.
Eighteen new sandballs rain down on you. Cover you. Slowly.
You can’t take a break. You’ll get buried.
So you get back to work on your new ideas for new castles. You’ve lost count now. You don’t remember how long you’ve been working. Your fingernail beds are shredded from the endless clawing at sand you’ve been doing for who knows how long? Certainly not you. You’re thinking in circles now. And the circle looks like sand. Your world is sand, piles, castles. But you don’t mind. You’re a sand-castle-builder after all.
You get hungry. You eat sand.
You get thirsty. You drink sand.
You stagger through your field of piles and castles and pathetic in-betweeners. Sand is everywhere. Everywhen. Your reason for living. Your purpose from God. Your God? God? Make God into a castle. You start a new pile, one on top of the dune. You slip. You tumble down. Your castles catch you. They cry for you. You can’t get up. One, two, three sandballs plop, plop, plop, covering you. This time you don’t mind. You think maybe laying in a bed of sand will give you a new perspective.
Perspective.
You roll onto your stomach and dig. Tear a hole in the sand beneath you. You dig down. More sandballs cover your tracks. The hole is taller than your crazed, hunched form now, but you keep digging down. New perspective. New castles. You love building castles. You love sand.
You dig farther down. Down. Down. Down. The sandballs are falling faster now. You’re finding it harder to dig down, to move. The light of the sun is disappearing. But you can still hear your hundreds of castles-to-be calling to you. You need more perspective. Dig deeper.
You’re breathing the sand now. It’s choking you, holding you, becoming you. Maybe this will let you rest. Maybe rest will let you catch up.
You let out a final gasp, inhaling the most sand you can. You close your eyes. You pray that in death you become a grain of sand.
Now replace sand with words, castles with stories, and leave me and my fifty-seven unfinished Word documents alone.
H. E. Dunkle is a page and stage storyteller, writing poems, plays, and everything in-between. She’s been writing non-stop since she graduated from the University of Sioux Falls with a B.A. in English and Theatre, and she’s had two of her plays selected for production at local theatre companies. Her current big project is tackling her first novel, which she works on alongside at least five other short-term projects.
Featured image by Judy Beth Morris on Unsplash.
