There were children on the sand. Both in winter coats. They had no shoes on, and their feet were bright red as they walked. The oldest was a boy. He dragged a stick on the ground, drawing lines and words and pictures. The younger one, a girl, kept dragging her feet across, ruining what he made when given the chance. To stop her, the boy would smack at her feet when she got too close.
A woman stood several feet away from them, hands in her black coat, the children’s socks and shoes piled at her feet. Her brow was furled, and the corner of her mouth only ever rose when the children looked up from the sand at her.
The little girl had a round face and was missing two teeth. Her mouth was wide open, taking in gasps of air. She preferred it to breathing in through the nose. It let her hang her tongue out, which often felt odd in her mouth. She could never quite figure out where to put it behind her teeth. She preferred letting her mouth hang open, even though her mother had often told her to stop. She felt she got more air into her lungs that way, and since her mother’s warnings of inhaling insects had yet to happen, she hadn’t stopped.
Her brother was taller. His face was buried in the scarf around his neck. The tip of his nose was red, and he could no longer feel his feet. Big ears poked out from the sides of his head. Though his mother promised he’d grow into them, the kids at school still laughed.
The woman was not their mother. The children belonged to her sister, born five years earlier than her. She passed away last Thursday. Dropped dead where she’d stood. An aneurysm, the doctors had said. Even though she was young. Left nothing but two kids, a pile of debt, and no will.
The woman called the children over. She wiped the sand off their feet and put their shoes back on. The boy brushed the stick back and forth on the sand. He dropped it as they made their way back to the house, five minutes from where they were.
“Your aunt bought a house by the beach,” their mother had said a couple of months earlier. “We’ll visit her in the summer.”
Elia Del Rosal is an aspiring author from the north of Mexico. She moved to the UK at seventeen to do her A Levels and now lives in Sussex with family.
Featured image by Nattu Adnan on Unsplash.
