How cruel, how pitiless the ocean has always been to life. It flung my town across its mile-long shore and has me groveling through its wreckage like some starved rat. Seven are dead. Ten are still missing. Neighbors squeeze themselves into collapsing caves while sirens wail and bells lament, their cries entwined with a grieving mother screaming for her lost son. Yet, the sea has settled back into its lulling rhythm—its savage amnesia.
Every fiber of my being begs to join the chorus of my neighbors and find some solace, but I cannot afford to be overcome. I cannot afford distraction. Forty years of paleontological excavations now lie buried—among them, my greatest discovery: an intact, 2.3-million-year-old human hand fossil from the Cradle of Humanity in South Africa. If I must scour this shore inch by inch, so be it. I will tear the flesh off my fingers before the tide swallows what little remains.
But that’s when I saw her, the mother standing a few feet away. Her breath ragged, her body swaying, hollowed by the weight of the night. Her clothes were stiff with dried salt, her hands scraped raw from digging. She had been searching for a future she refused to believe was gone. Her eyes locked onto mine, wide with disbelief—some terrible mix of emotions that made her look inhuman, stripped of anything but grief. She stepped forward, her fingers twitching as if she wanted to grab me, shake me, force me into something neither of us had words for. She asked for my help. Not with anger, not with accusation, but with something far worse: hope. Her voice cracked as she said her son’s name, as if the sound of it could call him back to shore. I didn’t know what to say. The tide trickles at my ankles; I cannot waver. Her son is dead. No thing as fragile as a child could have survived the night. I nodded because anyone would. I lied because delusion kept her from jumping into the ocean herself.
We called into the wind, only for his name to be muted by the crashing waves. She was ahead, clawing at a shattered beam as a fabric flapped beneath. I lurched forward, planting my feet in the rubble, wedging my hands beneath the beam. A sharp, wet sting bloomed in my palms—warmth pooling, slick between my fingers. I didn’t feel it at first. Then the searing pain, the salt shredding a hole through my hand: a rusted nail buried inches deep. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t even glance at me. She fell to her knees before a scarf, torn and damp but his. Clutching the fabric to her chest, her body wracked with silent sobs. I stood watching, waiting, knowing she would look up any moment now and insist that this was proof—he had been here, he was still close. But I had seen this kind of discovery before. It was never proof of survival. Only evidence of absence. She would not see that, not yet.
I stepped back, the beach shifted beneath. My stomach twisted as something heavy settled in my chest, something final. I turned towards the ruins of my cabin. The water had risen to my shins; I had allowed myself to sink with her grief. If I kept searching for a ghost, I would drown too. I had nothing left to give her. I whispered the words before I could stop myself. She whipped around, staring at me as if I had struck her. The scarf slipped from her fingers, tumbling into the water—forgotten. Her grief twisted into rage. She was willing to search until her body failed her, but I understood sense—and for it, I was a monster.
Her voice broke as she questioned me. What could be more important than a child? What was I even looking for, if not him? I had no answer that wouldn’t make me seem as cruel as she already believed me to be. I had thought I could stand in the same ruin as her and not feel its weight. I turned and ran.
She screamed my name. The shore blurred beneath my feet, the wind howling against my ears. I reached the water before the wreckage of my cabin and did not hesitate. The moment my body met the waves, the cold seized me, a shock that forced the air from my lungs. The tide dragged at me, pulling me deeper. My arms tore through the water, reaching, searching. The weight of the ocean pressed against my chest, and for a moment, it felt as if I were being swallowed whole. I searched, not for the boy, but for the only thing that mattered: the last piece of my life that had not yet been stripped away.
Shattered beams and broken lives bob with the current. My limbs grow heavy against the devouring current, dragging me into the depthless sea. In a moment of raw panic, ambition evaporates; there was no hope, no grief, no rage but the instinct to breathe, to claw against the suffocating grip of a tyrannical murderer. The water fills my lungs and I choke, thrashing for air where none exists. My arms flail against the tide, pulling me back toward the shore where I laid motionless on its beach. The water mocks me, thrusting up my nostrils, then retreating—laughing. Have I suffered enough for the divine to finally take notice, and in mercy, return what belongs to me?
My fingers sifted through the sand, numb and aching, until they brushed against something familiar. A shape I knew like my own bones. My breath catches. Could it be? The fear, the longing—it all crashed over me at once. A fleeting moment of hope, of disbelief. I lurched forward, digging frantically, my hands painting the shore red, salt searing my wound. My body protests, screaming for release, but I cannot stop. I refuse to stop. The ocean, with all its consuming power, will not claim me. Then—I see it. The opposable thumb. It was unmistakable.
The bone flexes against the current. This was real. This was the one. My heart stutters, my hands freeze, and for the briefest second, the world holds its breath. I have found it. The one thing that could restore me, that could make everything worth it. But the truth returns. It wasn’t my legacy.
It was a human hand, ghostly, severed and small—a child’s—cocooned by the wet sand. I froze above it; his mother howling at the roaring ocean.