Shifting Sands

Sand shifts.

There should be nothing remotely startling about this statement. You might as well say wind blows, or thunder rumbles. Shifting is a primary characteristic of sand – it gets everywhere, eventually.

A beach on the Caribbean will one day be the dirt of the Gobi Desert – or at least, the individual grains of sand which made up said beach will be. If you wait long enough, everything from rock to glass to coral will be broken down into grains of sand, to shift along with the rest.

Everything becomes sand, eventually. Even bones.

                                                                        …

 Jorge watched the sand shifting around him with something as close to envy as he could manage. He’d never quite gotten the hang of envy. It always seemed like a waste of energy.

He hadn’t had much else to do these past few years. Being dead and buried put quite the brake on any plans of moving around at all, he found. He had always wanted to see more of the world than this sleepy little town, but now he was stuck here forever, in a little graveyard by the beach with only the iguanas and crabs for company. Oh, and the other dead people. They were better than the iguanas and the crabs, but as far as clearing a low bar goes, that was a gold medal contender.

And there was the sand, of course.

He’d never paid much attention to sand when he was alive. With nothing to do but look at it and listen to it shifting around his corpse, Jorge was entranced to find beauty in every grain as it jostled for position. Each one was different. Each had a different secret tale in the minute facets and planes of its surface.

The crabs and iguanas were another matter entirely. The crabs and iguanas could go to Hell. They burrowed down and stripped the last shreds of flesh from Jorge’s bones. Jorge had been very much attached to his flesh. They had had a lot of good times together.

Now it was all gone, and he was left with just his bones. His bones and the shifting sand, whispering as it went past him.

On the whole, it wasn’t much of an afterlife. As far as Jorge was concerned, the disappointment of finding out that the afterlife was staggeringly dull was offset by the discovery that there was an afterlife at all.

‘It could be worse,’ he thought to himself. ‘I can still think to myself, after all. An iguana popped out my eyeballs and there’s really not much to see, but I can still see. A crab took my ears off and there’s really not much to hear, but I can still hear. I don’t have any breath, but I can still talk. Could be worse…could be worse.’

He wasn’t the only dead person in the graveyard by the beach, but he quickly discovered they weren’t among the world’s great conversationalists. He also thought he might be the only one who appreciated the beauty of the sand. The others absolutely hated it.

“Buried in sand! Buried in sand! What a disgrace!” Maria lamented constantly. “What can you grow in sand? What can you build on sand? Where is the fertile black soil and strong, steadfast stone?”

Maria’s people were originally from the mountains, far away, and they had been wealthy landowners – at least to hear Maria tell it. Time and circumstance had brought her low, all the way down to the shores of the Yucatan Caribbean. All the way down to sea-level (or in her present situation, just below sea-level). She considered this a major demotion in life and in death. Maria had a very literal sense of the phrase ‘moving down in the world.’ It was a phrase she used constantly, and whenever she paid any attention to Jorge at all, she always seemed to judge him harshly for spending his whole life as down in the world as she could imagine. Being down in the world amounted to some kind of moral failing, as far as Maria was concerned. Jorge, in her estimation, must have been as shifty and in-conducive to growth as sand, to have stayed here his whole life. Not a stone and black soil kind of person – not Maria’s kind of person at all and she was not shy in telling him so.

It was annoying and offensive, but Jorge had never quite gotten the hang of being annoyed and offended all the time. It always seemed like a waste of energy.

Rodrigo, on the other hand, had a far more practical dislike of sand. In life, he had run the only hotel in town and keeping it clean had been a constant, losing battle against the sand. Being buried in it now was the final indignity of a long, inglorious campaign where the only victories were pyrrhic.

“Beat me at last. It beat me at last. Coarse and irritating and it gets everywhere,” he would moan, weeping pitiably in his grave. Which is almost impressive, when you consider that skeletons are not renowned weepers. The lack of tear ducts is something of an impediment to a good weeping. As indeed is the lack of eyes or nose – but Rodrigo was hardly going to let a little thing like that get in the way of an eternity of assorted blubbering, bawling, snivelling, sobbing, wailing and, of course, good old weeping.

Jorge considered this to be a bit of a waste of an afterlife, all things considered. Even one as dull as being buried in sand in a little graveyard by the beach. Still, it wasn’t really his place to judge and if Rodrigo wanted to spend his afterlife weeping then that was none of Jorge’s business.

There were others in the graveyard, of course, but they were buried too far away for Jorge to hear them. Their voices were muffled by the sand.

Eventually, Jorge grew tired of listening to the endless complaints of Maria and Rodrigo and simply listened to the sand. It sounded like a thousand whispers as the grains shifted past him…and after some time, he found he that was able to understand them. Each grain whispered its story as it passed him, and hearing the stories, he was able to live a thousand lifetimes every day. The afterlife was looking up. There had to be some advantage to being dead, he supposed, or else people would stop doing it.

The sand whispered its stories…places it had gone…things it had seen…things it had been. Everything from a little girl’s castle on the beach, not far from the graveyard, to the concrete in a billionaire’s palace on the other side of the world.

Time shuffled on, and eventually the stories were not enough for Jorge. It was all very well hearing about these places. Other beaches on other seas. Deserts and mountains. Green fields and vast cities of steel and stone and glass. Jorge listened with something as close to regret as he could manage. He had never quite gotten the hang of regret – it always seemed like a waste of energy. Still, he had always wanted to see more of the world. There seemed to be so much he had missed out on. Even Maria had her mountains.

All in all, he would much rather be a grain of sand than a corpse in this little graveyard by the beach, he declared one night, as the wind blew and the thunder rumbled.

“Give it time,” the sand replied.

                                                                        …

Sand shifts. It shifts from beach to desert. From sea floor to mountain peak. Carried on wind and tide.

Eventually, Jorge shifted along with it, with a sense of joy and wonder.

There was just so much to see.