I’m at the beach but it’s not the real
beach; it’s indoors and it’s called the Ocean Dome.
A blue sky with some white puffy clouds is
painted on the ceiling, which is closed because it’s raining
outside. Maybe it’s raining on the real beach, too, wherever that
is.
Far away, I think, but I’m not sure.
There are tall curly waves in a big pool and
waterslides and even a volcano. The red-orange lava is pretty, like
liquid candy. I want to touch it but my mother says, “You can’t.
It’s hot.” Then she smiles and says, “Or maybe it isn’t. What do I
know?” She shrugs a pale shoulder.
She is building sand castles but they’re not
castles like for princesses. She says that one of the things she’s
making—a square building of sand with a slippery-looking slide
smoothed out on one side—is the Helter Skelter, and another
building is the Monkey Theater. Even though I have just turned six
years old, I don’t know what either of those things is, but I’m
going down into the fake surf with our square yellow bucket to
scoop up wet sand whenever she needs more of it. Soon she’s
sculpting what looks to me like a low wall and not a very good
one—she’s says it’s a boardwalk—on one side of her city of sand,
and I ask her what this place is called.
“Coney,” she says.
When she finds a broken shell in the sand, she
picks it up and says, “Huh. Nice touch.” Then she starts carving
twirly-whirlies and stars and moons onto her buildings with the
shell’s sharp edge.
I go to get some more wet sand as she starts
to work on something she calls Shoot the Chutes, which she says is
sort of like the roller coasters my dad makes but way older, way
more simple, dumping its cars down one measly hill into a lake,
which she’ll build with a buried bucket of water. “It was really
just a primitive flume,” she says.
“Mom,” I ask her as I watch, “what’s
Coney?”
She dumps the bucket’s wet sand out and it
holds its form nicely. “Home.”
“Can we go there?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “Not anymore.”
“Is it gone?”
She looks up as the roof of the Ocean Dome
splits the sky in two, cutting a cloud right in half. The real sun
has decided to come out after all.
“That’s right.” She puts on her sunglasses.
“It’s gone.”