Once when I was young,

I journeyed far from my home to the ocean

Where we would swim as if we were invincible

With waves crashing above our heads,

and water so deep at some points we wished we had a boat.

Our goal on such missions,

Was to reach the furthest sandbars,

and dig our feet into the sand,

To search with our dexterous toes,

Which was often illegal,

For sand dollars.

For some reason I never felt guilty for killing them,

They live just as we do, in communities under the sea,

But we snatched them up like villains,

Dropping them into buckets of bleach.

Once during such an adventure,

Or rather, on our way from the hotel to the beach,

My sister and I stumbled upon quite an extraordinary thing.

As we walked through the grassy dunes, little creatures scurried about

In the dimly lit morning.

Into their holes they went, for fear of humanity.

Even little things we knew from a glimpse as something new,

Dashed for the safety of the sand crab holes.

These creatures were new to us, they moved rather quickly, and had only two legs.

Even at a quick glimpse we could tell that they weren't walking,

They were getting into the holes as fast as they could in every direction.

Some appeared to fly, and some appeared to turn into sand,

We were instantly distracted from our usual activity,

and became obsessed with seeing these critters again.

Plots of luring them out consumed our minds,

Even came to us in our dreams, and every morning at dawn,

We were on the sands,

Trying to discover something new.

At first, we tried cruelty, we would cover their holes with sea shells,

Or flick sand into them.

The sand crabs would just emerge and move the shells,

Or relocate the sand.

Then we tried gifts, we built castles and embellished their holes with muscles,

Partly because we were afraid to step on the holes,

Partly to see if they would retrieve the dying muscles.

Sleeping the first night was the hardest,

Knowing that we'd seen fairies, or whatever they were.

(In later years, I've come to know them as sand nymphs.)

We knew there were more than crabs down there,

and we said this too ourselves often.

It seemed like a game of pretend gone delusion.

All day for three days we appeared to play in the sand,

Like a couple of kids with extreme imaginations,

Mom left us alone,

Extended our stay for two more days,

and acknowledged that we were on a mission.

When Castles yielded no results,

We went back to cruelty,

and flooded the holes.

When we were nice, they gave us nothing,

When we were rude, they were rude back,

By squirting the water back at us,

Or by still, giving us nothing.

On our final night, we went into the sea, and fetched sand dollars, as was tradition,

Just like Christmas to us, and we gave the fairies one final chance to show themselves to us,

We built a small castle, around our sand dollars,

and while we worked, I sang to myself of my love for the sands and the sea,

and how I hated to leave,

and a bunch of small lights emerged from the sands like large fireflies,

and danced with my sister and me.