by Eric Scot Tryon

The jellyfish lay lifeless on the sand. No longer an ocean ballerina, now a jello mold that never set. Dirty white. Hints of pink. Bites of brown. Teenagers poked it with sticks. Mothers shoo’ed toddlers away.

But a life in the ocean is not meant to cook on the sand. So I ran to my car to get her old beach towel, the one with dolphins wearing sunglasses that had lain dormant in my trunk for years.

With the towel, I scooped up the creature, a loose thing, alien, not easily contained by human hands. But what now?

A few yards up the beach, two kids were unearthing themselves after the thrill of being buried. They raced to the waves like sand monsters, and I asked the father if I could use one of the holes, borrow one of the shovels.

I grabbed the yellow plastic toy and knelt next to where the girl once lay, needing the hole to be deeper, worrying what the tides might reveal, uncovering what once was, my efforts then falling in vain. But on my knees, with the jellyfish by my side wrapped neatly in the towel like an offering, I saw what lay before me.

And I dug. I dug until the family packed up their towels and chairs and food and toys and left the cooling beach. I dug until the sky glowed orange then purple, the sun sizzling into the horizon. I dug until the yellow plastic shovel cut into my hands, desperate to reach the other side of the world. Desperate to erase the shape of another buried child.

Eric Scot Tryon is a writer and editor for San Francisco. His work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction, and has appeared in Glimmer Train, Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, Wigleaf, Los Angeles Review, Sonora Review & elsewhere. Eric is also the Founding Editor of Flash Frog. Find more information at ericscottryon.com or on Twitter @EricScotTryon.