A Bully Beached

 

"Hey, you're in my spot, pipsqueak."

Tamah stopped building her sandcastle for a second to find out who was so rudely interrupting her.  Towering over the four-year-old's crouched frame was a fair-skinned 10-year-old in a yellow swimsuit, her hands planted firmly on her hips.  She didn't look irritated; rather, she looked like she was looking for trouble.  Tamah had dealt with bullies like this before, but her Mommy had told her not to do it again.  After all, their abilities were supposed to be kept secret.

"I was here first," Tamah began, already turning back to her castle, "so pick on someone your own size, meanie."  'There, that should take care of that,' the dark-skinned girl thought to herself.

Mira, the older girl, responded to Tamah's attempt at de-escalation by circling around the smaller girl.  With a quick motion, she shot her foot forward, instantly destroying Tamah's sandcastle.  'That'll teach the brat,' Mira thought to herself smugly, walking away with a practiced swagger.

Tamah looked in anger at the remains of the castle.  She had worked so hard on it, and now some stupid bully had destroyed it.  'Mommy'll never know...'

Mira barely heard the little girl snap her fingers before she suddenly blacked out.

"Ya know, if you weren't such a big stupid meanie doodoo-head, I wouldn't've had to do this to you."  Mira woozily regained her vision as the voice of the little girl rang out around her.  If she was able, she would've taught the kid a lesson, but she suddenly realized she couldn't actually move.  She couldn't even blink, let alone yell at her would-be victim.

Tamah knew where on the newly-repaired sandcastle the bully's vision was coming from, so she stepped over to that side.  She decided that she wouldn't even kneel down to the transformed girl's new eye level; she didn't deserve to gaze on her architect's face.

Mira saw the other girl's feet enter her vision, rather horrified at how large the little girl's feet seemed to be.  She was almost in middle school; why was this little preschooler so much bigger than her all of a sudden?  And why couldn't she move?!

"I don't know what your name was," Tamah began, her hands resting on her hips in a stance not unlike her attempted bully's earlier, "but it doesn't matter anymore.  You're my sandcastle now, and that's all you'll be until I leave with my Mommy.  I don't know what'll happen to you after that, but I'm not turning you back.  Serves you right, meanie."  With that, she went to the other side of the shaped mound of sand, and dropped back down to her knees to continue decorating.

"Tamah, it's time to go home!" her mother yelled out, already cutting Tamah's beach day short.  She dropped the borrowed buckets by the sandcastle and ran off with a quick "Coming, Mommy!", leaving her sandcastle to it's fate.

Mira began panicking as the only person she knew of who could fix this ran off without a word to her.  She now knew she was nothing but a sandcastle, the buckets near her giving her a clue as to what exactly she looked like.  The former girl could feel every individual grain of sand that made up her body, the gentle sea breeze occasionally carrying a few away.  She was rather disturbed to discover that she could even feel the pieces that separated from her.

Even worse to Mira was the fact that her vision was locked in one direction, facing the ocean a few feet away.  It wasn't the unseen beachgoers behind her that worried her; it was the slowly rising ocean.  The tide was coming in, and she'd had her fair share of sand creations wash away at this beach.  Would that be her fate, too?

She could still hear the bustle of the beachgoers, wishing she was still one of them.  But no, she HAD to pick on the one person on the beach who happened to somehow have magic powers.  If she hadn't tried to bully that little girl, she'd be heading home with her parents instead of staring unendingly at the slowly encroaching ocean.

Two hours later, and Mira noticed that the sounds behind her had become slightly quieter.  She would've wondered why, but she already knew the reason.  The beachgoers had gotten further away because of the tide coming in, a fact she was all too aware of.  The ocean water had started lapping up against her base, taking even more grains of her body away.  She felt as the lost pieces were washed into the ocean, eventually settling on the seabed.

Another hour went by, and the tide was at it's highest.  Mira was completely surrounded by water now, and she felt as more and more of her increasingly pathetic form was washed away.  She should be heading home to take a quick shower to wash off the ocean salt before supper.  Instead, she was a small sandcastle being washed away by the sea, a process that was speeding up.  If she hadn't tried to bully a little girl just trying to have fun at the beach, she wouldn't be in this situation.

Mira discovered that she could now focus her vision on any piece of her body, but most of the grains in the ocean had already been buried by the rest of the sand she was now part of.  With a newfound resignation, she accepted that she would eventually be entirely mixed in with the seabed, scattered in her thousands of individual grains across the ocean.

As a particularly strong wave washed over her, the last thing she heard before her last remnants were swept away was the sound of a grown woman yelling, "Mira, where are you?!"  She wished she could answer her mother, but as her grains drifted in the turbulent water, she knew her life as a human girl was gone for good.  She was one with the seabed now, and would remain that way for millennia to come.