The Perfect Tower
Ryan was three, with wide serious eyes and rambunctious dark curls tied up in a white sunbonnet. His family was visiting our beach place for the first time, on a day when breeze blew sand off the tops of dunes and clouds skirmished across a hazy sky. I remember the moment the sun managed to burst through, and the boy’s seriousness, like his hair, abandoned itself to the wind.
His father walked gingerly down the path to the shore. There were seams in his slacks and he carried a new plastic beach bag full of sunscreen. “Don’t take off your shoes, you’ll get sand between your toes!” he said. He was a surgeon, and had all the qualities you’d want in a surgeon: acute intelligence, intense concern for the welfare of others, and fanatical desire for absolute cleanliness and precision in every detail. He was the husband of my oldest friend, but back then, when the children were small, I didn’t know him well. We rarely saw them since their marriage; his work had taken my friend and their three kids away to the other side of the country.
Ryan’s hand fit completely, fingers splayed, inside the round opening of our plastic sand pail. He watched with absorption and then concentrated on the task, as I showed him how to dig down past the dry fly-away grains, through the sand layered thick as cake, to reach what worked best for sand towers: a seawater mix gooey and tenacious as molasses. We filled the pail. Ryan smoothed the final layer, brushing off extra sand so that the top was perfectly flat. His head, protected in his little bonnet, bowed over his exacting project.
“Make sure it’s even,” said his father, watching from the safety of a large beach blanket. “Or it will be structurally unsound.”
On a flat spot where the wind barely rustled in the long dune grass, we smoothed the sun-warm sand with our palms. Ryan and I laid the full bucket down horizontally, carefully. Then, hearts fluttering, making mock-scared faces and puckered O mouths at each other, we flipped it.
My big and his tiny hands curved around the gravid plastic. Cautiously, slowly, we lifted. The dune grass shushed, the waves stopped crashing. The sand tower emerging from the bucket had no sags, no fissures, no flaws; it was perfect.
“Beautifully done, son,” said Ryan’s father, and turned a page in the journal he was reading.
Ryan studied the tower, conical and dark with seawater. He brushed a few flecks of sand off his hands. My daughter cavorted in the surf beyond us with Ryan’s mother and sisters. Nearby my husband napped, the edges of his ears slowly turning pink.
I didn’t think anything of my question. It just seemed to me the proper thing for a child to do with a sand tower.
“Would you like to stomp on it?”
Ryan raised his eyes from the tower — that lookout made with such deliberation and vigilance — and stared at me in astonishment. He glanced at his father, who turned another page, but, after a long moment, gave a small, bemused shrug. Ryan’s face burst into lightness. His hands flew up into his hair, knocking the bonnet askew — which the wind promptly took — and he bent, knees to chest, ready to spring.
Every time we hear from Ryan’s parents now, telling us of his accomplishments, his impeccable grades and pre-college test scores, I see again the look on his face when he jumped. The glitter of strewn sand on his cheeks, his enormous dark eyes, his arms flung upwards in the abandonment of perfection. I hear again a cry of laughter louder than gulls, feel the tug of his father’s rare grin and the slap of far-traveled salt air. As if it were yesterday and not fifteen years that we’ve treasured their whole family’s friendship, I catch my breath before the plunge of toes, deep and wriggling, into the freedom of damp, sticky sand.
Kimm Brockett Stammen’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in CARVE, The Greensboro Review, Pembroke Magazine, Prime Number Magazine and many others. Her work has been nominated for Pushcart and Best Short Fiction anthologies, and she won 2nd Place in Typehouse’s 2019 Fiction Contest. Before earning an MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in 2019, Kimm was a concert saxophonist, and spent twenty-five years performing, teaching and touring across Canada and the US.
