the Mystery

All good mysteries start as secrets. Something someone has hid, or left untold. Sometimes these secrets want to be found, and sometimes they wish to be left alone. Occasionally when you dig up someone else's secrets your actually digging up your own.
 
Our story begins at the local beach, where digging is not only a possibility it’s practically a guarantee. Its sand sculpture day, groups of all ages are about trying to win boasting rights for the biggest and best. Their gear ranges from the cheap plastic shovels of dollar store quality, to your mothers silverware, all the way up to professional archeology equipment.

 We are following Emma, she’s not quite digging she’s collecting. Days like these are a goldmine, she scours from pile to pile, pretending to admire the castles and mermaids but all the while keeping an eye on what’s being dug up. Most is piled and generally discarded, sand dollars, shells, occasional lost jewellery. These things contaminate their precious sculptures, in fact some even bring in fake beach paraphernalia. Perfect starfish and shells to show how at one they are with nature and so good to work with the perfect “found” objects around them.

Emma despises these people as well as enjoys them. They are entertainment and in one
day they dig up more beach then she can do the whole summer. They come in early
morning and by mid-afternoon the beach is unrecognizable. Every grain of sand
has been sifted through, displaced from its original location. On days like
these she brings the big beach bag. It starts off empty but as the day warms up
it fills with interesting rocks, dried sea creatures, a fossil or two, and yes
even your mothers silverware when you're not looking.  It shines in the sun and is just lying
amongst the piles of discarded sand. You won't even notice it gone till the end
of the day, you may look for it. Sometimes destroying the sculpture that took
you so long to build in hopes you accidentally buried it inside. You will
eventually give up, hoping your mother will not notice that another piece of
her once matching set has disappeared.

Emma will take off her sweater and add it to the bag, sure it takes up a lot of room but it makes the clink
clink of fine silverware much less noticeable.

Emma had been up and down the beach several times by now, her bag was weighing her down. She walked slowly as
to not give herself away; she regretted the cannonball she had retrieved.
Cannonballs were not so rare as she had several at home, but they didn’t appear
very often. The pirates of long ago they were fired at are no more and the
cannons themselves were only to be found at museums. This cannonball was a
smaller version than usual, probably a warning shot. Pirates beware we are a
protected community.

To her left Emma noticed a sand creation of a pirate ship. She browsed around to find its creators but saw no
one in the immediate area. In fact she had walked by this spot earlier and
hadn’t noticed anyone working. Or maybe she had just not paid attention. The
ship was impeccable, old beach would for the plank, pieces of seaweed for
sails, what looked to be the pirate flag from far away was actually a small
skull and bones up close. These must be imports as they were far to perfect to
have been found that day. As Emma examined the great details, which should have
taken weeks not hours to create something else caught her eye. As with all
pirate ships this one had a lady mascot on the front, a mermaid actually. It
was the mermaids’ face that really caught her eye, it looked remarkably
familiar. The arch of the nose, the sharp eyebrows, it looked very much like
her mother once did. Had it not been for the long hair it would look very much
as Emma did now. In fact the mermaid was wearing a small sand dollar pendant
much like the ones Emma made and sold to the tourists. Only this sand dollar
was miniature, the smallest finest one she had ever seen. Do sand dollars come
this small? Maybe that’s the size baby sand dollars would be. Emma wondered
where they would have gotten such an incredible find from. Maybe they breed
sand dollars specifically for sand sculpting competitions. Again she looked
around for an owner; surely they wouldn’t miss it if they breed their own. No
one was paying attention to the large pirate ship with the impeccable details.
She was an expert at these things and swiftly snatched the pendant away without
so much as disturbing a grain of sand on the sculpture.

After such a treasure she knew she had to go home, had to marvel at it in the privacy of her own space. She
lived in a little house just off the beach. The villagers called it a shack, no
respect for the humble little home. It’s big enough for one person Emma
frequently thought. When she was younger her mother had lived there with her,
but as Emma grew up the space seemed to get smaller and then her mother went
away. Emma thinks she needed more space, she was large in spirit. She wasn’t
really sure as she had been a kind mother, there was love and when she had left
she gave no warning or note. The villagers say she ran off with a sailor as
there were a few boats in the harbour the night she never came back. Emma
doesn’t think about it much she just knows one day she will see her mother
again.

She stared at the pendant; it was so dainty she felt the slightest pressure would crush it completely. She pulled
a loose string off the shirt she was wearing and strung the pendant up on her
neck. The string was barely visible and made it look like it was staying in
place on its own, as if it were a part of her like it had been on the mermaid.
She liked its coolness against her chest, it almost felt wet, and maybe it was.
She proceeded to dump her bag out, being sure to place the cannon ball with the
others near the fireplace. She went over all she had collected, stopping
occasionally to admire the pendant around her neck. Finally she curled up on
the cot she called a bed and fell asleep.




A storm came that night; it was one of those unexpected strong ones. The kind tht
people write angry letters to the weatherman about not warning them in time.
All this that were not strapped down (of which there were many) danced about
with the wind. No one dare venture outside in such a storm lest they be dancing
as well.




In the morning Emma and her little house were gone, not a trace of it washed onshore.
The villagers held their breath for weeks waiting as they once did for
fisherman that used to be caught in storms at sea. Their bodies eventually
given back by the ocean, bloated and hardly recognizable, one just had to wait.
But her body never came, nor even a piece of her house.




Eventually the villagers decided a proper goodbye was needed
and they went to where the house (no longer called a shack) had been to lay
flowers. A sparkle caught the eye of a little boy, and he dug up a fine silver
spoon. Soon all were noticing sparkles and hundreds of spoons and silverware
were being dug up, some recognized by their former owners.




Quizzical how they all ended up there, no one thought to blame Emma. A few said mermaids had given them back in exchange for Emma who
now lived in her little house under the sea. The old ones said it was fairies
who had taken away the motherless child as one of their own. And one old lady,
older than anyone alive, said Emma had been a Silky and now returned to her
true form had no need for such things anymore (she knew Emma had taken the
silverware). She didn’t however explain what use Silky Emma would have for
cannon balls.