Part ten of Twelve Stories.
The sediment washes away from the land into the sea. A lone lily once stood upon a cliff here. The cliff is no more, it has become the shore.
An unremarkable cafe once stood upon the sand, and for a brief period, enjoyed the benefits of beach-side property.
But when the water level rose, the sea consumed more land, and the cafe, just as easily forgettable as it was, was easily forgotten. No one came to the beach for the cafe in the first place, and people wondered how they could stay in business, as seaside coffee struck most people as an unpleasant combination of heat and heat.
Sand stretched from the inland desert all the way to the sea now.
What was once grass was now all just sediment. Not one creature walking upon the sand had seen the greenery that once covered the land.
Hakon, in fact, had never even seen a lily.
Hakon is a human, one from a long line of what is called a civilization. Civilizations are what people call their communities over time, sort of. Hakon, like many others, assumed his civilization was the product of ages and ages of development – progress. Attending a meditation retreat on the shoreline of a great desert, it hadn’t occurred to him how the land had changed, how what was once the precipice of a cliff with a perfect lily was now deeply underwater, how many different people had enjoyed the same scenery over the ages, and how a select few had enjoyed it with coffee.
Cliffs had become picturesque beaches, the sand of the beach had met the desertification of the land, pushed back by the relentless rise of seawater, and different civilizations occupied everywhere Hakon had ever been. But Hakon could have never known that things hadn’t always been the way they were.
Hakon sits blank-faced on the soft sand of the tunnel or cave, for the first time considering how he has arrived in this situation with a strange woman who’s name he cannot recall, painfully aware of the feeling of having forgotten something important, questioning if things hadn’t always been that way.