By the Ocean
Let me tell you about how it was living by the ocean when I was in grade school in November when the big storms would come in. Mid morning and it's still not daylight, then the big clouds come in and just hang there like iron cliffs draining rain all over the coast. Rain so hard you step outside and you're soaking wet already. You are not in the water, yet you are in water. That's when they'd come up out of the sea. They would come up out of the ocean and walk on the land. Creatures you'd never see otherwise climbing up over the rocks, then on up over the highway so the traffic would have to stop. Only a few would show up at first, then more, and small ones at first, then they got bigger. Sometimes the first one would get run over since they were so hard to see in the rain, and nobody's expecting anything like that if they're just passing through, you know? But then they would start getting seen, and the cars and trucks would stop. Traffic would back up for miles as they came, and soon so many they were crawling over the vehicles, and they would be everywhere in the town. They came into the playground, and they played on the swings. We watched them from the classroom windows while the teacher pointed out the various species, and taught us about taxonomy among the marine life. I saw one play on the monkey bars, and I saw it fall. The teacher explained that they don't understand gravity. I remember so many out there, everywhere, holding the town hostage until the storm let up. One year my father had to drag one off our lawn using a tractor because it had died there somehow. He dragged it to the beach and burned it.
