Sand
						It's almost finished. He pulled the rag out of his back pocket and rubbed the sweat off his forehead. "God its hard work building a home" he muttered to himself and settled back into finishing the part of the front wall he had been working on for most of the morning. An hour later he stands up from the crouching position he'd been in for longer then his knees could remember and takes a few steps back to the sand pile to take a look at his work. "It's beautiful" he sighs. "The house that Dale built" it said above the front door and in his heart. OK, it wasn't a castle like you sometimes see up and down the beach. But it was his and he had built it with his own two hands. It wasn't an especially grand house or big, as houses of this type sometimes are. It had a basic suburban architecture and was planned as a four bedroom, two story town house with a double garage, a large back yard and a medium sized front lawn. There were millions of houses that looked like this across the nation. The walls were straight and proud which brought up a small smile to the corner of his mouth as he recalled how long it had taken him to teach himself to make the walls this straight. The front door was half open and the pathway leading up to the house including the three little steps that lead up to the front porch where all laid out in order. The windows were all in place, the right height this time, with neat little hinged shutters, like the ones he had seen in a magazine once, open wide and flush against the outer wall. The roof was in place already, neatly shingled and with the proper slope. Even the little chimney stood proudly in the middle of the roof above where the living room would have been. That had been hard work and he was lucky it hadn't rained yet but then again that was why he had chosen this time of year to put the house up, in the first place. Even the location was straight out of a magazine. He could see the waves breaking on the beach a ways off to the west and could smell the salt in the air. A wonderful place for a home. The kind of location for a house he'd dreamt about ever since he was a kid. He sat back on the pile of sand at his feet and drifted into the world of the imaginary. In his mind he could hear the kids playing on the front lawn as he pulled up to the driveway. The dog jumping up every time they threw the ball at each other and the weeping willow swaying softly in the sea breeze. There was a smell of home baking drifting out of the house and he could see his wife standing at the front door with a contented smile on her face. The kind of smile that he knew, after all these years, to mean "all is well in the world". "God, it's perfect". He thought to himself and let the contentment flow over him like a wave. It was getting dark. There was still tomorrow to put the finishing touches on the front wall before he brought the family out to see the finished house. He loaded up what was left of the tools hanging around the site and after a glance back at "the house that Dale built", drove off down the dirt path, turning left at the beach road and back into the city for a night full of that feeling of achievement that only an act of creation, mixed in with contentment, can bring. ---------------------------------------- At eleven twenty three that night, as the city slept, the storm blew in from the west. It was an off season storm and the national meteorological service was just as surprised as the rest of the population when the winds started picking up energy. They quickly reached winter speeds with gushes reaching gale force pushing the waves higher then was normal for this season. The fishermen in the nearby marina ran out and started adding tie lines to the boats to make sure that the midnight tide, that they knew would be at least a meter higher then normal, didn't bash the boats together. Back down the beach the waves started getting creeping up closer and closer to the house that Dale built. It happened at twelve forty one. A thousend in one combination of waves coming and waves going created the kind of wave that surfers call a surge wave and wait for for years. It was three and a half meter monster when it hit the shore line. The wave rolled up and over its top and broke fifteen meters out then washed up the beach all rumble and white foam. Twenty eight meters up on the beach, from the water line it reached the bottom of the small hill the house stood on. For a moment it seemed to stop, foaming at the foot of the small bump on the open beach, then, like someone had reached a decision and given a command, it surged up and over the waist high, sand house crumbling everything in its path and returning the wonderfully sculptured sand to its original flat state. By the time the "wave of a lifetime" had exhausted its energy on the sand and returned dripping to the open sea, the "house that Dale built" was just another lump of sand on another stormy beach ready for talented hands to create another house or castle or mermaid, whatever the whims of creativity might come up with as soon as the storm passes. Then the morning came.

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