“The Sea Cave”

“On one especially resplendent morning, Theo sat in his favorite hiding place at the beach, marveling at the scene by which he had been swallowed up like a speck of dust within a cosmos. He sat in the entrance of a cave carved out of a cliffside by the skilled sculpting action of ceaseless waves. They had scooped out an oversized snail shell from the yellow-gray siltstones and blue-gray sandstones that made up the cliff, which rose at a forty-five-degree angle from the beach. The cave opened like the bell of a huge tuba, and then wound round itself, in smaller and smaller passages, before finally closing at the back. The walls of the cave were alive with what Theo’s imagination recognized as seals, sea lions, dragons, sharks, mermaids, and spirits of the deep, all seemingly melted into the rough stone by some coastal Vulcan in a past long forgotten. Long locks of mermaid hair streamed down the moist stone walls. Mouths a meter wide opened to whisper important secrets to the visitor. Faces of generals, like those carved in ancient Greece, with beards whose every strand could be clearly made out, loomed over the interloper, apparently wondering why he had come. A sheen of water silvered the nearly vertical slabs on Theo’s either side.”