by Anonymous

Strolling I was, down the soft dunes
of a sea-facing shore. A man squatted, staring out at the susurrous undulations before him. His eyes glowed like pearls, his skin fair and spotless. His cheeks proudly rose out from dark hairs around his chin. How beautiful a beard can be on a man. And he was crying.

When I asked what was wrong, he told me that his daughter had been a good kid. She excelled at school but loved playing in the sand when she came home. She would make castles and fortresses, always embellished with the most immaculate details, each one more articulate and extravagant than the last. ‘Sometimes, she would waste away hours on the beach, until I called her in for supper. Surely, she would become a great architect one day, just like me!’

I have heard about the gang before; the whole town has. They were a band of brothers who started off by stealing from local stall-holders and terrorising the aunties of the area. But as they waxed older, they waxed meaner, and turned to bullying the smaller children. Pushing and stamping, robbing and abusing all became the new normal, and while most parents in the town disliked them, their crimes were generally put down to juvenile delinquency. Kids grow out of their behaviours, don’t they?

‘My poor girl, every day they came and crushed her sandcastles,’ the man continued. ‘They said they needed the space to play football. Even though the whole beach was empty, they had to settle wherever she was playing. Often, she would come running home, tears dripping from her eyelashes.’

After a while, the father had had enough. He went down to the beach himself to watch them obliterate his daughter’s creations. And so, he confiscated their football and shooed them away. So much for them.

… Or so he thought. For when the town saw a man, broad in stature and galvanised with beard, clutching away the ball of children much smaller than him, they did not side with him. They probably thought he hated them because they were Jews, even though he hadn’t thought religion had had anything to do with the matter. After all, the gang of brothers did not discriminate when they picked on those smaller than them.

They lashed out. Their pride got the better of them, or something did – it wasn’t easy to say why they did what they did. Maybe they had been planning to kill the girl anyway, and used the football incident as an excuse for retaliation. Either way, the blood was drawn, and her body lay somewhere at the bottom of the ocean now.

‘That is why I sit here, watching the shore. In case her body comes floating to the surface. I should like to give her a proper burial, in the ground.’ I can tell he isn’t just upset at his daughter’s murder. He was a successful architect and has been reduced to a sobbing entity. More than life has been lost.

Atrocities do not begin out of nowhere. They start as ripples that no one bothers to dismiss. They transform into waves as they veer towards the shore, but only if they are left to grow. But only after they’ve hit the bank and flooded the town do people feel sorry. Hindsight is a horrible thing.