When the sun goes down, close your eyes, and I’ll tell you a story.
It’s a story about a wave—a big one, the kind that threatens an undertow if you’re not careful.
This is not advice but a warning.
In this story, I will be a stone, and you can be a seashell or a fishbone or the head of a plastic doll with blue hair someone’s child left behind. On the ride home, when the child remembers the doll, his favourite doll, whose head he gleefully ripped from its body and tossed aside, he cries out—a long and remorseful cry—but it’s too late to turn back now and retrieve it.
The trick, if there is one, is to wash up on the shore and not get dragged down to the bottom of the ocean.
Sometimes the water is calm, but not today, not in this story.
Yes, of course, if you want to be a grain of sand, then be a grain of sand, but you won’t necessarily fare any better.
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Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She also runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter.
The Litter I See Project 