Episode: Fair winds and waves
Posted by Story on 08/29/17
A very large statue of the goddess Mangata appears one morning on the eastern beach, epiphanite eyes staring out to sea. Her arrival is a mystery of the mundane variety, for drag marks in the sand and tracks leading to and away from her vigil make it clear she was placed by human hands under cover of night. If anyone knows who commissioned her, who drug her to the beach, they are not yet sharing that knowledge.
But, what anyone who visits knows is this: the crabs that live on the shores, usually in their long winter dormancy, have roused and brought their own offerings to lay before the jewel-studded likeness of the goddess. The pedestal of the statue is surrounded by every shiny rock, lovely shell fragment, and crystalline cluster of beachglass along the shoreline. All picked up, and carried, and arranged in rough concentric circles like eddies around a stone dropped into a pool. It is something of a wonder, stones and treasures both natural and polished glinting in the wintry morning sun.
But, what anyone who visits knows is this: the crabs that live on the shores, usually in their long winter dormancy, have roused and brought their own offerings to lay before the jewel-studded likeness of the goddess. The pedestal of the statue is surrounded by every shiny rock, lovely shell fragment, and crystalline cluster of beachglass along the shoreline. All picked up, and carried, and arranged in rough concentric circles like eddies around a stone dropped into a pool. It is something of a wonder, stones and treasures both natural and polished glinting in the wintry morning sun.