THE SQUISH

The beach is a rough place for a sand castle, what with all the feet, Frisbees, and other hazards around.

Created by two children—one brown-skinned, one tan-skinned—a small, bucket-shaped castle with googly eyes and a hopeful smile (“Hello, world! Here I am!”) faces a string of disasters, from a stomping foot to a shower of rain. Dampened but undaunted, the sandy jumble rises up into even higher and more elaborate structures…only to be knocked down again and again. Then a nearby castle that was constructed in the background by two brown-skinned children, only to suffer a “squish” of its own thanks to a passing wave, prompts a proposal: “Let’s pick ourselves up, / dust ourselves off, / and weather everything life throws at us… / TOGETHER!” If the generalized monologue seems addressed more to younger adults than children, and superfluous anyway given that few if any readers will have trouble recognizing that both the setting and squishing are intended to be metaphorical, the text does add further lift to the visual buoyancy of the low-angled collage beachscapes, created from paper grocery bags, construction paper, and a little sand. The closing “Hello, world! Here we are!” makes a fitting caption to the final view of a magnificent, double-towered construct festooned with banners and waving crabs…and, it seems, only seconds away from one more crashing, but never crushing, squish.

Buckets of sandy uplift.