Writing Prompt: This was a self-imposed writing prompt. Something about this particular edition’s cover of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse compelled me to write a story based off the cover image. I also decided to set it in the same world as the larger story project I’m currently working on. My (self-)instructions: Write a story about this picture (below). Who are the people at the beach? What are they doing? What is the structure in the background? Tell it in under 1000 words.

“What do you think it is?” Raine asked his father, looking up at the older man.

It was a hot day. A bright day. The Sun’s rays fell mercilessly on the beach, baking the sand and turning the normally relaxing, muted blue water of the bay into a sparkling mass that rose and fell like the deep breaths of some massive creature, waves tumbling slowly towards the shoreline as it exhaled deeply. The steady sound of waves coming and going echoed this sense of the bay/creature’s deep, rhythmic breathing.

It was at the intersection where the waves met the sand that Raine and his father, Asher, stood. Where the water rushed forward and slipped between the toes of their bare feet, then receded as if feeling their presence frightened it—only to return again and again in the ceaseless curiosity of a dumb animal. The two stood a few feet apart, Raine and his knotted mop of dirty blonde hair to his father’s left. Further to their left, two men struggled to get a canoe in the water while a third waded in the bay a few feet out, waiting to hold the boat steady once it was afloat. Behind the father and son, two boys roughly Raine’s age chased each other across the beach, kicking up sand behind them. Farther back still, where the beach began to fade and rise gently into grassy hillside, three older townsfolk sat on the hill’s slope, hiding from the heat and Sun, one under a parasol, the other two soaking in a periodic breeze that carried with it the heavy salty scent intermingled with seaweed so distinctive to beaches. By the look of their dapper attire, they must have been fresh out of church, which was only a short walking distance away.

Raine mostly stared at his feet, wriggling his toes in the wet sand, watching the stuck together clumps of sand grains squeeze out between his toes, then wash away when the next wave rushed over his feet. Occasionally, he looked up and stared at the dark round monolith lunging towards the heavens from the tip of a thin strip of land farther out in the bay. From where he stood, the tower was tiny. He closed his right eye as if holding a wink and raised his thumb in front of his left eye, blocking the tower out of existence. This made him smirk. But Raine was old enough to understand perspective, and knew that if he and his father were on the island, not the beach, the ancient tower would loom over them ominously.

After a while, Raine looked up at his father. The older man was looking towards the tower with a hard gaze, hands in his short pants’ pockets. Asher’s dirty blonde hair, the same shade as his son’s, was cut closer to his skull, and did not flutter in the wind like Raine’s whenever a breeze passed by. The silence crept between them at a slow pace, and just as impatience was about to get the better of Raine and cause him to repeat his question, his father spoke.

“Honestly? I don’t know. The Ancients, wherever they went, left behind an awful lot of their belongings. As if they packed up in a hurry. Though, I guess it’d be kind of hard to take something as big as that,” he motioned towards the tower with his chin. “But. We’ve found some pretty amazing things of theirs, so who knows.”

“Yes but what do you think it is?” Raine asked, a slight whine of insistence laced in his tone.

Asher smiled. He looked down at his son, who fell just of short Asher’s chest, and ruffled the boy’s tangle of hair. This caused Raine to squirm away in embarrassment while failing to suppress a grin he couldn’t help. It made Asher realize just how old Raine was getting. Time. In Asher’s experience, you could fix almost anything in this world, make right by just about any mistake if you try hard enough, but there were two things you couldn’t get back: time and life. Asher shuddered, trying to shake the grim thoughts from his mind, and focused instead on towering black obelisk turned gray by the haze of heat and distance.

“I’m no Restorian, Raine. If you want a good answer, you should go ask old man Khris back in town. He’s the resident expert on the Ancients and magitech and all their machines.” Asher looked down at his son and saw the boy about to protest, but quickly continued. “But, if I had to guess, I’d say it was a marker of some sort. Like. A lighthouse. You know how they say the Ancients used to have boats that sailed not only the skies, but also the heavens? Well, maybe that’s what this thing is. The Ancients’ version of a lighthouse, like the ones with lights we use.”

“What about that big dish on top?”

Asher chuckled. It was like the why? phase all over again, and just like then, Asher had none of the answers. He considered himself a simple man. He just laid down track for the trains, or worked with the Restorians when they discovered any pre-existing tracks that once belonged to the Ancients, and tried to do as best by his wife and son as he could. They were, after all, his world.

“I dunno. Maybe some of the Ancients were huge. I mean like, giants, and they ate their breakfast out of those things. They were their bowls.”

“Daaaaaad!”

Asher laughed. “C’mon, let’s get back home to your mother. You know how she hates to be without us for too long. When you get home you can go pester Professor Khris and see if he can’t give you a better answer than my silly ones.”

Raine took his father’s hand and the two started across the beach back towards town. Both wore smiles the whole way.

~Dedicated to my father, William J. Holzworth, for Father’s Day–6.19.11