Author’s note: as noted above, I wrote this sometime in the mid to late seventies. It made my family laugh. Shout out to my amazing sister Laura, who has had it memorized for all these years. Without her, this little gem might have been lost forever in the mists of time.

                                                     A Day at the Beach, by Evelyn P. Jervey

The darkness of the ocean floor has a singular quality: no amount of light can permeate its depth. But there are those who thrive in the darkness, and there, under a weird, tangled growth of sea lichen, dwelled three such creatures, a mother and her two little ones. Creatures of the deep, darkness personified.

High above them, in another world, laughing children, sunburnt teenagers, a family building sandcastles. And among them, one adventurer. An adventurer. Disdaining the safety of the beach, he struck out defiantly on his own. Faster and faster, his powerful, even strokes carried him away from the shore toward the depths of the sea.

And then, a shape he could not distinguish from the blackness below seized him and carried him off to its lair beneath the sea.

Darkness personified.

                                               A Day at the Beach, Take Two (Abridged Edition)

It was dark. However, living under a big clump of seaweed were three slimy black things who liked the dark.

There were a lot of people on the beach. One of them decided to go swimming. He went a long way out from shore, and boy, was he ever sorry.