The Shingle That Waited

Here is the 21st of 24 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained Glass Window 1 for background. This window - the only one of the 24 designs so muted, so unlit from behind - shows a semi-abstract landscape: a tall tree stands in the centre with a brown trunk and deep green canopy. Behind it, rolling hills sweep across the scene in bands of varied colours. To the left, a structure suggests the outline of a windmill. In the distance, layers of faded blue and purple evoke sea and sky, creating a sense of depth. (See below for an AI enhanced copy of the image.)

Limerick

A lone tree stood proud on the rise,

Where the hills blushed in patchwork disguise;

By a windmill’s red crown,

Colours drifted and wound,

As if landscape and daydream were allies.

The Shingle that Waited (with apologies to Gabriel García Márquez)

At first light on a morning without memory, a solitary tree stood on the Brighton Beach shingle where no tree had stood the day before. The tide had withdrawn in long blue breaths, and the stones around the tree seemed to have shifted to receive it, as if saving that space for longer than anyone had lived. Its leaves shone with a green so new the gulls wheeled in uneasy circles above it.

People approached quietly. They felt a warmth rising from the stones but did not lean close to confirm it. A boy of about ten pressed his ear to the trunk and later told his mother the tree was humming. He said it felt like a forgotten memory had entered him by mistake. When he stepped back, he stared at the horizon with the solemnity of someone recognising a distant call.

Days lengthened, and colours around the beach began to behave in unfamiliar ways. The sea deepened into shifting turquoises, the sky into purples without sunset, and the distant hills changed tone with the tide, warming as the water withdrew and cooling as it returned. Residents felt the changes but did not question them; they sensed the beach had entered a season beyond explanation.

Late in the month, a shape gathered itself on the horizon. Each dawn revealed more: a red-roofed windmill with long blue vanes turning steadily in air that held no wind. No one claimed to understand its arrival. The old ice-cream seller simply nodded, saying, ‘The sea keeps its stories. Sometimes it gives one back.’

One afternoon a young woman knelt beside the tree, drawn by a breath of warmth beneath her feet. When she parted the stones she saw, only for an instant, a faint radiance below the surface, colours laid out in careful layers like the remains of a celebration the earth still remembered. She withdrew her hands, and the glow vanished. Those who later dug in the same place found nothing but cold grey stones.

As the season shifted, the marvels retreated. The sky returned to its familiar greys, the sea to its disciplined blue, and the hills to their customary restraint. One morning, without any sign of their leaving, both tree and windmill were gone. The shingle showed only a slender arc of lighter stones tracing a path toward the water.

The boy who had heard the humming did not seem surprised. ‘They were waiting,’ he said. ‘And they heard what they needed.’

Sometimes at dusk, when the tide lies perfectly still, a tall, delicate shadow stretches across the stones, cast by nothing that stands there. Those who see it feel the shingle shift almost imperceptibly beneath their feet, as if making room again for what has not yet been forgotten.