Saturday evening brought me to the beach, no matter the season, weather, tide, or wind speed. It was a routine Jacob and I had followed religiously, but now I sat on the coarse sand alone and watched the swollen red sun sink into the horizon. The sea frothed and crashed upon itself, and I remember watching Jacob crash and froth with it while he tested the oceanic might with his surf board.
Which is why when I told them that the ocean had swallowed him one evening in December, they shook their heads sadly and tried to console me without asking questions.
We came in the evening because that was when the sea was its wildest, when the moon peaked through the dusk and bullied its slave. Whoever was still there watched as Jacob battled the strong waves as the daylight faded—they knew him as the Night-Rider. I would laugh tentatively because Jacob used to joke that the waves weren’t the only things he rode at night.

That evening on a gusty March weekend I sat on the beach with my knees pressed against my chest, staring at the sand dunes and waiting for Jacob. I could almost see the beer bottles he had stacked into a pyramid and knocked over with his quavering fingers, his raised voice as he stumbled towards the water with his surf board caught between his arms.
The wind played with my hair and the sea spat on my face with its salty vengeance. The water was cold, and the grey salt stung my eyes, but I didn’t dare close them. I waited for Jacob to come back to me.

The first time I came to the beach alone was on Christmas day—Christmas evening. It was bitter cold, windy with vendetta, clouds shielding the beautiful sunset, but I had huddled on the wet, frigid sand and waited for him to come back for me.

I remember when we were younger and our mothers let us run about on the warm beach as they sprawled themselves out before the afternoon sun and became red. Jacob and I used to build castles in the sand by the ocean, playing sleeping beauty or some childish game of the like. Once, I had tumbled over my feet and landed atop the sand castle, ruining it. Jacob grew angry and struck me, leaving an angry blue bruise on my cheek. When my mother asked me about it hours later, I blamed it on the fall. Jacob apologized bashfully later, but I had already forgiven him. He knew I had, he knew I always would.

The first time I saw the sandman was on that portentous Christmas evening which brought me to the beach alone for the first time. The wind carried the grains of sand from the dunes and swirled them about and into my hair and eyes. The fog made it dark and the mist churned with the sand, red in color from the dying sun. So when the sand came together in such a manner it was almost incredulous to behold and by the end of its fleeting appearance I had convinced myself that the sight was nothing of importance.
He was there for a split second, Jacob—a sandy, still sculpture. But in a moment, he was gone, and I could almost push my surprise to the dark sky and fatigued mind. Still my ears could not drown out the ocean’s crashing words, Katherine, Katherine, Kathy-Katie-Kata-Kate, Kaaaaaaaatherine. Nor could I block out the whistling torments of the wind, Why? Whyyyyy? Whyy meeee?
And when I arrived back to my cottage by the side of the beach, drenched, shocked, frozen with fear and shock and cold, I glanced out the window and there it was. By the beach, the sand concentrated and there was Jacob again. His face was pointed straight towards me, and my heart jumped in panic as I leapt away from the window.
I snapped the drapes closed and locked every door and window, sunk to the sand-dusted tile by the futon and shook and scratched at the ground until the storm passed, and the gentle moon reached its fingers through the crack in the blinds and bid me to sleep.

I remember when we were young and invincible, teenagers together. Best friends, on-and-off lovers, the beach brought us close and made us daring. Jacob grew his hair long, allowed the salty ocean to tangle it into straggly, dry dread-locks. His eyes were the palest blue-green, like the sea. The sea was his blood, he used to say. It made him restless, it made him moody—don’t blame him, blame the sea in his blood, he’d say.
I myself was somewhat of the opposite. Tranquil, stoic, I was an eddy—I pooled out from the sea. Calm, steady, I had large brown eyes and chocolate hair. Jacob told me I was beautiful, and that was all it took for me to fall for him, fall further and further into an abyss of submission. We used to sit by the beach on the weekends and talk; he would drape his arm around my shoulder and interlock his fingers through mine. I remember looking to Jacob for approval, looking to him for leadership.
The first time I remember becoming angry with him was when he came back from school very late, and knocked on my window with an elated expression. I let it open, careful to make sure my mother was fast asleep, and in Jacob sprung. His locks stuck to his face and he breathed quickly. He smelled cloying, of sweat and alcohol and smoke and drugs. I had asked him why he came and he held up a small bag full of what looked like dead grass. Wide-eyed I gawked at him. What is this, I had asked, What the hell is that? The maniacal smile of the night I would never forget; Jacob was not as I knew him. You gotta try some of this, Katie, this stuff the bomb. Shocked, I had refused. How dare he suggest that I follow the path of a druggie, of a junkie, of a goner? How dare he knock on my window at midnight, wasted and laden with drugs? Jacob had grown angry. He pressed me against my bed, banging my head against the bolster. Suppressing a yelp of pain, I could not throw him away from me. Jacob had ripped the little bag apart and placed the drug in his closed fisted right hand. With his left, he had wrenched open my mouth and put the grass on my unwilling tongue.
The next day I kept my teeth on a raw lip, kept my eyes and legs away from my best friend. He cornered me that afternoon, he was all apologies. Aw, Katie, I was drunk honey, I sure am sorry, it won’t happen again, promise! And I, being meek as I was and had always been, found it at the shallow shoals of my heart to forgive him. He had been drunk, he was sorry, and it would not happen again, he had promised. And I believed him. We kissed, and with the magic of his smoke-tainted lips I forgot my anger and clung to him like a dog to its unpredictable master, the way I would never fail to be until the end of his life.

The next time I saw him was weeks after that frightful Christmas evening—my Saturday night vigil upon the unforgiving beach. The sky was clear and dusk came late, the wind was soft and the freezing water only came so far as to tickle my toes and then regress. With a down blanket draped around my shoulders and hot chocolate heating up my nose and finger-tips, I gazed at the sinking golden beacon of the heavens and then bored my eyes into the shattered rainbows that the dying sun cast upon the sea spray.
At the same time, a whirl of soft and then fast winds arose, circling about the beach and toying with the sand dunes. And there and then, the sandman materialized once again. Like a concentrated dust storm, the grains of sand converged and concaved to form a silhouette—tall, slim, well built. Sandy dreadlocks hung from an ashen, ovular head, and empty voids stared at me blankly, in question.
My heart beat quick and sour adrenaline coursed through my veins and bid me to run, run away from this strange reincarnation of my once-lover. But fascination and fear kept me planted to the sand, shivering with my blanket tightly wrapped about me for protection. I heard the sea crash and churn, Kaaatherine-Katie-Kattie-Kate-Kaathhherinee. I heard the sudden wind scream Whyy? Whyyyy? Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?
And finally when my heart pounded quick enough to explode, and fright concentrated my insides so that I might spontaneously combust, I buried my head into the blanket of protection and prayed to the god I didn’t believe in to save me from this sandy apparition.
I dared peak out from my refuge in the blanket, and the winds had stopped, the sea had calmed. My frightening sandman disintegrated, and not a trace of the ordeal remained in the placid ocean picture. The somber moon rose, and so did I. Wavering, I made my way back to the beach cottage and lay awake in bed for hours.

I think the reason why our mothers raised us both so closely together was because they had so much in common. Not in terms of looks—my mother was petite and pale, with long dark brown waves of hair, and Jacob’s was tall and slender, blonde with a toned body and well-tanned skin. But both of them shared the lack of a husband, the lack of a fulfilling income, the lack of a privileged life. Both had thought they were in love when young, only to have their hearts broken after mistakes had already been made. Both shared the same undying love for the hot, rough beach and the petulant ocean. They watched the static-filled television that we shared between our two neighboring households. My mother followed Jacob’s in much the same way that I followed him. She looked to Jacob’s mother for advice, consolation, to spend a rainy day with.
But Jacob’s mother never hurt mine. She was always kind, always patient.
Raised by single mothers, Jacob and I spent our childhood devoid of phonics or toy robots or singing dolls. We grew strong on the briny ocean air, in the company of each other. Of the two of us, I was the intellectual; he was the undoubted protector and leader. I came up with the plans, he took credit for them. He hated being defeated, hated being humiliated. His anger was quick to boil up, spill over. I calmed him when he grew too hot, cheered him through his gains and losses.
Our mothers used to tease us when we were younger that one day, we would fall in love and get married, perhaps even have children. And they had raised us together as to ensure he would never leave me.
Our mothers were right to some extent—but our love was not constant. Passionate, but not substantial. Animalistic, painful, and in the end I had had enough.
But what did we know, we were young, and all we knew was passion. All we knew of were idealistic approaches to love—to overlook the other’s wrongs, flaws, to love him regardless. Jacob was handsome, charming—he led and took care of me. He was the only man I had ever felt attracted to my whole life, although I knew he had gone through several other girls on our off periods in our teenage years. And so when I was just twenty and he was just twenty-one, he proposed to me. We were married in the small local church, with two witnesses—my mother and his. They cried with joy because we were bound by marriage—we could not leave each other now.
Our families never had the money saved for college, so Jacob worked as a cashier in the local supermarket, and I sold lemonade and hot dogs on the boardwalk by the populated part of the beach. Together we scraped through life in the tiny, two roomed cottage we called home—a kitchen and a bedroom. It had once been a large storage shed for kayaks and motorboats, but Jacob and some of his friends took the time to refurbish it into something which would do for a home.
We did not have a television, or cellular phones, or a car to share between us. The confines of life restricted us to the beach. I walked to my work selling refreshments; Jacob took a bus and walked the rest of the way. I had two pairs of shorts, and sweatpants which I slept in. We lived off of the hotdogs and lemonade from my stand, they were cheap and sometimes I did not have to pay for them. I scraped pennies into dollars and laid them in the bank for desperate times, I made sure the bills were paid and the water was still running. Jacob spent most of his time at home talking sweetly to me, lying around on our moldy yellow couch, eating a hot dog or stroking my head.
Jacob used whatever he did not give away in taxes for alcohol. Our dusty refrigerator filled with beer just as soon as it was emptied of it, and it contained more beer than substantial food. I mostly stayed away when Jacob was drunk. Drunken Jacob was not the one I knew, not the one I cared for.
One day I realized I had forgotten the key to my cash register at home, so I decided to take the first half of the day off and then return home for lunch to retrieve the key. I found Jacob on the porch, rocking back and forth on a collapsible chair with a maniacal smile upon his face. He was not wearing pants. When he caught my eye and saw me approaching, he stood up abruptly, knocking his chair backwards and onto the front door. He staggered down the stairs and I averted my eyes in mortification.
“Hay thar Kattie,” he slurred. I could smell the alcohol even several feet away.
“Jacob.” I rushed up to him and led him back up the stairs. “Jacob, why are you home so early?”
He smiled with half of his face. We were back in the house, and I sat him down upon the couch. “Jacob, why are you home early?”
“Ah gawt fah’red.” He slurred mischievously.
My heart fluttered nervously. “Fired? You can’t be serious.” Half of our income, gone. “Why, what happened?”
“Little lady, wahh da you care? Drunk on-a job, missie, that’s what they fah’red me fo’.” When he was drunk, Jacob took on an odd southern accent which he never had sober. His eyes grew darker, and he was dangerous.
He grabbed my wrist.
“Please let go of me, Jacob.” I said meekly. But who was I to tell him what to do, who was I to put him in his place?
His grasp tightened and his frightful smile widened. “C’mon Kate, let’s ha’ some fun.”
Two hours later, Jacob was fast asleep on our moldy sofa, and I was sobbing on the floor of our locked bedroom. My wrist was red and bore angry marks where Jacob’s fingers had pressed into me, and I felt it had sprained and swollen. There were bruises on my back and arms from when Jacob pressed me against the wall when I told him repeatedly to turn me loose, a game of power he played. My arm bled from the cut he gave me with his pen knife, saying: I ain’t gon’ turn you loose, you just see whose boss here!
I cried because I wished that Jacob loved me more than he loved alcohol. I cried because I missed my mother and I missed building sand castles on the beach when we were both young, pure, untainted by booze and drugs. I cried because for not the first time, I questioned whether the sober Jacob was good enough to make up for his drunken Mr. Hyde.

I never saw my sandy Jacob again after our second fleeting meeting, but he haunted my dreams, he appeared in my peripheral for the briefest of moments. I saw him in my dreams, like a ghost he whispered to me. He always asked the same thing—the single word question with infinite answers. Jacob wanted to know why, he wanted to avenge himself, but I did not regret what I had done. Because since the day that Jacob died, all I had ever felt was relief.
Today I sat on the beach and waited for him to come together one last time out of the sand. I dug my toes into beach and waited for the sky to turn the color of blood, and waited for the sea to start chanting and the wind to begin whispering.
The wind wove together a sandman, by the opposite end of the shore. His blank eyes gaped at me, and his ashen dreads whipped at his face. His body was mercurial, forming and reforming, and it gave off an aura of sand. Jacob, my haunting, came walking towards me. This time, I was not scared, but ready, and I waited for him.
The waves of the ocean grew taller, and they came swirling up to my calves, dousing the bottom of my sweat-pants in breathtaking cold. The breeze coiled around my head and released my hair from its restricting rubber-band. The dark curls slashed and clung about my face, as Jacob kept his steady swagger towards me.

When Jacob had fallen to one knee with a pearl ring in his hand and popped the question, I never knew that the day would come when I would become a premeditated murderer.

That week before Christmas, Jacob and I packed for our routine expenditure to the beach for the evening. I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and some chocolate chip cookies out of the Betty Crocker mix we had indulged in. I packed some lemonade as well, for myself. I had never touched alcohol, never even tasted so much as a sip of beer. I knew what it did to Jacob, and I could never let myself become that way.
I put our food in a wicker basket that had once belonged to my mother. Jacob brought an icebox.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
He slung his surf-board over his back with one hand, dangling the icebox off of a few fingers with another. “Oh this? This my booze, honey!”
I frowned. “I thought we agreed no booze on beach day?” Reaching my hand into my sweat-pant pockets, I felt around. The pills were still there.
“C’mon honey, just one Saturday?” he pleaded.
My fingers closed around the pills with decision. “Fine. But just this one time.” There would not be another time.

The sandy apparition came closer. The wind whistled the never-ending question, and the ocean screamed my name, loudly, loudly. Jacob was just five feet away, now two, now his ephemeral feet almost touched the edge of my drenched thigh. I shivered, trying to subdue the fear which welled just under my stream of consciousness. I snapped my gaze away from him and concentrated on the dancing ocean.
From my peripheral, I saw the sandman fall. At first I thought he had collapsed into the sand and was gone. But I turned my face and there he was, staring at me in full flesh and color. There he was with his fair brown dreadlocks and pale, sea-colored eyes. And with all of the eerie impossibility my imagination had ever conceived, he flashed me a crooked smile.

While he had used to spend the evening surfing, Jacob now laughed with one arm draped around my shoulder and the other bringing a can of beer up to his thin, colorless lips. Three cans had already piled on his other side where his untouched surfboard rested.
“Well aren’t you gonna surf today?” I asked him, resting my head on his shoulder.
His hand trembled as he took another swig of beer. “I dunno, babe, I’m thinking today is a day to relax.”
“Oh.” I raised the crust of my finished sandwich in its plastic wrappings and held it out to him. “Can you throw this away for me, honey?” I asked.
Reluctantly, he complied, and staggered to his feet. As he made his way towards the trash can, I swiftly took hold of his beer. The pills had stayed clasped in my hand since my fingers had closed, and now I dropped them into the beer can and sloshed it around so they would dissolve. Then I gingerly placed the can back where I had picked it up.
Five minutes later, the sun had almost died, and Jacob drowsily downed a fourth beer.
“Jacob, darling, these waves look too tempting to let you waste them like this.” I said sweetly. “Will you please ride them for me?”
“Naw, I’m too tired…” he said. But his eyes looked at the ocean yearningly—the ocean in his blood stirred and pushed him when he saw the height of the waves, their tempting majesty.
“Please? Will you surf them? For me?” I urged.
Seeing my imploring look, he acquiesced grudgingly, wobbling towards the ocean with his surfboard under his arm.
While he surfed, I watched as the angry ocean swept him farther offshore, and I watched as he grew more and more unsteady upon his board, swaying back and forth. The pills, paired with the alcohol, were taking their powerful effect.
I watched in triumph and agony as Jacob lost his balance and fell into the rolling marine depths and did not resurface.
And I came to my feet and stalked away back to the cottage, the heavy pressure against my heart all at once dissolved. My hair struck my neck and face as I walked away from my murdered husband.
And now, here he was again, back to life from his nautical death. His skin had a grainy consistency, like the sand he had just materialized from. I breathed heavily and flipped my gaze back towards the crashing ocean.
When he spoke, the winds suddenly ceased and the sea became tranquil. “Didn’t think you’d ever see me again, did you?”
I squeezed my eyes closed. He could not be here, I had killed him. I had seen him drown, had cried at the funeral after his body was swept to shore and the locals had knocked on my door with his washed corpse in their arms. When I opened my eyes, he could no longer be there. When I opened my eyes, he would be no more than a pile of sand beside me.
“I am still right here, ya know.”
“Go away,” I said softly, with my eyes closed, “I thought you were dead.” My voice quivered with fright and awe.
“I am dead. That doesn’t mean I can’t come back to clear up some misunderstandings,” he replied.
“We don’t have any misunderstandings, Jacob.” A tear emerged from the corner of my eye, but I brushed it away with hurt pride and edged away from my once-lover.
“Why did you kill me, Kattie?” he asked, “I thought you needed me.”
I exhaled slowly, in fragments. “I don’t need you anymore, Jacob, you were bad to me. I did what I had to do.”
“All I gave you was love, Kate, why’d you go an kill me?”
I turned towards him with glacial speed. Anger surged through my placid temperament, and I remembered the time when we were teenagers and he forced the drugs into my mouth. I remembered when he struck me when I knocked over our sand castle. I remembered when he hurt me in his drunkenness, when he brandished a knife and cut my arm.
“How dare you say you that love was all you gave me?” I lifted my sleeve and showed him the scar from the cut his knife gave me. “Is that love?” The tears fell freely from my eyes. “All I ever gave you was love. You got drunk. You hurt me.” My voice wavered. He watched me with his impaling blue-green eyes. “You hurt me and I forgave you all my life. But you picked the booze over me, and I had to kill you.”
Jacob’s smile faded. “Well then. You may think you’ve won this battle of ours.” He arose. To my combined horror and relief, his face began to lose its complexion. His eyes turned to dust and fell to the beach floor. “You’ve lost, Katherine, I’m still in control of you.
Slowly, his head turned into sand, and the rest of his body followed, until at last he was no more than a heap of sand by my feet.
Shakily, I rose to my feet and staggered away from the water and towards the house. By this time, the sun had completely sunk below the horizon and the moon cast its delicate white light and reflected it upon the sea.
I felt the water tap at my heels.
The wind picked up. Yyyyou’ve forgooot…I am the seaaa Katieeeee…
And the next thing I knew, the briny water came crashing over my head and dissolved the sand beneath my feet. It swept me off the ground and carried me out to sea. I fought and struggled to keep my head above the water and find the ground somewhere below me, but alas Jacob had come for his revenge.
Of course, I had forgotten Jacob’s abhorrence of defeat, his never-quenching thirst for my submission and loyalty. Alas, I had tried to become rid of him, I had tried to win.
But I could never win with Jacob. The salty, chilling pacific water filled my lungs, and I took my last breaths under water. I drowned in the blood of the man I had at the same time loved and hated, drowned in the blood of the tempestuous sea itself.