Paybacks....

The moon, fat and yellow as a summer squash, rose languidly in a late August sky, plush with stars which blinked on and off, cautionary twinkles guiding celestial navigators of the sea, casting its pale light on the beach below, causing vague shadows to form behind the castle which had been fashioned at tides edge by the many small hands and potentially great minds of the summer children who came every August with heat prostrated parents desiring to escape the sweltering simmer which encased the city, radiating ribbons rising off steamwalks with foot burning intensity causing electric bills and tempered wills to rise along with the temperature; and who, with the focus belonging only to the summer children, had fashioned battlements and flags, moats and bridges in this castle made of sand and which was even now being pulled back into the sea with each encroaching wave, waved on by ancient forces of gravity and exuberance, and the castle walls fell back into the sea: the silent screams of the inhabitants ignored in the general scheme of things as the scuttling hermit crab greeting the waters rushing food within his clawed grasp went about his sideways travel wondering at the small creature caught up in his pincer. The man in the moon smiled.