Sandy

by Edd

She was born not quite dead. The doctor at first said, “No head?”. Yet how to explain the thread of clumping sand that led from her spinal cord to more sand, two pounds of it expelled with the eponymous girl.

Given up in horror, Sandy landed in a foster home run by Betsy and Jim, who cared for the children just a bit more than they cared for the money that came with them. Mostly they wanted ones who would lie abed and cause no ruckus.

Sandy was not one of the quiet ones.

At a year, when most children would say their prayers and ABCs, Sandy was spattering her room with blasts of sand that scoured paint and varnish, bodies and faces. The moan of the sirocco presaged her darker moods. Of sunny days she had few.

Everything would taste of grit.

Jim and Betsy dumped Sandy on the street ten years later. She wandered from street to street, sleeping under bushes and avoiding contact.

Slowly the rest of her body turned to sand.

She learned to infest buildings. Any window or door left open, any crack in a wall was an entrance. She spread herself across buildings and blocks. She got into everything.

Sandy ruined it all.

Bits of her in gears, in food, in valves. Things broke down, people grew unhappy, as unhappy as she was. The first death was almost anticlimactic. A clogged fuel line, an auto that balked at the wrong moment, and just like that Sandy was a killer.

She liked it.

There was no stopping her after that first fatality. She made buildings and vehicles explode. She choked people, she tripped them, she blasted them with herself. Simplest of all, she blocked their bloodstreams. People had so many access points.

Sandy was the ultimate predator.

Almost.

Humans struck back. One by one, they captured her grains, weakening her. When they thought they had all of her, they stuck her into a blast furnace and fused her into a beautiful glass cube. It sits today on the desk of the president.

But they only thought they had caught all of her. She’s out there still, a particle here, a granule there. Some day you may feel a bit of her, a kiss almost of sand against your skin.