Note: This is for my wife, Brooke, who one day asked me: why don't you write a story for me about... oh... sand dollars? This, and every story, is for you, Brooke.
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The village of Lamanca sat between the jungle and the sea as long as anyone could remember. There were stories, told by great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers, that once it had been a day's walk north, to the Great Piedras River mouth. Of course, the Great Piedras River held a great many crocodiles, and everyone knew it would be foolish to build a city there. But where the city was or was not is not part of this story. This story begins in a humble home, as most good stories do, with a man and a woman.
The man's name was Alvaro Montagua de San Alvieda. We shall call him Alvaro. He was a strong man, though rather simple, and worked exceedingly hard. He rose his lean, muscled body every morning and spent his days fishing on the wide sea, dragging nets behind his small sailboat, barely making enough to support he and his wife. His hair and eyes were dark, and his laugh was loud and jovial. You would, if you met him on the street, like him promptly. He was that sort of man. To his great misfortune, though, his luck was exceptionally bad.
The one place where he had good fortune was his wife, Magdalena de Santa Rosa Flor. Her black, thick hair could hardly be maintained, and she had to cut it every other day so that it did not grow to her knees and get caught on all manner of household objects -- wrapped around the water pump or tied to some door handle when she tried to get up from knitting. It was rumored Magdalena's hair had its own mind, and one for causing all sorts of mischief. Alvaro would sometimes feel something creeping on his shoulder and turn only to find Magda's hair suspended in the air behind him, like some thief caught in the act. Her hair would spill pots, open windows, even knock over lanterns if she were not careful.
Despite her hair's unruliness, Magda was the most beautiful woman in the village. Her hair, when it behaved, was blacker than the back of the cave where the old hermit lived, and it radiated red when the sun shone on it at just the precise angle. Her eyes were olive-green, her nose and face slender, her lips a deep red that made it look like she painted them, but she did not. Her skin was the color of almonds, and her voice was as buttery and sweet as sugarcane.
Lamanca had once been a blooming village. The great artist Ibrahim Ormidas de Terce lived there, and he brought great wealth to the residents. His one medium was working with sand dollars that he paid the children to find on the seashore. In those days, sand dollars littered the seashore like trees littered the jungle, and children did not have to find them but collect them.
Ibrahim made clay out of sand dollars and sculpted. He sculpted for the church, then for nearby churches, then even for the capital which was leagues up the Great Piedras River. He sculpted jaguars and eagles and tapirs to sell to private homes. He painted sand dollars and sold them individually to hang on walls. The capital commissioned him, even, to make painted sand dollars the official currency of the land. Thus, he trained young men and women of the village to produce thousands of painted sand dollars, and they went out in satchels on horses over the mountains, or even on boat up the nearby Great Piedras River to far away towns, where people spent them on jaguar and tapir statues. Ibrahim Ormidas de Terce's work brought travelers from all over the land to the town of Lamanca, and those travelers brought gold and money and wealth. The town's women opened shops where they sold sand dollar soup and fish grilled over sand dollars and fermented sand dollar juice. The men made the finest sand dollar glass which would not break even when you dropped it from the bell tower of the church.
As great wealth poured into the village, houses made of sand dollar bricks grew larger and larger, and beautiful pianos from across the sea or fine guitars filled the street with continuous music. The church grew larger and richer, and gave out so many alms to the poor that even they walked around in fine clothes with beautiful necklaces and drank copious amounts of the fermented sand dollar juice, though they had no place to sleep. The only person whom the wealth did not affect was the hermit who lived in the cave well up the mountainside, and no one had seen him in so many years that they nearly forgot he existed.
The sand dollars vanished on a bright morning. The children began their way to the sea to collect sand dollars as they always did, but the manna was not there. They ran back to the village shouting that the sand dollars were gone, and in ten minutes' time the entire populace was mobilized onto the coast. The children were right. No one could see any sand dollars. Some dug in the sand, some cursed the ocean, The Priest gathered the women and they prayed. The sand dollars did not show up. Nor did they show up the next day after an emergency mass the following morning -- the same five o'clock hour that they always held mass, only this time attended by scores of villagers. That afternoon, Ibrahim Ormidas de Terce began packing his studio.
He left the following morning. One of his students tried to stop him and asked foolishly, "Why are you going?"
"The sand dollars are gone. I'm going to live like a king in the capital, to grow fat and old."
"Perhaps they will come back. Everything comes back."
"No, they won't. I've waited for this day. It was foretold by my father when he blessed me on his deathbed."
"Perhaps we can create with something else."
"No. I was the younger. My father gave me the gift of art. I learned to create wonderful things. I could not, however, create or affect life. That was another blessing." The old artist stared off at the sea. "But, I was to have influence only for a season. It is over now. It is time for me to grow old."
With that, the great artist left, and no one heard from him again.
