Barnacles

I wrote this for Rhetoric Declamations yesterday.  It was nice to think of a warm summer's night as cold crept through my doors and windows and plopped itself in my lap.

If you turn a flashlight on at the beach at night, you can watch the light bob along on the backs of all the crabs swarming around you. There are these places at the beach called jetties, where all these big rocks are piled up like someone tried to build a road out to sea. One night I climbed out on a jetty with my friends. Barnacles nipped at our toes like snapping turtles as we tip-toed along the boulders slimy with algae and fish guts. When we got to the end of the jetty, we nestled in with the barnacles and sea shells and watched the waves come in. At first they were pretty small, just splashes on our legs as they rolled to shore. But as the tide rose, the waves grew until we could see the water start to swell up hundreds of yards out, as if a monster was going to burst from the depths. Then the swell moved toward us, growing bigger and bigger until the top of it turned white and it looked like hundreds of miniature sheep were getting sucked into the sea. And then it was all over us, slamming our faces, our stomachs, shoving us into the barnacles. As it went back out, it tried to take me with it. My friend grabbed my arm as I was yanked off the jetty and threw both of us against the rocks, back with the sea shells and the barnacles.