After the shipwreck had finally been pulled onto the beach, back in March, a salvage crew kept cutting up the crab boat’s hull and cockpit. The workers had shooed her off like a small girl, even though they must have seen the trash bags she carried full of the styrofoam, fiberglass, and plastic every new tide spat at the beach. If she wanted to play, they had scolded her, she could do so farther north, past where the creek emptied into the ocean. She’d kept silent through their tirades, maybe afraid of worse consequences; the beach was officially closed. The stink of leaked diesel clung to everything she touched. Yet she couldn’t stay home and kept coming back, filling bag after bag with rope, floats, and styrofoam. It was the styrofoam that got to her, the strange ochre styrofoam that multiplied like freckles. She collected the empty plastic water bottles the workers left in their wake.

Now it was three months past the captain’s mistake that had cost him his livelihood, and still new styrofoam dotted the rocks. Tourists had fit large pieces of fiberglass, wood panels, and cabinet doors into the driftwood monuments they habitually erected. Anna hated these shelters, shacks, and chapels. It wasn’t paganism that offended her; the tourists left these piles of wood behind just like their trash. There was violence in the trash they left. Anna felt threatened by the hubris and arrogance built into these piles, ill will worse than the wreckage. Evil was always banal, of course it was. It spilled from every car, and from every cart and every bag tourists dragged from the cliffside parking lot down to the sandy beach. The driftwood chapels were always full of trash.

Her bag was already heavy from Mother’s Day leftovers — plastic clamshells, two towels, socks, aluminum foil, a kite, broken plastic shovels — when she ventured closer to the water’s edge, near the high tide line. It wasn’t raining, but the morning mist had already soaked the first layer of her clothing, a thin jacket she had found here a year or two ago; it fit quite well. The sand lay trampled, too many feet had trudged along this stretch, but the wrack zone was still smooth, barely touched.

A few steps away from the strandline, three pairs of Crocs huddled together like seagulls seeking worms or warmth. All of them were barely worn and pink, two pairs of a pale shade, the third one bright with hearts printed all over. They were nearly the same size. Three sisters? Two sisters and their friend? Where were they? Kids left behind a Croc or two all the time, but three pairs? One of them must have remembered.

In a shed at the back of the small yard behind her cottage, Anna kept the finds that interested her. Torn soda cans, mud pie shapes, crab trap floats. One buoy, a bright yellow one, had made it across the Pacific all the way from Japan. Once she’d talked to an artist who made sculptures from beach trash, down south in San Francisco. And she’d asked him how what he found every week had changed in the twenty-five years he’d been cleaning the same beach. He’d thought for a moment, then said, “In 2002, they launched Crocs.” And she’d laughed for several minutes and kept laughing on her drive home, because of course it was those shoes that already filled several storage boxes in her shed.

These three pairs were different, though. They made her stomach hurt and hold her breath. Where were the girls? They still had to be here. Anna dropped her bag and looked around. But it was only 7:30 in the morning; the only other people on the beach were surfers, and they didn’t wear pink Crocs.

What had happened to the three girls? Had they decided to return to the cliffside parking lot in their bare feet? Their parents too antsy or tired to retrieve the shoes? Or had the girls been unable to locate their shoes after a night swim? No, the shoes seemed too small to belong to girls taking a night swim; the girls couldn’t have been much older than eleven or twelve. Had they discovered that Crocs were an abomination and decided, with disgust tearing at their faces, to abandon the ugly plastic bowls disfiguring their feet?

Anna bagged the pink shoes, then sat down on the sand and stared out at the water and the gray clouds above. One surfer after another left the water and walked past her to the stairs leading to the parking lot where their Subarus and overland vans stood in long rows. They were replaced by other surfers, most of them older men with beards where once their jawlines had been.

She didn’t have to be anywhere, no one was waiting at her cottage; she hadn’t made any appointments and expected no one. She waited for the water to give back the three bodies, return them to the shore. Of course, she knew no such thing would happen, of course she knew the girls were alive, maybe now sitting behind their desks in school and whispering amongst themselves about the trip to the coast. They hadn’t forgotten about their shoes, but they didn’t miss them either. Their parents would buy new ones, such things didn’t cost the world. Anna knew, and yet she also knew something else about the three girls. Gripping one another’s hands, they had entered the waves together and left their families, who were eating sandwiches and building castles with the tiny ones. They had no motive, no clear reason for leaving their brothers who were chasing after a football, their older sisters tugging at their clothes and posing for their phones. Dusk had turned them invisible, the sinking sun erasing them from their parents’ eyes. They had fought until the waves were no longer breaking above their heads, and they swum toward the horizon until their limbs grew too numb and tired to keep up the routine. Anna kept waiting for the girls, she felt calm now, almost peaceful, her skin prickly with excitement. She knew she didn’t have to wait much longer, not much longer at all, and here they were, here they were now, their limbs tangled, hair green as seaweed. Anna wrung water from that hair, they had diesel on their lips. The old towels she used to rub the stiff limbs and fingers, and later she pulled the shoes from her bag and stuck them on the girls’ blue feet.

– Stefan Kiesbye