She stood at the edge of the beach, her toes just barely brushing against the sea that lay before her. She had come this far, and yet… and yet. Something made her look back, turn around, not to remember, exactly, for the journey was still fresh in her mind, so “remember” was a word that was irrelevant here. She supposed she wanted to make doubly and triply sure that this was the right path to come by, and the only way she could do that, was to once again see the way she came.

It was odd, looking at her own footprints that were already fading in the sand. There was no wind, so it wasn’t as if the marks she had made were being filled in with new grains, they were just… disappearing; going away, as if they had never existed. The footprints were pushing up from the bottom, and she watched as they did so, entranced. She blinked languorously, and the path behind her was gone. Her footprints, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs, had been eaten by the beach.

So the only thing left to do was to turn back around, and face the sea. She felt the wet foam sliding between her toes, now. She squidged her big toe against the rest of them and smiled at the peculiar feeling of the wet sand. She looked down and saw the dark brown material erupting onto the top of her foot. She gave a half-smile, and lifted her head to the sky.

Her white dress began to almost imperceptibly riffle in the no-wind, and her brown hair began to move around her face, drawing her toward the vast body of water. She was hesitant, though, and the no-wind seemed to sense it. It began to pull harder, and harder still, until her dress was taut against her back, urging her – go in, swim on, it will be worth it, it is all you are waiting for.

She brought one hand back to hold her hair behind her head to give her a clearer vision, and looked down into the clear water. It looked tempting. It looked more than tempting, actually. The clear crystal vision was moving in waves under her like a dream, and she could see them moving just under the surface. Just there – the words. This is what she had come for.

No more hesitating, no more pausing, she decided. She dropped her brown bag to the ground, and its strap settled on top of the worn pouch. Her arms came together in front of her to form a graceful arch in front of her head, her fingers interlinking. She dove in.

The first feeling that came to her was one of elation. The words were all here, and they swam with her. She rode a current of happiness: elation; joy; ecstasy; gladness; giddiness; amusement. The feelings were all there with the words, and she laughed at the sudden barrage of goodness.

Frog swimming among the words, she breathed in and felt surprise as one of the words entered her – it rushed into her lungs and her blood stream absorbed the word, and as it came into her brain she felt a sudden understanding of what the word was: peace. She suddenly felt a great understanding for everything around her, and stopped swimming for a moment, letting herself sink to the sandy bottom of the La Mer de Mots, smiling beatifically. Peace… then, just as suddenly, the word exited her body as she exhaled, and the moment of clarity was lost to her.

The corners of her lips turned downward almost imperceptibly, but there was more to see, to feel; so her arms propelled her forward, onward… and onward still. The ocean was becoming deeper now, and she could see layers of words, creating three-dimensional matrices of verbs and adjectives and pronouns and adverbs and nouns and even definitions. A few startled fish swam through the letters, but most remained around the bottom of the sea, buried in the seaweed that just barely grew over a foot tall.

The ocean was a deeper blue out here, and it almost lost its opaque beauty that had allowed her to see what was coming ahead. She swam slowly, her legs pumping at a steady pace, stirring the words together into compound words that would not have normally formed. She turned her head over her shoulder curiously to see what she created: bookstop; pencil-water. Perfumestench. An oxymoron made its lazy way through her toes, and she giggled at the jumbo shrimp.

But then her hand met something. In its rotation it had collided with a moldy wall, and she brought her body level with the wall, staring at the ugly thing. It seemed to be a cave, and if she looked in it carefully, she could see people… swimming carelessly, following a dim light that seemed to be at the end of endless labyrinthine corridors. She called to them – “That’s not the way!” But her words turned against her the moment they left her mouth. They clung to the wall, the letters shivering as they attached themselves to the textured surface. She was overcome with a feeling of sadness – it was as if they were dying. Sure enough, the words she had called out began to shrink. “Not” in particular seemed to be resisting the process, it pulled against the force that was welding it to the wall, stretching and writhing, but it, too, became a part of the wall. Or perhaps… it just disappeared, as it if had never existed at all.

Frightened, but drawn by a curious sensation in the pit of her stomach, she stuck her head inside the cave, and was immediately met by a blast of loud noise. It was indecipherable, and almost indescribable. The words – there was no way to tell them apart, it was as if a million people had begun to mumble, and then someone else had turned up the volume all the way up. She reached out and tried to feel for something – anything to make sense of it all. Any reason as to why these people were wandering farther and farther away from the ocean, with all of its wonderful feelings and words. But there was just that sort of hyper mumbling, and they seemed so attached to it.

She was sure she had to leave. She felt sorry for them – an aching, numbing feeling had arrived in her head and she couldn’t ignore it, but she had to go, and she had to go soon. Now. Reluctantly, she turned away and swam out of the cave, a pensive backstroke that allowed her to see the cave as she swam out of it.

More slowly than before, she headed for the shore of the sea. Never before had she seen the cave, but then, never before had she swum out that far. As her head broke through the water, and her feet met dry sand, she thought with a new sense of sadness of the wonder that the words had brought her.

She sat, tucking her knees to her chest, on the sand, and gazed out on the ocean as the sun glittered over it, hiding the beauties, and horrors, beneath it. She pulled a piece of paper and a pencil out of her brown bag that she had dropped – was it already hours ago? – on the beach.