You see oceans of sparkling sand. Endless deep blue water. Sea-shells and angry crabs pinching and sidestepping between sandy toes that get too close. A melting pot of vacationers with tan lines and beach towels and maybe, you’ll see the fin of a dolphin and you’ll turn to your mother and point and say, “Look!”

Perhaps she will look up and smile with, “Good eye.” Then pull out her phone and snap a quick picture for all her friends to see who are back at home. Her skin is turning lobster red under the hot August sun and it shines from the Hawaiian Tropic tanning oil she covered herself in from head to toe. The wind will blow hot and strong that close to the water and you can smell the heavy scent of coconut marinating her skin. “You’re lucky to have a natural tan,” is what Mother would say.

On the beach I see The Devil. He’s got a round belly and motor grime under his nails. He’s red in the face not because of the sun but because he’s mad, fuming, and that’s what makes him hotter than the sun, so hot-he becomes angrier and you watch as he crumples an empty blue can of budlight and pops the tab on another. Sweat trickles from his almost see-through blonde hair that he’d recently cut close to his scalp because He said. “I’m getting older, too old for hair in the summer.”

Just as we all would begin to enjoy our time on the beach, perfecting sand castles and searching for unchipped sand dollars, The Devil will tighten a grip around Mom’s arm, and squeeze her little green mushroom tattoo. “It’s time to go!” He’d say.

I’d feel the bees beginning to swarm in my belly and maybe Nana could see that for herself because on this particular day she stood up from her towel and reached for my hand. “Hey, why don’t you come over here, my pikin, and I’ll tell you the story about the sand.” Nana said.

I looked at Nana and then I looked at Mom, The Devil’s glassy blue eyes and the way Mom tugged her arm from his grip revealing little finger tip bruises on either side of her little green mushrooms. But, this time she snipped back, “Everyone’s having a good time! Why can’t you for once?”

Nana grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the shore. I glanced over my shoulder and Mom was back on her stomach, unphased by her new bruises, she lay like a starfish across her beach towel. The Devil watched her sunbathing, and that’s when he began his mumbling, loud enough for her to hear. The mumbling he’d do to get her riled up, too.

“When you come to the beach what do you see?” Nana asked me this as she picked up a handful of wet sand.

I shrugged and kicked at a clump of seaweed. I wasn’t in the mood for the beach anymore. “He is picking at Mom.” I said. And I frowned over at The Devil. “Which means we will be leaving soon.”

“Nevermind Him. Tell me.”

I scanned the area. “Sand, water, people…” I replied.

“Ah-ha, and what color is the sand?” Nana asked.

I considered her question. The color of sand depends on the minerals, I learned that in science. More often than not it’s a shade of brown so that’s what I said. “Light brown, beige, I’d say.”

“Yes, now you should know what sand really is.”

I always loved Nana’s stories, my favorite one was about the listening fish. A fish that swims your worries upstream and dumps them in the sea to be sorted out by the water Gods.

So I turned my back on Mom and The Devil and put all my attention on Nana’s words and on the story about, what sand really is.

“Tell me, what color are dinosaur bones?” When she asked this the wrinkles around her eye crinkled with her smile. She really had my attention, then. She grabbed my hand and placed the wet sand into it. “What you got in your hand is salt and bone.”

“Dinosaur bones?” I asked.

“Ehen! Dinosaur bones, yes. When I was a little girl I’d help my oldest mother make pap and akara in the mornings to sell on the carts and while we prepared food, she’d tell me stories the same as I tell to you, my dia, and one day when I was rubbing the beans for the akara between my hands to loosen the skin, a strange man in dirty clothes and barefeet, broke into our hut and demanded money from her pouch.

The man was angry, he was a very angry man and I’d never seen him before so I was scared, yes.”

“A stranger?” I asked.

“Ehen, his feet were covered in mud and small cuts, perhaps from rock and stone that made our road. My oldest mother continued what she was doing, she sat by the basin, rubbing beans between her palms till the water turned white and thin skins floated away. So I, too, stayed calm and she talked to the man no different than she’d have talked to anyone else. She said, “No, sir, I need that money to survive. What else can I do for you?”

The man said nothing but the look on his face was that of shock, as if he hadn’t expected her to react in that way and I’m sure mine too, was that of shock.

The man gripped a field knife in his left hand and his eyes were wide and fueled by anger and I wanted to cry or run away. Because what he said next was, “Give me what I ask for, or else.”

But, instead of giving the man her pouch of money, she got up from the table and wiped her hands on her apron and greeted the man and without much thought she told him to have a seat at the table! I couldn’t believe it. She fixed the man a plate of hot food and he’d eaten it like he hadn’t eaten in days, still holding onto that field knife, and when he was done she even sent him on his way with a jug of well water and food for the road.

When he left I asked her, “ Did you know that man? Why did you help that man?” She smiled at me, that old woman, and she said, “He came in wanting to do a bad thing, maybe so, but he didn’t. He just needed reminding of where he came from and I prayed he’d come from good.”

When she could see that I was not understanding, she did what she always had and took me to the borehole, which was behind our hut and down a crooked path and it overlooked Ibeno Beach and its long stretch of sand. She scraped up a handful of the tiny rocks and minerals from the path and told me this story and now I’ll tell you, too.

She told me the world was once ruled by creatures so large, the earth trembled and quaked just to bear their weight. She called them the First Children of the Sky Mother.”

I buried my feet in the sand and asked her, “Dinosaurs?”

“ Yes, dear, you know them as dinosaurs. The Sky Mother, as my oldest mother told me, made them from her own ribs—polished, strong and shining. She set them upon the earth to live forever, to guard the land and the sea, to keep the balance between flame and water, hunger and rest.

But forever is a long time, my pikin. Even the gentle grow restless, and the mighty grow proud. The creatures forgot who had shaped them. They began to roar against the mountains and swallow the rivers. They trampled the small things without seeing. They ate the weak and chewed up nature’s beauty.

And so the Sky Mother looked down from her wide blue house and felt her heart split open. She could not bear to destroy her children, so she wept instead. Her tears fell as burning stones—meteors, you call them now. Each one kissed her creatures goodbye in fire.

The fire burned so hot it broke their bones to shining dust. The wind gathered it, and the sea carried it to her lap—the edges of the world. There, she laid her children down, cooled their bones in her waters, and spread their ashes across the shores.

That is why, Grandmother said, the beaches are pale as bone and warm under the sun. They are not sand at all, but the sleeping dust of the Sky Mother’s first children.

And when the tide sighs against the shore, it is her voice you hear—still crying for them.”

I rolled and thumbed the grains between my fingers and thought about what Nana said. Salt and bone. “Why was it that she had to destroy them?” I asked her this and squinted up at her creating a visor with my free hand to shade my eyes from the sun.

Nana smoothed down the wild curls that sprung and frizzed in the dry heat at the front of my head and said, “Well, my pikin, they forgot their purpose. Instead of keeping balance on earth, their pride flipped things upside down, see, they could have lived forever but they chose the wrong path. Still, Sky Mother didn’t want to cause them harm. She loved them anyway.” The old Nigerian lady’s eyes smiled as she said this. “Now we are here and we have these beautiful beaches to remind us of our purpose and what may happen if we forget.”

The thought of sand being the bones of dinosaurs made me happy in a way that I couldn’t explain then. This became my new favorite story of Nana’s. For a moment I forgot all about the Devil on the beach. I only thought about The Sky Mother and her children. But I was also curious about the stranger. “What happened to the man that broke into your grandmother’s house? Did he ever come back?” I asked.

“You know, he never did come back, but a few weeks later there was a basket of kola nuts and a little note that read, Thank you for your kindness when I had none. And we figured it had been from him.”

Nana’s hand disappeared into the folds of her yellow and blue wrapper and returned with a small paper bag. Inside, wrapped in wax paper were golden balls of puff-puff, still warm, smelling of sugar and spice. “Just a small one,” she said, pressing it into my palm like a secret blessing.

“Thank you, Nana.” I popped the sweet dough-ball into my mouth and skipped back to our spot on the beach where Mother was packing up our towels and arguing with The Devil.

“Help me pack up. It’s time to go.” Mother said. “Because when everyone is happy, he gets mad.” She grunted. She shoved a handful of sand and beach towels into a tote bag, too. The Devil laughed about what she had to say and drank his last beer as he watched us pack up our belongings.

I felt the bees swarm, once again. I stepped toward The Devil and bit down. Then I felt salt and bone between my toes and I thought of the dinosaurs. I also thought of the man with the field knife and I thought of Nana, too. That’s when I chose not to let the fire in. My eyes burned and they just about begged me to let go, but I didn’t. Instead I turned to Mother and said.

“The beach isn’t going anywhere.” And looking out across the sparkling water there was the fin of a dolphin, rounding in and out the water.

“Look!” I said.

Mom looked and she smiled at the dolphins weaving the shoreline. “Good eye.”