For the last three years, I’ve published a short Halloween story for my newsletter readers. In 2020, it was “The Stair Sweeper,” in 2021, “The Ghost of Quarantine Present,” and last year, “Local Boos: Terror in Marghoulritaville.” This year’s story is called “A Sand Castle for the Space Man.“

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The seagulls, squawking and bedraggled, dropped the space man into the shallow surf much too soon.

“What are we supposed to do with him until it’s tiiiiime?” Jackie whined as she and Pilar dragged the space man’s unconscious body up to the dunes. Feigning exhaustion, Jackie let herself fall backward on the sandy incline, landing next to the space man’s milky, bruised frame in the sun-dried seaweed. 

They might have made a cute couple cloud-spotting, thought Pilar, if the space man were twenty years younger and Jackie ten years older. And if his eyes were open.

“It isn’t an exact science,” Pilar sighed. “Mama Linda always said so. Anyway, he won’t wake up for a while.”

“But we haven’t even finished the base.”

Pilar reached elbow-deep into the girls’ neatly excavated hole at the edge of the surf and scooped up a handful of shimmering brown muck, flinging it at Jackie. “I’ll finish your base!”

Jackie sat up quick in a huff, heaving two handfuls of dry sand over her head, sending more of the grit flying every direction into the heavy, hot October wind — and back into her own face — than anywhere near Pilar’s immediate orbit.

“Move over,” Jackie said, crawling to join Pilar at the muck-hole and shaking out her long, sun-bleached waves with a sputter. 

Jackie bumped her friend with her hip. “I’m better at this part, anyway. Since now we’re like, in a hurry now.”

——— 

The night that Pilar learned the true architecture of sand castles — real sand castles, what Mama Linda always called “grande” sand castles — she had been crying silently and re-reading her text messages while her grandmother made Hamburger Helper.

“Mama Linda, he said he loved me,” Pilar said, waving her phone. “He said we would be together forever.”

Mama Linda backed away a little from the wobbly electric range to rest one hand on Pilar’s shoulder, using the other to keep stirring their meal with a long-handled wooden spoon. “Mija, these boys will always say things like that.”

“But Travis promised. We made the promise to each other.”

Mama Linda stopped stirring, closed her eyes, and clasped a fist to the bib of her pink checkered apron. “You made with this boy the promise?”

Pilar put her phone face-down on the formica tabletop and stared into her lap, nodding.

“Oh, baby child,” the old woman said, clicking off the burner. “Come over here, then.”

At the stovetop, Mama Linda squared Pilar’s small frame in front of her own, and together they gripped the spoon. Mama Linda tipped the pan, separating the cumin-scented meat and noodles from the watery dregs of diced tomatoes and broth.

“You remember how I taught you to build sand castles, yes?” Mama Linda asked. “Dig down at the wave line, then draw up the seawater and sand to hold it all together, strong. One-to-one, mix the water and sand into bricks —”

“And tamp it down, hard,” Pilar finished, scooping the watery dregs into the meat to build a lumpy tower. “Mama Linda, I could teach this as good as you by now.”

“That is why you will build this boy a sand castle. A real one. Grande.”

“Why, Mama Linda? He cheated on me. He was unfaithful! He doesn’t deserve—”

“Because we do not only build sand castles for those we love. Sand castles can also serve other purposes.”

When they’d finished dinner, Mama Linda had Pilar bring out the promise vial she and Travis had filled together. They carried it, along with Mama Linda’s favorite red HEB-brand folding chair and her trusty, rusted shovel, down to the surf, dodging little luminescent crabs skittering here and there under the big Texas moon. They began this sand castle just like every other — real, grande castles, and just-for-fun castles alike — digging down to create a self-replenishing repository of building material. Pilar tipped the contents of the vial into their little cave of swishing muck, began forming the sand into bricks between her palms, and listened carefully to the rest of Mama Linda’s instructions.

———

Travis found that he couldn’t shake the feeling of being alone in every room. It didn’t matter if he was out on the garage couch with his uncles playing Call of Duty, or in the Port Isabel High cafeteria at lunch. Even his DMs, usually teeming with activity, began to feel somehow … cavernous. So many nights, he lay awake in his bed, swiping right and swiping right and swiping right. He swiped so many swipes to the right, to no avail. 

There were many fish in the sea, but he was no longer a catch.

———

Pilar had built her first sand castle — her first real sand castle, grande — for Mitts, the heart-faced tabby kitten who’d wandered up, starving, to Mama Linda’s place on the boulevard. The island’s feral cats tended to stick close to the marinas and bars on the lagoon side, growing fat and slick on fried shrimp scammed from tourists and treats stolen (sort of) from the fishermen who ever-so-accidentally left fish guts on the pier.

But somehow wee Mitts made his way toward the beach, mewling and chirping on Esperanza until Pilar scooped him up after t-ball practice and brought him to Mama Linda’s wind-worn balcony overlooking the gulf. Many years later, when it became clear that Mitts’ time on this side of the sea was growing short, Mama Linda showed her granddaughter how to make the promise for the first time. 

She had Pilar snip off a tuft of hair from Mitts’ scruff — though Mama Linda did the hard part, the cutting part, herself — and Pilar promised Mitts he would never lack for mice to chase or a cozy corner in which to curl up. When the end finally came, Pilar and Mama Linda took the little promise vial down to the beach at sunrise. Mitts’ favorite time of day. They began building.

Pilar dug a hole at the wet line and poured the contents of the vial into the exposed pool of water filling up beneath the sand. Dipping her hands into the little pond, she combined water and sand and fur and blood in a little plastic spoon, shaping wee mice. With a prayer, Pilar placed the sand-mice inside the cozy, Mitts-sized cubby that Mama Linda had shaped from the soggy earth.

Mama Linda had prayed, too: “Persigue ratoncitos todos tus días, Mitts. Nosotros te amamos.”

———

Mama Linda had been determined to take her last soggy, hacking breaths with an ocean view. Pilar’s mother had tried to coax Mama Linda into the hospice at Port Isabel, but she refused — it was already full of the ghosts she’d grown up with before the oil men and the space men got ahold of the coast and filled it, land and air, full of the crackling, lung-wrecking death-grit of progress. She would die in her own home, with her eyes on the water, as the last tourists of the season drove disco-lit golf carts down the boulevard blaring “Margaritaville” and “Mambo No. 5.”

Pilar had been the only one there when Mama Linda slipped from the seaside into the other side, minutes after midnight. 

Pilar had been using the dim glow of her smartphone to work on her pre-cal. The dark used to be darker, she thought, cradling Mama Linda’s neck on the deck chair so that she could look out into the vast no-longer-emptiness of the Gulf of Mexico. Oil rigs blinked unmoving on the eastern horizon. To the south, a sulfuric glow rose up from the farthest tip of Boca Chica, where the space man had built his future and destroyed everyone else’s. The space man’s future did not include Mama Linda. It would not include Pilar, either — or at least not the future Pilar had dreamed of since she was a little girl, giving sand castle lessons and renting snorkel gear from Mama Linda’s neon storefront on Gulf Boulevard. The snow birds were already selling their condos at a loss; the RV parks along Highway 100 were half-empty even during peak season. Soon enough, no one at all would drive down from Dallas or even San Antonio to see the no-dolphins and the no-fish and the no-turtles and the no-birds of the Laguna Madre.

“Mija,” gasped Mama Linda, as her spirit began mingling with the salty breeze. “I want you to make me a promise.”

“Anything, Mama Linda.”

“Promise me you will build a sand castle for the space man.”

———

Jackie pulled Pilar into the girls’ bathroom outside the choir hall with a couple minutes to spare in the passing period.

“Launch day, launch day, gettin’ down on launch day!” Jackie teased, passing Pilar a vape pen. “Cotton candy, your fave.”

Pilar handed the vape back without taking a hit. She wasn’t in the mood. She couldn’t imagine being in the mood.

“Are you not going to go? Everybody’s going.”

“Why would I want to watch that shit?”

 “To witness the agent of your future demise? The looming destruction of everything we know and hold dear?”

Pilar shook her head, tears burning like hissing coals behind her eyes, and turned to open the bathroom door. She didn’t need to imagine some future destruction; she already knew what it was to lose everything. But Jackie grabbed the rainbow lanyard dangling on Pilar’s bag, pulling her back toward the line of crusty sinks. 

“Not even to watch an old, white, racist dipshit fail again? For funsies?”

“Like you said, they’ll probably call it off at the last minute. I have a test, anyway.”

“Then we’ll come back at the last minute. You’ll make it to pre-cal. Promise.”

Unbidden, the last promise Pilar had made to Mama Linda shoved itself to the front of her mind, ahead of her pre-cal test and her pain.

She couldn’t put it off forever. 

———

“HORKKKCHCHCH!”

The space man’s dry cough startled Jackie and Pilar out of their shared, silent reverie. While Pilar worked at shaping rocket boosters from the bottom of their now-towering six-foot cylinder of sand, Jackie used a plastic Slurpee straw to carve out details — she imagined lights stretching up the the central spine of the sand-rocket.

“HORKKKCHCHCH!”

The girls launched themselves toward the dune, pinning the space man’s arms into the crackling seaweed. He wasn’t yet fully conscious, but he was making his best attempts to wrestle out of their grasp.

“HORKKKCHCHCH!”

“Do his rockets have running lights on the outside?” Jackie asked, breathing heavily as she worked to pin the space man into the sand. “I didn’t really look super close when we watched last time?” 

“He’s about to be running if we don’t figure out a way to keep him down while we finish this thing,” Pilar said, looking around at their tools — a bucket of straws, multicolored plastic tubs, and Mama Linda’s shovel. “We have to break his legs.”

“We?” Jackie’s eyes grew wide.

“Yes, we, and before he’s awake enough to scream for help,” said Pilar. “Can you keep him still?”

Jackie nodded, straddling the space man’s torso while Pilar hefted the shovel over her shoulder.

“Countdown to launch,” Pilar said, grinning over the space man’s lower half. “Ten … nine … eight … ah, screw it.”

She brought the shovel’s flat head down as hard as she could on the space man’s knees, which only sent them deeper into the tender sand of the dunes. He began to struggle with a force Jackie could barely manage, even with her compact cheerleader’s strength.

“You’re going to have to use the pointy end,” said Jackie over her shoulder as she pushed her right knee into the space man’s solar plexus.

Pilar adjusted the shovel and drove it — the pointy end — into the space man’s crackling, shattering kneecaps as Jackie threw her hands over his mouth to muffle his screams.

———

 All the girls at school had their own Travis, and Jackie was no exception. So Pilar had showed her friend how to make promises and how to build sand castles. Real ones. Grande. 

The Tarpons had a great team, but for some reason, they didn’t make it to the 4A varsity football championships that year.

———

Pilar had finally consented to let Jackie drive her out to the point with the other kids to watch the launch. She figured it would be a recon trip for her promise to Mama Linda. They all sat in the bed of Jackie’s truck, passing around a bottle of lukewarm Malibu.

“Launch still on,” Travis reported, checking social media and casually dropping his phone between the baggy legs of his basketball shorts, the screen just tipped up enough for him to give Tinder another brief, disappointed look.

Minutes later, Pilar snickered while her friends despaired. They would all be back for pre-cal. As she’d predicted: another starship had been scrapped at the last second. Something about a “crucial valve” this time around.

As Jackie pulled back into the school parking lot, Pilar leaned, half-drunk and stewing, on her best friend’s shoulder. It was always something with these stupid launches. Some reason for the space man to make and break a promise about the sky and space and the future, an empty promise that had nevertheless already killed Mama Linda and which would kill them all someday, too. Even if the space man himself never made it to the stars.

She whispered into her best friend’s ear. 

“Do you want to build another sand castle?”

———

The setting sun lowered an opalescent curtain over the dunes, and Jackie and Pilar buried the space man up to his neck to keep him from trying to crawl away even after they’d turned his knees to mush. 

It added an annoying amount of time to their build, but Pilar thought the space man’s lolling head looked darkly jolly as he passed in and out of consciousness there in the waning light.

———

“I don’t know why she wanted you to have this,” Pilar’s mother said, pulling a Rubbermaid of plastic beach toys out of Mama Linda’s garage and into the driveway alongside a 40-year-old exercise bike and a half-dozen boxes of yellowed bank statements. “It’s just more beach trash. But it’s in the will for you, special.”

When Pilar dragged the tub into her room later, she peeled off the lid to find a set of handwritten instructions taped to the inside. In Mama Linda’s disjointed script, the pages began:

For my sand castle — grande. Begin with bird calls. The gulls are stronger than they look. Bread helps.

———

“Space man, make me a promise!” Pilar cried, slamming the bottle of Malibu into the sand and sending ghost crabs into a frantic skedaddle.

“Anything,” the space man said, his South African drawl sounding drunker even than the Texan twang of his teen captors. “Please, I have children.”

 Jackie echoed Pilar’s cackle and pulled the bottle to her lips. “Can you name them, even?  Your kids? What do you have, a dozen?”

“What will you leave them, space man, when you leave them?” Pilar asked, draping herself across the sand covering space man’s squirrelly, broken body. “When you shoot yourself to Mars, where will your children go? With you? Will they even want to?”

“Nobody likes you, space man,” Jackie said, teasing the bottle out of Pilar’s hands for another swig. She laid down on the other side of their little buried-man-pile, intertwining her limbs with Pilar’s.

“Make me a promise, space man,” said Pilar again, this time quietly, seriously.

“Anything,” he said, again.

Pilar slid a little knife out of her bikini top and held it to the buried man’s cheek.

“Make me a promise, space man, that you will explore nothingness for eternity,” she said, drawing the blade across his skin. “Promise me that you will search endlessly for absolution, probing the vacuum of the unknown and finding less love even than you have here on earth.”

“Anything,” he gasped. “Yes, that. Sure, of course. Have your people call my people, I have money—”

“Silence, space man!” Jackie ripped out a handful of hair and skin from the space man’s scalp and sprung to her feet, giggling wildly.

Together, the girls dropped little bits of the space man into their muck-hole. Pilar reached into the depths and rose up with a fistful of water and sand and hair and skin, shaping the brick of sand between her fingers into a tiny figure.

Jackie had done exquisite work carving a cockpit door into the side of the rocket. In the hands of children on the beach — children who Pilar worried she might never teach to build sand castles, grande or otherwise — Jackie’s little door might have perfectly fit astronaut-Barbie, or cosmonaut-Ken. 

But tonight, it was into this sandy recess that Pilar gently placed the space man’s promise, and her promise, to Mama Linda. 

The space man was finally, definitely, a go for launch.