Of Sand, Storms, and the Unbelievable - A Tale of True Fantasy

Of Sand, Storms, & the Unbelievable

A Tale of True Fantasy

It was early morning in the town of Corolla, North Carolina.

The sun had not yet risen, yet there was already light — not the pure kind that lifts the heart, but a watery gray light leaking through the clouds that were fleeing the coast, reluctant to abandon the memory of the storm that had battered them the night before. They drifted slowly, like soldiers retreating from a battle already lost.

Benjamin Whitlock Junior stepped out of his house, wrapped in a thick brown jacket that had belonged to his father and smelled faintly of cedar and leather. He wore it whenever storms came, as if its worn fabric might still protect him from things greater than wind.

The streets were littered with debris. The drains were clogged as always, and the men of the neighborhood, rakes and shovels in hand, pretended they could somehow persuade the water to return where it belonged. Benjamin walked past them without slowing. He wanted to reach the shore and see what the storm had dragged in.

Scraps of junk had washed up along the sand, carried from all over the Outer Banks of North Carolina and even from the islands of the Bahamas. Broken lobster traps, snapped branches, even candy wrappers with faded foreign labels — proof of the long journeys of meaningless things.

He had walked these beaches after storms for decades, ever since he was a boy. It had become a ritual, a habit so ingrained that at his age of eighty-seven, he had nearly forgotten why he was there that morning — until he heard a woman crying.

On a dune ahead, a cluster of policemen had gathered. At their center was a woman on her knees, her sobs carrying across the sand. Benjamin asked a passing couple, and they told him: a thirteen-year-old boy had vanished during the thunderstorm. His mother had seen him too near the water, and then lightning struck, exploding into a shimmering glare of sparks that illuminated the entire shore. When her vision cleared from the blinding white flash, her son was gone.

Benjamin listened, nodded, and moved on. Tragedies of the sea were not unusual here. Tourists disappeared into the ocean’s fury every year. Still, something in the woman’s grief pressed into him. It reminded him of another time, long ago, when he had been the boy — not lost to the water, but found by it. He turned his gaze to the sand glistening in the morning light. The sight pulled him back to the reason these walks had once mattered. He remembered now.

Since childhood, Benjamin had walked to the shore after every storm, not because he loved the ocean, but because of what the old men in the cafés used to say. Diamonds could be found in the sand, they whispered, if one searched carefully in the days following a thunderstorm. They said it in low voices, with their eyes on their coffee cups, as if the sea itself were listening and would take offense if they spoke too loudly.

This part of the Outer Banks was like any other: cold, gray, and windy by the end of winter. Houses stood along the dunes, facing the horizon of the restless sea. Once, there had been forests with ancient trees, boulders as large as school buses, even caverns that drew summer visitors in search of fanciful exploration. But with the passing of time, the storms, and the steady creep of sea level rise, that landscape was long gone.

But the town’s main attraction had always been its beach — once known, almost mythically, as “Lucky Beach”, and famous still for the wild horses that roamed the dunes whose origin was still debated in official reports to perhaps being the last remnants of some forgotten cavalry.

The name was borrowed from old folklore, revived whenever storms and stories seemed to make it true again. Local accounts spoke of sacred unicorns, guardians of a hidden land beyond the shore called “More Over.” When storms of unusual ferocity struck, the protectors emerged. Their horns glowed, lightning fell like spears, and blue rods of fire rose from the sand like jagged stalagmites. Anyone who touched them, it was said, would explode into stardust, never to return.

The most repeated tale was of the Spanish Conquitadores who had gone looking for the mystical gate to More Over. The weather turned so suddenly that lightning did not fall from the sky but rose up from the sand, leaving behind stalagmites of blue fire as tall as trees. The men crossed themselves in fear, believing they were seeing demons disguised as pillars, spirits conjured from the depths to punish their trespass. Then, from the sea rushed out the unicorn guardians, galloping from the water, foam flashing into sparks beneath their hooves.

The explorers ran for the boulders in the forest, shaken by the unholy spectacle, driven only by the instinct to survive. But the slowest among them faltered. He turned, drew his sword, and braced for the charge. A unicorn thundered forward, lowering its radiant horn like a lance. When ivory met steel, lightning tore from the sky, and both man and beast exploded into a shower of diamonds that fell like rain across the sand.

That, the townsfolk said, was why Lucky Beach shone the way it did. At sunrise, when the sand caught the light just so, it glimmered as if precious stones were hidden beneath the shore.

The legend persisted long enough that slowly speculators began to arrive, hoping for riches. But the only man who grew rich was the one who sold shovels and sand sifters, for no diamonds could be found anywhere.

That was until one fateful morning in 1954 when Benjamin, at the young age of nine, gained a small measure of fame after discovering a diamond the morning after Hurricane Hazel. The diamond was small, natural, uncut, brilliant — and so out of place that it seemed impossible. The local newspaper printed his smiling photograph, holding the stone in his dirty hand. The event rekindled the wild tales, and in whispers at the cafés and shouts on the docks, the place was officially christened as “Lucky Beach.”

The town was overrun with foreigners and fortune-chasers. So much commotion followed that local officials summoned geologists to study the sands and terrains, because of course, governments cannot leave mysteries to the people. The scientists arrived with solemn faces, wearing khaki suits and hats that looked borrowed from the war. They took samples, wrote reports, and returned with their explanation: the shimmer of Lucky Beach was not diamonds, but an unusually high concentration of carbon minerals mixed with broken glass. The glass, they explained, came from a shipment of Coca-Cola bottles meant for troops in Europe, lost decades earlier when a freighter struck an iceberg and all its cargo was spread along the Atlantic Ocean.

It was written plainly, with measurements and diagrams, the data irrefutable and the language so official that it made any talk of diamonds sound ridiculous. The speculators packed up and left.

A few days later, a woman appeared, claiming Benjamin’s diamond was hers, lost from her wedding ring the summer before. His parents made him surrender the stone to the police. Benjamin turned it in reluctantly. Calm settled over the town and in an official gesture meant to erase the embarrassment, the settlement was quietly renamed “Corolla.”

The folklore survived only in keychains, snow globes, and coloring books sold to tourists who wanted magic without responsibility.

But Benjamin still returned to the beach after each storm to see if he might get lucky again, but to no avail. As the years passed and he grew older, he told himself that the diamond had been nothing but a regular stone, a coincidence, a story adults had explained away. Slowly, the fire of his imagination began to fade.

This memory brought back his long-buried disillusionment, and so he decided to end his walk and return home - the woman’s sorrowful crying trailing after him like an echo on the wind.

On the way back he found the neighbors still raking uselessly at the drains, so he resolved to get his old bobcat digger and bring it to help clear the rubble. He worked, pushing aside trash and sand. Neighbors watched with folded arms, approving, as water slowly spun down into the drain until it finally began to recede. They applauded his effort and walked away.

Benjamin climbed down from the machine, leaning against it, satisfied with the work.

That was when he saw it: a glimmer in the muck, barely visible between plastic wrappers and wet leaves. He bent down, pushed aside the grit, and lifted it into the light.

A diamond. Natural. Uncut. No larger than a pea, shining bright against the sun.

He froze, staring, as the childish smile overtook him once again.

After all his years of searching, he finally knew: he had not been crazy and that all the stories were true.