A beach of diamonds

Without her glasses, it seemed to her that she was running on a beach of diamonds.

And in many ways, it was exactly so.

With the unrelentless sun beating against the back of their necks and knees, they hedged their bets on a singular moment: a quantifiable stillness in the movement from here to there. If they stopped to pick the diamonds, or stopped to fly their kite when the dark-skinned man so temptingly said. "Stop here? Wind good. Fly kite.", that singular moment would have slipped away like a mirage in the delusional desert heat.

There are no checkpoints in this journey. There were only hideous looking gods made of the same black glittering sand, watching the two -- what shall we call them? -- migrants making for themselves a trail of footprints as an offering that will be claimed by the sea. The sea always wins. Once in a while they would pass by a coconut tree that gave up, its crown completely buried in the sand, even as the others stood resolutely by with their dry roots exposed.

It was a curse: if they stopped they would lose; if they reached their destination, they would lose, but like condemned gamblers, they put everything they had into that singular and fleeting moment, relegating the crippling pain to a back part of the brain that could not be accessed easily.

And she thought: "Isn't this a lovely beach of diamonds?"

But she lost her glasses to the sea a long time ago.