When the first hand washed ashore, I didn't think much of it. Or, rather, I tried not to think of it at all.

It'd been evening. The sky was gold and red, the sun was tired and waning, and I walked and hummed along the beachfront. Calico Beach was a mess, you know, in the days before the mayor started her war on littering. Instead of white sand and sea breeze, we had trash-riddled heaps. We had bottle caps and ciggy lighters, broken glass and candy wrappers and chip wrappers and plastic wrappers and bags and nets. We had perpetual stink. Yes, the beach was vile everywhere--save for my little cove.

I don't recall how I found it. Only that I had. It was always clean--clean and hidden away by great rocky outcrops.

It was also where I found the hand.

Or, rather, my toe did. It struck the hand, and the hand was cold and gummy. The hand. A woman's hand, I thought, for it was delicate and thin-fingered. It was also bruised and detached. Perhaps soft. I don't know. I didn't stick around to find out.

I ran. Quick as that. No need to linger around severed limbs, I thought, and somebody else, surely, would find it.

Somebody evidently did. For the next evening, when I returned--because I returned every evening and I wasn't about to stop now--the hand was gone. I breathed a sigh of relief then. I prayed for the presumed-dead presumed-woman too, and then I continued to walk the soft white sands of Calico Beach.

                                                                      * * *

It didn't stop.

I should have told someone. God, yes, of course, I should have told someone. But our town was small, and this particular stretch of beach, this cove, was a haven to me. I knew others knew of its existence--somebody had removed the hand, right--but they were few, and left me alone in these quiet moments when my thoughts could be, were supposed to be mine, all mine. Yet now my thoughts ran rampant and uncontrolled, and it was wrong, all wrong, because there was another hand the following week, the same time. A man's hand this time, I thought, big and calloused.

Once again, I ran. Once again, I returned the following day to find it gone.

And, once again, there was more the next week.

And the week after that.

And the week after that.

Not just hands. There were feet too, toes curled up like a dead spider, serrated off just above the ankle, all blood long since spilled. There were forearms and shins, biceps and kneecaps, and I realized soon enough that they were building towards a body.

I tried showing up on different days. I tried different times. Nothing worked. The limbs appeared a week apart every time without fail. If I didn't show on expected appearance-days of the body parts, they would be there the following night.

I ignored them. That's what I resolved to do. They disappeared in good time anyways, so long as I showed up, and I had to show up. This was my cove. I could not leave it. I would not leave it. My refuge that I had found, an escape from those back in town... I needed it. There was no other option.

                                                                    * * *

Leaving this as a start to a short story I'll bounce back to. Sorry to leave another one short - I dunno how high I should go on the word count. );-;)