1.
Sponges! The beach for three blocks covered with chunks and blobs of them, conical net-woven baskets and odd polymorphous hand shapes, like the giant foam fingers sold at sporting events, like that for an arena full of twisted aquatic gnomes. A little coral tossed up, some seaweed, but mostly the remains of what must have been a huge sponge bed, a sponge Atlantis. Why?
2.
Sponges all over the front porch, Elizabeth and Jackson busily spraying them with Lysol, soaking them in laundry buckets of bleached water like demoniacal bird’s-nest soup. I tell them this will never work, we lack the subtle knowledge of the sponge makers, but who listens to me.
3.
Like strange mushrooms now, beneath the hibiscus bushes, the cast-off sponges, abandoned to the dirt.