Kitty Itty And The Seawall Broke

By S. A. Barton

A novella, about 9,000 words.

Jonny lives with his mom on the hardscrabble coast of North Carolina. The old coast is underwater -- Jonny's dad makes a living diving to salvage valuables from drowned towns, rarely home. It's a hard life. When Jonny rescues Kitty Itty he learns a bit about responsibility and caring, but the coming hurricane Xerxes may teach them both some harder lessons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. A. Barton
• Release date: Nov 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310596179

S. A. Barton

S.A. Barton knows third person bios look professional, but he doesn't care for them nonetheless.I prefer to be more personal, partly because overcompartmentalization is a former flaw I remain mindful of. As a (recently diagnosed) autistic/ADHD human, I have many reasons to remain mindful and many rewards for doing so. I dislike the label disability but understand it does sometimes apply to me and my work–but enough about that.I live in the Chicagoland exurbs near parentals and my sole sibling and her family, where the city is in reach but the deer are closer. Like many writers I often live in my own head; I prefer to be close to nature and select humans daily so I don't stay there.My children live in Virginia with their mom and her husband. Buy more of my books, please: help finance some in-person visits because thrice-weekly videocalls are good but not the same as IRL hugs.My writing is diverse and reflects all of the above as well as roughly four decades of personal seeking and many jobs beginning with my rural Wisconsin roadside worm stand, begun to finance an RPG habit in 1981 and shut down by the state when my success began luring customers from the local bait shop.You'll find my more polished and mostly self-published fiction here; so far my nonfiction lives with my visual art and select fiction on Patreon.com/sabarton and Twitter.com/sabartonwrites :)

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Kitty Itty And The Seawall Broke

Contents:

Jonny was a boy

Hurricane Xerxes

The Storm Fell Silent

Connect with S.A. Barton

By S.A. Barton

Copyright 2014 S.A. Barton

Smashwords Edition

Jonny was a boy. Hair blond and sun-bleached, eyes deep black, skin sun-beaten into the color of coconut shell, he was a creature of the beach. The beach itself was pale sand streaked with rich dark veins of sand from the old wrecked barrier islands folded into the new.

Jonny did not remember the old beach or the drowned towns of the barrier islands that had been ground away by the last century of growing storms and rising seas. But he had heard, at the feet of his widowed grandmother. And he knew that the things he hunted in the sand were pieces of an older life, pieces he could touch. He thought he could feel the past through them sometimes, vibrating, connecting him like a lamp to electricity (they had it in the kitchen, provided by a state that liked to boast that left no home in the dark), lighting him up with the way things had been, before the ocean chewed up the tourist draws, before the money went away, before his family was reduced to digging a living from the sea in salvage.

Before the town of New Kill Devil spent what little it had to build the seawall, to stop the ocean where it cut across the dunes to the south, to chew at the backside of the town.

Jonny looked up as the wind gusted a spray of stinging sand across the beach. The waves broke in churning brown and white at the steepness where the sea ate the land; farther out, a mile or more, a ragged white line marked where the waves broke the first time before coming ashore, over the tops of what his grandmother said was drowned road and town. His father was somewhere out beyond that white line, for weeks, months at a time, diving into the wrecks along the coast. The same job that had killed grandfather. One day it will probably kill dad too, Jonny thought.

One day it will kill me. He threw off the chilly thought with a shrug of his bony shoulders and attacked an odd lumpy lay of damp sand with the pointed stick he carried. A lay like