CREATIVE NONFICTION
STEVEN HARVEY
FOLLY BEACH
“Earth, isn’t this what you want: to resurrect
in us invisibly? Isn’t it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!”
--Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegy IX”
I rose before everyone, and walked toward the surf, a wave whipping up spray at the beach and spreading across sand in a headlong sweep, feathering out at the edges and churning at the rim, but when I pulled a notebook from my pocket, scribbling ‘spindrift’ in the margin, the wave disappeared leaving nothing but a sheen on the shore as a parting kiss.
All morning Owen made dinosaurs in the sand with red and yellow plastic molds while I played the ukulele, and when I opened the notebook to describe sand coating his calf, the leg, tawny but soft to the touch, disappeared right there where the sand in my words fell away, taking the ukulele with it.
Sitting in her stroller, Anna disappeared too, squinting under a blue umbrella in the shade of my imagery where she remains hidden still, resurrected invisibly as Rilke put it, along with Nessa and her magnificent sand turtle, and Maddie who, holding a shovel, dissolved into the stripes of her bathing suit the moment I found them charming,
and when the water lapped against wooden risers, Sam and Brooke closed up the umbrella and dragged the canvas chairs back to the deck before the tide swept them away along with the plastic molds, the ukulele case, and the stroller, though the happy couple were long gone already, their shadows lengthening as shadows often do in the dusky dark of my books.
At dinner, the family gathered around a meal of shrimp salad that Matt and Angie fixed, and ate Angie’s blueberry sponge cake topped with whipped cream, strawberries, and blackberries and a sprig or two of mint all served in slabs that disappeared completely without my help, but live on invisibly in cleverness.
It doesn’t get much better than this, I said, looking out at the curl of one wave folded into the arms of another and then it did when Alice showed up, not arriving until the last day much to our surprise, wearing a mango dress and sunglasses and, surprise being enough, disappeared on the spot.
And Barbara, of course, the mother of this vanishing world, wavered like witchwater in my gaze as the sun turned her cheeks golden, and waves, practiced in the art of invisibility, kept coming and going in the evanescent beach beyond our folly, where I join her when I close my book and set down my pen at last.
“Earth, isn’t this what you want: to resurrect
in us invisibly? Isn’t it your dream
to be invisible one day? Earth! Invisible!”
--Rainer Maria Rilke, “Duino Elegy IX”
I rose before everyone, and walked toward the surf, a wave whipping up spray at the beach and spreading across sand in a headlong sweep, feathering out at the edges and churning at the rim, but when I pulled a notebook from my pocket, scribbling ‘spindrift’ in the margin, the wave disappeared leaving nothing but a sheen on the shore as a parting kiss.
All morning Owen made dinosaurs in the sand with red and yellow plastic molds while I played the ukulele, and when I opened the notebook to describe sand coating his calf, the leg, tawny but soft to the touch, disappeared right there where the sand in my words fell away, taking the ukulele with it.
Sitting in her stroller, Anna disappeared too, squinting under a blue umbrella in the shade of my imagery where she remains hidden still, resurrected invisibly as Rilke put it, along with Nessa and her magnificent sand turtle, and Maddie who, holding a shovel, dissolved into the stripes of her bathing suit the moment I found them charming,
and when the water lapped against wooden risers, Sam and Brooke closed up the umbrella and dragged the canvas chairs back to the deck before the tide swept them away along with the plastic molds, the ukulele case, and the stroller, though the happy couple were long gone already, their shadows lengthening as shadows often do in the dusky dark of my books.
At dinner, the family gathered around a meal of shrimp salad that Matt and Angie fixed, and ate Angie’s blueberry sponge cake topped with whipped cream, strawberries, and blackberries and a sprig or two of mint all served in slabs that disappeared completely without my help, but live on invisibly in cleverness.
It doesn’t get much better than this, I said, looking out at the curl of one wave folded into the arms of another and then it did when Alice showed up, not arriving until the last day much to our surprise, wearing a mango dress and sunglasses and, surprise being enough, disappeared on the spot.
And Barbara, of course, the mother of this vanishing world, wavered like witchwater in my gaze as the sun turned her cheeks golden, and waves, practiced in the art of invisibility, kept coming and going in the evanescent beach beyond our folly, where I join her when I close my book and set down my pen at last.

Steven Harvey's newest book is Folly Beach, a personal essay about easing fears of mortality and loss through creativity. He is also the author of The Book of Knowledge and Wonder, a memoir about coming to terms with the suicide of his mother published by Ovenbird Books as part of the “Judith Kitchen Select” series. He has written three collections of personal essays and two of his essays have been selected for The Best American Essays Series: “The Book of Knowledge” in 2013 and “The Other Steve Harvey” in 2018. He is a contributing editor for River Teeth magazine and the creator of The Humble Essayist, a website designed to promote personal prose.