The last time any of us saw her she was buried in the sand.
Her body was literally covered under a thick pasty layer of mud.
She just laid there, her eyes closed under the hot sun.
Her younger siblings, bored of the usual sand castles, had began tactfully clumping patches of wet sand onto her legs first, and then to her stomach and arms and hands. By the time they reached her neck she still hadn’t flinched.
Mother hurried over and told the boys to stop the construction.
It was only then that she opened her eyes; opened her dry mouth to say:
“Let them play.”
Her brothers stopped then, suddenly uninterested.

She lay like that, just like that, until suppertime that night.