Owen stands alone on the beach, squinting against the white glare of the sky. He cups a hand over his brow, scanning the dunes, the tide-flattened expanse of sand, the rusted carcass of his BMX. It sits where he left it, half-swallowed by the earth, its back wheel jutting at an angle, its chain thick with salt and neglect.
It looks like something abandoned. Some broken thing from an old world, half-dug from the tide by careless hands.
A fossil, maybe. Or the wreckage of a metal spider, crashed from some forgotten planet.
Owen thinks about what he’ll tell the class when school starts again. He could spin a story from this—say he spent the summer excavating the skeleton of a prehistoric insect, unearthing it from the sand bit by bit, braving wind and rain and the slow hunger of the tide.
It could be good. If he delivers it right, they might think he’s interesting.
But even as the thought forms, it greys at the edges. He knows how it will really go. Kevin Barker won’t buy it. He’ll sneer at Owen’s scrawny frame, shove him against the classroom sink, and say something like You’re full of shit, beach rat. Miss Meagor won’t hear, or she won’t care, and the rest of the class will snicker behind their hands. It’ll be crappy.
Owen knows about crappy.
He wriggles his toes into the sand, pressing deep where it’s damp and cool, where it grips at his foot and tries to pull him under.
Grandpa’s always talking about things you can find at the beach. Things the sea gives up, things long buried. But Owen knows it’s just something for Grandpa to say—words to fill the spaces where Grandma used to be. Since she’s been gone, Grandpa is all shades of grey. Not just his hair, but his skin, his voice, even his movements—slow, flat, as if something inside him has turned to stone.
And Owen understands the distraction, the need to fill empty spaces with something.
His mother thought it might help, sending him here for the summer. Maybe she was right. Maybe Grandpa needed the company. Or maybe she just needed space to miss Grandma without him watching.
Even if it’s just sifting through sand for things the sea has spit out.
#
Owen grabs the beach sifter him and Grandpa made—a battered shopping basket fixed to an old broom handle. It sags if he scoops too much, but he likes the way it sifts sand in soft, whispering cascades. He drags it along the shore, collecting pale scallop shells, splintered turret shells, the occasional smoothed shard of sea glass.
He used to love this. Finding things.
Now, he just collects enough to make it look like he still cares.
In the darker sand, he crouches and uses the chisel Grandpa lent him. Tiny ammonites. Belemnites like sharp little teeth. He remembers seeing a real dinosaur tooth once, on a school trip, sealed in glass, surrounded by the hush of a museum. That had been a good trip. A rare one.
These are fine, though, for his own personal stash. Not for school.
He kneels in the damp grit, sorting through the latest scatter from his sifter, when a sharp, searing pain bites up through the arch of his foot.
Owen yelps and jerks sideways, dropping the chisel as he staggers onto one leg. The world sways. Pain pulses, hot and bright, as blood drips, drips, drips into the sand.
He hisses through his teeth, bending to inspect the cut—three puncture wounds, neatly spaced, like little fang marks.
Something glints nearby, pale and jagged and half-buried in the sand.
He’s stepped on something.
Owen hobbles forward, on his throbbing foot, and kneels. His blood stains the sand, seeping into the hollow where the thing waits. He reaches for it, fingers hesitant.
Not glass. Not a rusty nail.
What he pulls free feels and looks like bone.
Pale, smooth, curved—except for the edge, which is lined with small, sharp serrations.
His stomach tightens. A jawbone.
The teeth are incredibly sharp and intact.
Owen wipes his blood from the ridges, watches the way it pools in the cracks, staining the serrated edge.
He swallows.
Something crawls beneath his skin.
A slow, spreading heat, starting in his foot, threading into his ankle. A faint ache, just beneath the surface.
He turns the fragment in his hands, feeling the weight of it. It’s just bone. It should be just bone. But something in him tightens, as if his body already knows what his mind hasn’t figured out yet.
#
Grandpa doesn’t ask what Owen found. He just shakes his head at the bandage job, muttering about sand and infection as he sits Owen down at the kitchen table and re-wraps his foot properly. His mother would have fussed over him, told him to be more careful in that tired, watery voice she always had now.
“You ought to wear sandals.”
Owen makes a face. “They’re lame.”
Grandpa hesitates, like he might say something else. Maybe about Owen’s mother. Maybe about Grandma. But he just exhales through his nose again and goes back to his pipe. “Suit yourself.”
The house smells like damp wool and pipe smoke, like something soaked into the walls a long time ago and never left. The clock ticks, slow and steady, filling the space between them.
Owen stretches his leg out, watching the way his skin looks under the kitchen light. Pale, except for the faintest shadow of bruising at his ankle. His foot still throbs, but it’s different now—not just pain, but heat, low and constant.
The heat lingers, stretching through his muscles. Not just pain. Not just healing. Something different.
He props Grandpa’s encyclopaedia across his knees, flipping pages with tired, sluggish fingers. Fossils. Bone structures. Extinct things.
The jawbone sits beside him on the table, grinning its neat serrated row of teeth. Grandpa picks it up, turning it over in his hands.
“Strange,” he murmurs. He taps one of the teeth with his nail. “Still so sharp.”
Owen watches him closely.
Grandma would have known what it was. She would’ve had a story for it. Some long, winding tale about how it ended up here, washed up by the tide, waiting for the right hands to find it.
But she isn’t here anymore. And Grandpa—he just looks at it, shakes his head, and sets it back down.
Somewhere deep in Owen’s gut, something folds in on itself.
He takes the bone and presses his thumb along the edge, not quite hard enough to cut.
He presses his thumb along the edge of the bone, not quite hard enough to cut. Maybe if he did, he’d feel something real. Something sharp enough to matter.
#
Owen barely makes it through three pages before the words start slipping. His eyes ache. His head feels thick, like it’s stuffed with cotton.
The slow, steady heat in his leg is creeping higher now, spreading through the meat of his thigh, winding up into his ribs.
He shifts in the chair, restless. His skin feels wrong. Tight.
Grandpa sits by the window, pipe in hand, staring out at the sea like he’s longing to see the silver-grey bob of Grandma’s head appear over the dunes.
Owen watches him for a moment, then looks back at the page. But the words won’t stay still. They skitter, rearrange themselves. Fossil records. Evolutionary shifts. Creatures reshaped by time.
He rubs at his stomach. His fingers press into tender, unfamiliar ridges.
His breath catches.
For a second, he doesn’t move. Just stares down at himself, at the faint lines of something new, something forming beneath his skin.
His pulse stutters.
He grips the book tighter, pressing the hard spine against his leg as if grounding himself in the weight of it. As if pressing hard enough might keep him together.
“I’m gonna lie down,” he says, voice strange in his throat.
Grandpa doesn’t seem to catch it, only glances away from the window briefly to nod.
When Owen stands up, his legs feel different. Not weak, more like… solid, really steady and sure in a way they’re not normally. Like he could walk for miles without stopping.
He crosses the room, heart hammering, the bone still in his hand.
Upstairs, the guest room is stuffy with heat, the air thick and still. He kicks off his shoes, drags his shirt over his head.
The ridges along his stomach catch the dim light. Faint. Barely there.
Not bone. Not quite skin.
Something between.
Owen curls onto the bed, pressing his fingers to his ribs, feeling the quiet pulse of his own body shifting.
The bone rests on the bedside table.
He closes his eyes and smells salt and seaweed and dark, dank places far below the Earth.
Outside, the tide rolls in.
#
Sleep comes fast and it’s heavy, like the tide dragging him under.
The heat is there, curling in his gut, threading through his limbs. It feels less like fever now, less like pain. More like something waking up.
Owen dreams in white light.
Endless, empty dunes unfold to the horizon, the air brittle and hot. The sky is colourless. The sand beneath him shifts and resettles, and when he moves, he moves low, close to the surface.
As he stretches his long, ample limbs, his skin tightens and hardens. He makes a clicking sound in the back of his throat.
He sniffs the wind, tasting the dry heat. Somewhere, far off, things scuttle just beneath the sand—quick, darting shapes, hiding in the cool depths.
Hunger stirs in Owen, patient and distant.
The dunes roll on forever. No footprints behind him. No shadow.
Only the sinuous elasticity of his body, the curve of his spine, the certainty that he belongs here.
Then—
A sound. Sharp and sudden, cutting through the silence.
A voice, ragged and familiar, breaking in from another world—
“Owen, eggs and bacon ahoy!”
#
He wakes with a jerk, pulse rattling in his ribs. The room is dim with filmy early morning light.
The dream lingers at the edges, sticky and pulled thin, not quite gone.
The jawbone is still there, waiting. The morning light slides over its teeth, still too sharp, still too white. Like it hasn’t been buried for long at all.
Owen slides his hand across his stomach. His skin feels smooth. Normal again.
But as he presses harder, he hesitates. Deeper down, the whisper of something odd and out of place.
Feels like tiny bumps, or—no, not bumps. Maybe scales.
Owen knows how ridiculous that is, but his skin tingles and crawls all the same.
He swings his legs over the side of the bed, the floorboards cool and steady against his bare feet, grounding him back in reality. For a moment he just sits there, staring at the jawbone, almost resenting it, but still so intrigued by it.
“What are you?” he murmurs.
When he rises, his limbs feel steady. Almost too steady. There’s no hesitation, no sluggishness—only fluid, quiet control.
He should feel something about last night. The dream. The ache in his stomach. The sense that when he moved, he wasn’t quite moving like himself anymore.
But he doesn’t. Not really.
He smooths a hand over his stomach, searching for something just out of reach. He half-expects to feel the ridges again, that strange roughness, the proof that something shifted overnight.
But there’s nothing. Just the familiar plane of his stomach and the usual rise and fall of his breath beneath his ribs.
Still, he can’t shake the feeling that something has changed.
#
Downstairs, Grandpa is at the stove, shuffling bacon in the pan. The house smells like grease and coffee, like a morning routine too stubborn to break, even when everything else has.
Owen lingers in the doorway.
Grandpa doesn’t turn. Just says, “Morning.”
Owen’s eyes track the pipe resting in the ashtray, the unfolded newspaper, the careful set of the table. Two plates. Two cups.
His grandmother’s seat is empty.
It always will be.
Owen moves to the chair across from it and doesn’t look up.
Grandpa sets his plate in front of him, but Owen isn’t hungry. The bacon glistens with grease, the egg yolk pools bright against white ceramic, and his stomach coils, tight and unfamiliar.
He reaches for his fork anyway.
#
Today, he goes home. His mother will be waiting, trying not to cry as she asks him about his trip.
Back to the school corridors, to Kevin Barker’s sudden and violent shoulder bumps at every opportunity.
To the endless, quiet waiting of what comes next.
Owen glances at the window. Outside, the tide is rolling in again, slow and steady, pulling at the shore, reshaping the beach grain by grain.
He thinks of the cool, damp places beneath the sand. The places where nothing ever dries out, where things stay hidden, waiting.
Something shifts beneath his skin—so faint it could almost be nothing.
But Owen knows better.
He presses his fingers to his ribs, feels the faintest rise of something not quite bone. Not quite skin. The scales are back, and they’re spreading. The jawbone grins at him from the table, teeth gleaming in the light. Owen doesn’t look away this time.
He picks up his fork.
And eats.
About the Author
Jennifer Oliver is a writer, gamer and illustrator based in the UK. She writes stories set in the fantasy, sci-fi and horror genres aimed at both adults and young adults. Her stories have been published in Kaleidotrope and Youth Imagination Magazine. To learn more, you can visit her website: jenniferoliverwriter.com
