The Day I Probably Murdered The Dollar
By Carsten ten Brink
May 5, 2025
May 5, 2025
I had an hour to kill on the empty beach. I’m more mountains and forests than sand and sea but this is where we’d been dropped, so I untied my hiking boots and let the damp sand squish between my toes. The waves that reached the shore were gentle and as the water drained, the susurrations in the sand reminded me of gently revolving rain sticks.
As a child, I’d walked along beaches looking for rubber balls and plastic toys, brought in by the currents, but here on this tiny African country’s shore I found no rubber, no plastic, not even old nets. The greyish brown sand was a quiet necropolis for marine life: burnt-sienna seaweed, pungent as it dried, small grey clamshells and those light, white, floating things that I knew had once been part of cuttlefish. The few stranded mollusk shells I encountered that might have appealed to hermit crabs were empty. I left them untouched – perhaps the night tides would bring in a wave of crustacean home-seekers.
I was the second member of my family to visit this country. The first, a century before, had been an explorer, a botanist, biologist and scientist. Orchids and frogs still bear his name. Fleeing a war, he had crossed the border into neutral Spanish Guinea using canoes carved from tree-trunks, bringing his wife and their papers with him.
She, by then his widow, starting in neutral Spain, somehow traversed a Europe of territories marked and marred by war. She survived the trip home. Alone, and I imagine heroic, in overcoming the dangers of the time, her subsequent fate was not recorded. The family archives stop with her husband.
I had visited both the river they had crossed, and the city where, sick, they had waited for travel permissions, for a ship. I had also visited the National Library. Equatorial Guinea, no longer a colony, is a young country and the new, uncluttered shelves await fresh history to feed them. Treaties and legal documents were on display, but the archivist could point to no records of the wartime flood of refugees from Cameroon that the Spanish had generously allowed to enter. I had hoped to bring something home to my mother to commemorate her uncle, and her aunt, but I had found no traces.
I was the second member of my family to visit this country. The first, a century before, had been an explorer, a botanist, biologist and scientist. Orchids and frogs still bear his name. Fleeing a war, he had crossed the border into neutral Spanish Guinea using canoes carved from tree-trunks, bringing his wife and their papers with him.
She, by then his widow, starting in neutral Spain, somehow traversed a Europe of territories marked and marred by war. She survived the trip home. Alone, and I imagine heroic, in overcoming the dangers of the time, her subsequent fate was not recorded. The family archives stop with her husband.
I had visited both the river they had crossed, and the city where, sick, they had waited for travel permissions, for a ship. I had also visited the National Library. Equatorial Guinea, no longer a colony, is a young country and the new, uncluttered shelves await fresh history to feed them. Treaties and legal documents were on display, but the archivist could point to no records of the wartime flood of refugees from Cameroon that the Spanish had generously allowed to enter. I had hoped to bring something home to my mother to commemorate her uncle, and her aunt, but I had found no traces.
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Nor had I found, on this beach, the cowries or the delicate translucent shells that my mother had treasured when, in my childhood, we had walked together on my first African beach. But I did discover something else, something I had not seen before.
If my great-uncle had been by my side, he would have recognized what I was discovering in the froth where the water met the sand: light, flattish discs, as delicate as desiccated sea urchin shells. A pale, sometimes greenish, grey, each was almost round, with one semicircle formed of a dozen tendrils or fronds, as if someone had pressed waving seaweed in between pages of a heavy book and, rather than simply drying, they had magically petrified. |
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Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of these discs dotted the waterline, most with their fronds broken. I collected ten undamaged specimens to study, to give to my mother in place of a formal record of her relatives’ brief sojourn in this country where her uncle’s explorations had ended. Museums in Europe still hold specimens that he collected, but the family has nothing of his. I wrapped the discs in a pad of tissue paper, thick but gentle packaging to protect their fragile forms.
That evening, under the intense neon bathroom light of a new hotel close to the airport, I washed my collection. Sand emerged from a pair of pinholes on one side – the discs were flat but hollow. I held each under the tap, patient as tiny grains dribbled out, measuring the time to dinner. Despite my protective tissues, one disc’s fronds had already fractured; the others were all distinct, their shapes perhaps as unique as snowflakes. Washed, two even felt different, their texture furry. As I placed discs on fresh tissue to dry, straggling sand particles joined the escaping moisture, like minuscule black pepper grains on the pristine white paper.
At dinner, there was Wi-Fi, and the opportunity to research my finds: The discs were my first ever sand dollars. A type of sea urchin. Mine were of the family Rotulidae, only seen on the Atlantic side of Africa. When a sand dollar dies, its surface’s velvety cilia disappear and the skeleton, the test, is bleached by sea and sun into the pale colors that first made sailors think they were indeed silver coins lying on a shore.
Upstairs in my bathroom, preparing to pack my suitcase, I discovered tissue paper wet and gritty under many of the sand dollars. One of the pair whose surface under my fingers was a furry velvet had stained its tissue yellow.
Yellow. I’d read about yellow stains. Echinodrome. Sand dollars emit this harmless substance when they are alive. One of my flat sea urchins was alive. Was I depriving it of a chance to survive?
My great-uncle had left this place alive, but weak, and had not survived the journey home. Perhaps he would have had a better chance if he had stayed.
There was no beach nearby to return the poor sand dollar to and the next morning I would fly home. Even if I owned a six-foot aquarium filled with salty water and nutrients, I could not take a living thing, a species that was not native to my home, with me. Things have changed since my great-uncle’s day. Living things cannot cross borders now without safeguards and authorizations.
The dollar would have to stay behind. The plastic garbage bucket in my bathroom would be an insulting death sentence. Asking the hotel receptionist for help, for a late-night taxi to a distant beach, was out of the question.
That evening, under the intense neon bathroom light of a new hotel close to the airport, I washed my collection. Sand emerged from a pair of pinholes on one side – the discs were flat but hollow. I held each under the tap, patient as tiny grains dribbled out, measuring the time to dinner. Despite my protective tissues, one disc’s fronds had already fractured; the others were all distinct, their shapes perhaps as unique as snowflakes. Washed, two even felt different, their texture furry. As I placed discs on fresh tissue to dry, straggling sand particles joined the escaping moisture, like minuscule black pepper grains on the pristine white paper.
At dinner, there was Wi-Fi, and the opportunity to research my finds: The discs were my first ever sand dollars. A type of sea urchin. Mine were of the family Rotulidae, only seen on the Atlantic side of Africa. When a sand dollar dies, its surface’s velvety cilia disappear and the skeleton, the test, is bleached by sea and sun into the pale colors that first made sailors think they were indeed silver coins lying on a shore.
Upstairs in my bathroom, preparing to pack my suitcase, I discovered tissue paper wet and gritty under many of the sand dollars. One of the pair whose surface under my fingers was a furry velvet had stained its tissue yellow.
Yellow. I’d read about yellow stains. Echinodrome. Sand dollars emit this harmless substance when they are alive. One of my flat sea urchins was alive. Was I depriving it of a chance to survive?
My great-uncle had left this place alive, but weak, and had not survived the journey home. Perhaps he would have had a better chance if he had stayed.
There was no beach nearby to return the poor sand dollar to and the next morning I would fly home. Even if I owned a six-foot aquarium filled with salty water and nutrients, I could not take a living thing, a species that was not native to my home, with me. Things have changed since my great-uncle’s day. Living things cannot cross borders now without safeguards and authorizations.
The dollar would have to stay behind. The plastic garbage bucket in my bathroom would be an insulting death sentence. Asking the hotel receptionist for help, for a late-night taxi to a distant beach, was out of the question.
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There was no beach. But the hotel did have a pool. Late at night, it was abandoned, quiet and waveless.
I returned the dollar to the water. It floated on the surface.
Perhaps I was not too late. Perhaps with luck, a passing gull would be tempted, swoop for it, and then reject it, drop it in the ocean. Or like in a childhood tale, the dollar would be blown into a stream and find its magical way to the open sea.
Perhaps it was hardy, like my great-aunt had been, and would survive. At least I’d given it a chance.
A fantasy, I know. I probably murdered the dollar.
But I slept better, and the next morning, when I looked out the window and down to the pool, I could no longer see it.
I returned the dollar to the water. It floated on the surface.
Perhaps I was not too late. Perhaps with luck, a passing gull would be tempted, swoop for it, and then reject it, drop it in the ocean. Or like in a childhood tale, the dollar would be blown into a stream and find its magical way to the open sea.
Perhaps it was hardy, like my great-aunt had been, and would survive. At least I’d given it a chance.
A fantasy, I know. I probably murdered the dollar.
But I slept better, and the next morning, when I looked out the window and down to the pool, I could no longer see it.
Carsten ten Brink is a writer, photographer and artist. He was born in Germany and raised in Australia, Japan and the United Kingdom. He has traveled widely, including to over twenty countries in Africa, which inspired this piece. He has volunteered on both ocean-based and land-based conservation/research projects. Prose has been shortlisted and/or published by Coalitionworks, Fish Publishing, The Master’s Review and The Write Launch, among others. Mostly recently, his work can be found in Cosmic Daffodil and Thin Skin Magazine. He has published photobooks, fiction and CNF. Carsten is editing a novel and working toward a book about his decade of experience of travelling in New Guinea.
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Author’s Note:
My academic/explorer great-uncle Johannes Elbert died decades before my mother was born, and his exact fate was unknown and mysterious. He had led an expedition to Indonesia, and legends spoke of a grisly end in New Guinea. I have been to both, multiple times. The gradual digitization of archives—in museums, academia and botanical gardens—provided clues, to a posting in Cameroon, a country I had visited in ignorance of his link. Discovering that he and his wife had fled one of World War I’s largely forgotten African battlefields and become refugees in Equatorial Guinea, leading to his death, catalyzed my desire to visit the country. I found no traces of their presence. Were the sand-dollars, which they would also have first encountered there, a reward for my effort?