Matt Leibel
How to Build a Sandcastle
Hire an architect. Someone with vision, and an understanding of light, space, materials, temperature controls, safety protocols, 3D modeling. They should know their way around a city planning commission, have experience balancing the interests of competing stakeholders. Possibly a past Pritzker winner, or someone in the conversation for the future: a towering talent with Hadid’s sense of the avant-garde, Gehry’s knack for the baroque post-modern, Kahn’s elemental geometries, Pei’s iconic simplicity. And sure: you may object that sandcastles are for children on your beach day, and you’re just happy to hand them plastic shovels and buckets to keep the phones out of their little mitts while you attempt to catch some rays while zoning out to whatever reliably heart-pounding thriller plot Robert Ludlum or Lee Child or Tana French or Harlan Coben may have in store for you. But this misses the sheer structural power, the potential for grandeur and dazzle that sandcastles offer. Face it: you’re never going to build Versailles in your lifetime, or a new Monticello, or Great Wall. You’re probably not going to build an extension on your home, or even fix a pothole in your street. But you can build a tiny world that expresses your constructed dreams. You can make the universe incrementally better, if only for the time between the tides. Don’t be afraid to bring in outside help, to tell the kids they’ve got it all wrong. They’re thinking too small: you want flying buttresses, raised turrets, hidden pathways, maze-like courtyards, staircases leading to nowhere. Castles were created by Kings as walled fortresses to ward off usurpers. All sandcastles can fend off is the deadness in your soul, and even that only for a little while. There’s a reason adults compete in sandcastle building contests, and it’s not (just) because they’re trying to regress to their six-year-old selves who imagined they could dig their way to China, or whatever their corresponding “other side of the world” was. Sand is one of the world’s oldest substances; when you (or your architect’s subcontracted building team) are working with it, you’re communing with the origins of our planet, that whirling, gaseous chemical play set. Jack Reacher—for all of his skills with a rifle, his hands, or his wits—can’t really dig that deep.
How to Get Unstuck
Call a tow truck. Call a locksmith. Call a therapist. Call your mother. Call my mother. No. Leave my mother alone. She’s got enough on her plate. Don’t try to stick things to other things in the first place. Don’t affix decals to your car bumper. They don’t age well. No one cares who you supported in the 2004 election. Well, there are probably people who care. I might care, a little bit. But don’t do it. Don’t try to stick the landing on your dismount without years of practice. Don’t bother trying gymnastics at all if you didn’t sacrifice your childhood for it. If you’re a child, for the love of God, don’t sacrifice your childhood. Definitely don’t sacrifice your childhood for the love of God. God, if she exists, would want you to have more fun than that. If you’re stuck on a piece of writing, set it aside for a while. Come back to it later. Hopefully, the piece will then unveil itself to you, like a previously-withholding lover suddenly deciding to entrust you with a disconcerting torrent of emotional honesty. If you’re still stuck, set your writing aside for 500 years. In the distant future, someone will discover your barely-scrutable texts buried under geologically-intimidating layers of sand and rock. They’ll decide to continue your work where you left off, and either they’ll make the writing better or worse. If they finish it and improve it, this will confer upon you a kind of immortality that you’ll be too dead to properly appreciate. If they make it worse, you’ll be forgotten by history, which seems appropriate since most people forget all the history they ever learn anyway. And what will you care? You’ll be kicking back in the afterlife. In the afterlife, there are beanbags 100 times more comfortable than anything you had back on Earth, including the ones they had at that one startup you worked at where they tried to turn the work environment into a glorified playroom. If you sink deeply enough into your afterlife beanbag, you will become one with it, as if with the universe itself. In the end, this is the kind of stuck you want to be. Maybe none of us ever truly become unstuck, and maybe that’s okay. We’re all stuck with each other until the day we die, and maybe long after that. If you’re stuck in rush hour traffic on the 405 trying to get home from downtown LA at twilight on a Friday night under a sky striped with layers of orange, pink and purple whose beauty belies their origins in the environmental ruin we seem to have irrevocably yoked ourselves to, then sorry: I’ve got nothing for you.
Matt Leibel’s short fiction has appeared in Post Road, Electric Literature, Portland Review, The Normal School, Quarterly West, Socrates on the Beach, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, matchbook, and Wigleaf. His work has also been anthologized in Best Small Fictions 2024 and Best Microfiction 2025. Find him online at mattleibel.com.
