When the One-Year Chip Wasn’t Claimed

I always got there early, as if being first could anchor me. The folding chairs had already been staked into the sand by the time I arrived, dug in like teeth. They wobbled when you sat in them, sinking a little deeper with each weight, like the beach wanted to claim us one by one. Tonight the circle gaped with an extra space, a hole waiting for her. I put my backpack down in the sand like a flag, like the universe needed proof I was holding it.

The sky over Venice was doing its thing. Cotton-candy streaks smeared into smog, clouds dissolving at the edges as though someone had rubbed them with an eraser. The gulls flew in low circles, louder than usual, their cries tangled and sharp. At first it sounded random, but when I leaned back and listened, it hit me: they were chanting the steps. Not words exactly, more rhythm. Admit. Restore. Surrender. Their wings cut through the air like knives flipping flashcards.

People trickled in the way they always did: barefoot, flip-flops, dragging coolers, carrying styrofoam cups of coffee that steamed in the salt air. The tide was pushing in heavy tonight, coughing foam across our ankles. When it pulled back, it left behind circular stains like coins pressed into the sand, or chips. I kept squinting at them, expecting to find her one-year token already buried there, glinting in the dim.

“Saving that seat?” someone asked, nodding toward the chair beside me.

“Yeah,” I said. My throat caught. “She’s coming.”

The guy just nodded, too polite to say what we were both thinking: you never really know.

The fire wasn’t lit yet, but the pile of driftwood smoked faintly, as if it was breathing on its own. The smoke curled into shapes—faces I half-recognized, people I’d seen at meetings months ago and never again. They seemed to hover just past the edge of memory, blurry as afterimages from staring too long at the sun.

Every so often I thought I saw her on the boardwalk. A flash of dark hair, a stride I swore was hers. My heart leapt and then faltered when it was someone else. A tourist in a sunhat, a girl with headphones, a man walking a dog that barked at the tide like it knew something we didn’t. The waiting was worse than withdrawal, every beat of it another jolt.

The sand around her empty chair started shifting, little avalanches sliding into the hole where the leg pressed down. I had this wild thought that if she didn’t come, the chair would sink all the way under and no one would ever know she’d been expected.

More people arrived, filling the circle. The chairs rattled like loose teeth when they sat down, one after another. Someone handed out Styrofoam cups, someone else tested a guitar string, and the gulls screeched louder, so loud I almost covered my ears. The rhythm was clear now: not the steps, but her name, broken into syllables by the wind.

I told myself it was stupid, that it was just birds being birds, but the sound tunneled into me, lodged under my ribs. Even the surf had started to clap in time, slow and deliberate. Waiting for her. All of us waiting, but the beach itself most of all. And still, the chair beside me sat hollow, its back tilting toward the fire pit like it was listening.

The leader called us to start, her voice carrying over the wind like a cracked megaphone. She stood in the center of the circle, bare feet planted in the sand, a stack of plastic chips fanned out in her hand like a cheap deck of cards. Behind her, the horizon smeared into violet and bruise-blue, the sun disappearing faster than it should have—as if it wanted no part in what was about to unfold.

“Thirty days,” she said.

A guy with trembling hands walked up, eyes wet. We clapped, we hugged, we said keep coming back. The ritual was familiar, almost comforting, but every cheer rattled wrong in my skull. Each clap of our palms was echoed by the surf, crashing harder, timed too perfectly. It felt like the ocean had learned the script and was beating it back at us.

“Sixty days.”

“Six months.”

Each time someone stepped forward, the firewood pile hissed louder though no one had touched a match. The smoke thickened, writhing into shapes I didn’t want to see. I could make out shoulders, arms, blurred faces of people who hadn’t made it this far. Their mouths opened in silent howls, pouring upward into the night like balloons popping against the stars.

I kept glancing at her empty chair. The sand beneath it shifted, scooped itself deeper, as though the chair were sinking into quicksand. The indentation looked like a grave being dug in real time. My chest tightened. Any second she’d appear. Coming late but glowing, the way she always walked into a room with her head high, pretending she wasn’t shaking. I clung to the thought like driftwood, but the gulls screamed her name again, syllables broken and frayed, and the sound twisted it hollow.

“Ninety days.”

A woman in cutoff shorts cried as she took her chip. We clapped. But the applause didn’t sound human anymore. It rolled around the circle like surf and echoed in the sky, until it was hard to tell if it was us or the ocean or something underneath the sand beating its fists to the rhythm. My palms stung.

The fire finally caught—no lighter, no match. It roared up out of the driftwood in a column, sudden and vicious. The flames bent sideways, pointing toward her chair, painting the sand in red strokes. I blinked, and for a second, I thought she was there—silhouette sharp against the glow—but then the smoke peeled back and it was only absence, only emptiness, the chair rocking a little like it had been touched.

I wanted to stand, to scan the boardwalk again, but my legs felt rooted. The sand around my ankles was gripping tight, grain by grain, dragging me an inch deeper with every breath. I could feel it tugging at me in rhythm with the leader’s words. Each chip handed out was another inch lost.

“One year.”

The words dropped like stones. Everything went silent. No gulls, no surf, no fire crackle. Just the hiss of the ocean holding its breath. All eyes turned to the empty chair. I held my eyes open for her. My throat burned. She’d come. She had to.

The wind shifted, and the smoke wrapped around me, hot as hands pressing my shoulders down. In it, I saw her outline again, lips moving but no sound, bottle glinting where the chip should be.

And then the applause started—louder than ever—but no one had moved. It was the tide clapping against the shore, over and over, applauding an absence. The kind of applause that didn’t stop, that didn’t care whether it was honoring survival or loss.

I sat frozen, her chair yawning beside me, the sand still pulling. The fire leaned closer, listening.

“One year,” the leader repeated. Her voice splintered against the silence. It wasn’t a call anymore, it was a dare.

We waited. All of us staring at that chair. The tide held back like it, too, was waiting, hovering on the edge of breaking. My chest ached from holding my breath, but I didn’t dare exhale first.

Nothing. No crunch of sandals on the boardwalk, no nervous laugh, no “sorry I’m late.”

The leader’s hand, holding the chip, trembled once. She opened her mouth like she might try again, but the words died, burned to ash in the fire’s roar. Then she set the chip back down on the stack, and the world broke.

The chairs shuddered all at once, legs scraping against the sand like they were trying to stand up without us. The empty ones multiplied, sprouting in the circle where no one had been sitting. Rows of hollow seats, all facing the fire. The people around me clapped, but their hands never touched, just echoes, phantom applause that hurt my ears.

The ocean chose that moment to retreat, sucking itself so far back it exposed yards of slick black seabed. In the muck, shapes gleamed. Sobriety chips, dozens of them, hundreds, sunk half-deep in the sand like coins in a wishing well. Bottles bobbed in the shallow pools left behind, labels slurred off, glass throats cracked. Between them, bones jutted—ribs, femurs, things I told myself must be driftwood until the gulls landed and picked at them.

The gulls were chanting again, not just her name this time but all our names, spitting syllables like curses. Their wings beat the air into rhythms that matched my pulse until I couldn’t tell whether my heart was inside me or circling above, sharp-beaked and screaming.

I looked at her chair and swore I saw her there: drenched, dripping seawater, hair plastered to her face. Her eyes were hollow sockets, and her lips stretched into a grin too wide. She held out a bottle instead of a chip, and when she tilted it, the liquid inside poured sideways, against gravity, spilling toward me.

I lurched forward, half-standing, but the sand clamped my ankles tighter, climbing now to my calves, my knees. Grains crawling like fingers, pinning me down. Each chip given earlier had been a bargain, a debt paid by the sand, and now it wanted interest.

The fire whipped high, sparks whirling into shapes: every relapse I’d ever witnessed, every overdose whispered about, every absence we’d shrugged off. Faces I knew flickered in the flames, mouthing “gone, gone, gone” until the words blurred.

“She’s not coming,” someone whispered beside me, though when I turned, the seat was empty, rocking as if someone invisible had just stood up.

My chest heaved. I wanted to scream her name, to pull her into existence by force, but when I opened my mouth, seawater poured out. Salt burned my throat. The others clapped harder, smiling, tears on their cheeks, congratulating nothing. The applause echoed into the sky until the stars themselves seemed to pulse, blinking in rhythm.

I saw her then, out on the newly exposed seabed, walking toward the bones. She was barefoot, trailing water, her skin too pale under the sick light. She bent to pick up one of the buried chips, but when she raised her hand, it wasn’t plastic—it was bone, smooth and white, crumbling in her palm. She looked up at me like she’d done it on purpose. Like that was her one-year token, and I was the only one meant to see.

The tide roared back suddenly, slamming against the shore, erasing everything—chips, bones, her silhouette. The circle gasped as cold water hit our ankles, our knees, spraying the fire but not putting it out. The flames hissed louder, turning green for a second, before snapping back to red.

When the water receded again, it left nothing but smooth sand. The seabed was gone, the bones gone, her gone. The chairs stopped multiplying and settled back, but hers was still empty. Sunken deeper than before, half-swallowed.

The leader cleared her throat, shuffled the chips in her hand, moved on. “Two years,” she called. As if nothing had happened. As if the ocean hadn’t tried to speak. I clapped because everyone else did, but my palms struck the air without sound. I looked down and saw the chip she should’ve claimed, the one-year token, sitting in my lap. No one had put it there. The plastic was slick with seawater, salt crystallizing on the edges.

I pressed it into my fist so hard it cut my skin. Blood welled between my fingers, mixing with the salt until I couldn’t tell which was which. She had failed, or she had succeeded, and I was the only one who would ever know which.

When the meeting broke, it was like someone had snapped their fingers underwater. The sound came back too fast—zippers tugged, chairs folded, styrofoam crushed under sandals. Nobody mentioned her name. Nobody even looked at the empty chair, half-buried in the sand like a headstone.

I stayed seated until the circle collapsed, until the smoke thinned into a crooked halo above the tide. My ankles were free again, but they felt raw, rubbed down to bone. The one-year chip was still in my fist, edges digging crescent moons into my palm. I didn’t unclench.

Venice at night is a carnival even when you don’t want it. Rollerbladers streaked past me in LED wheels, their faces blurred into skulls by speed. A man in a Spider-Man costume leaned against a lamppost, mask hanging loose, cigarette dangling. When he exhaled, the smoke curled into the number twelve before dissipating. Neon signs bled across the pavement, their letters dripping like open wounds: LIQUOR, LIQUOR, LIQUOR

I walked. The chip burned in my hand, hotter than it had any right to be. Every storefront reflection showed her beside me, pacing step for step, dripping seawater, leaving no footprints. People brushed past without noticing, but their eyes widened a little, like they felt the chill even if they couldn’t see her.

By the time I reached the boardwalk rail, the tide was clawing back hard, pulling at the pilings like it wanted to drag the whole city in. I leaned against the metal and opened my fist. The chip gleamed pale in the streetlight, but when I blinked, it wasn’t plastic anymore. It was bone again. The same one she’d held out to me in the seabed. Smooth, cracked, humming faintly like a seashell pressed to an ear.

I should’ve dropped it. Tossed it into the waves and let the ocean have what it wanted. Instead I pressed it to my ear, listening. I heard clapping.

Not hands—wings.

Not applause—thunder.

And under it all, her voice,

low and certain:

I’m not coming back.

I staggered, nearly lost my balance over the rail. The surf reached higher, kissing my shoes, trying to take me with it. I closed my eyes and clutched the bone-chip tighter.

When I opened them, the sand below had turned to a mirror. My reflection stared up at me—not me as I was, but me hollowed, wet-haired, holding a bottle. My mouth moved without sound, exactly the way hers had in the smoke.

The tide rose again and swallowed the mirror, but the image stayed burned behind my eyelids. I stood there until the gulls stopped screaming, until the neon flickered out one sign at a time, until Venice was just shadow and salt.

The chip cut deeper into my palm, bone or plastic, I couldn’t tell. I whispered her name into the wind. The waves answered anyway, each crash a syllable, each retreat a silence. And then the applause started again—endless, faceless, rolling out from the horizon.

DEDICATION

For my dad, who died before he

ever held a chip.

For the patients and peers I’ve

sat with since, their hands trembling with tokens he never lived to earn.

And for everyone whose chair

stayed empty.