Sea Stacks: Stone That Stayed
The coastline edited itself, and these are the sentences it kept.
A sea stack is what remains after the ocean has thrown out everything softer. The headland was once continuous; water found the weak seams, hollowed an arch, and then let the arch fall. What stands offshore now is the part that argued back, a column of the hardest rock marooned a stone's throw from the land it used to belong to.
They keep strange company. Gulls and gannets treat the flat tops as apartments with no rent and an excellent view of nothing but weather. At the base the tide does its slow accounting twice a day, and the stack loses a few grams it will not miss for another century. Nothing about the arrangement is permanent; it only looks that way on the timescale of an afternoon.
On a screen the sea stack does the one thing a horizon cannot: it stands up. The water runs flat to every edge, the sky does its gradient, and this single vertical holds the frame in place like a thumbtack. You could watch the waves for an hour and the stone would not move, which on a Monday is either restful or faintly smug.