The artist installs the bells on the beach as an act of homecoming. Each of the bells comes from a ship that once sailed from this town. She hangs them from white scaffolds that could be part of the beach, matching the wooden fences and pavilions along the esplanade. Tourists ask her what these things were - something municipal? An early-warning system? It's art, she replies. Ring them! But few people dare.

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The artist is at the beach every day, taking photographs, ringing the bells to see if their tone has changed. The sound lingers in her ears, and soon she hears it all the time, a faint echo. Often, while she is walking down the street, she stops and claps her hands to her pockets, convinced her phone is ringing. It never is.

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The artist is extremely hung over when she dismantles the scaffolding before returning to the city. Although she packs the bells away safely, in her hazy state she leaves the metal spikes firmly in the ground, where the wind quickly covers them with sand. Five hundred years later, an archaeologist working on the deserted edges of the frozen Baltic Sea will discover them, and go on to write a popular book suggesting that earlier civilisations may once have lived right on the beach, building their houses on sand - against specific advice of the Bible. No wonder they didn't last very long, he will say. Such shortsightedness. 

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