[smartypants008]

I was given an excerpt from a short story and I need to finish the story. Feel free to give me a lot of ideas because it has to be 3-4 pages. Thank you very much!

THE FIRST CHILDREN who saw the dark and slinky bulge approaching through the sea let themselves think it was an enemy ship. Then they saw it had no flags or masts and they thought it was a whale. But when it washed up on the beach, they removed the clumps of seaweed, the jellyfish tentacles, and the remains of fish and flotsam, and only then did they see that it was a drowned man.

They had been playing with him all afternoon, burying him in the sand and digging him up again, when someone chanced to see them and spread the alarm in the village. The men who carried him to the nearest house noticed that he weighed more than any dead man they had ever known, almost as much as a horse, and they said to each other that maybe he'd been floating too long and the water had got into his bones. When they laid him on the floor they said he'd been taller than all other men because there was barely enough room for him in the house, but they thought that maybe the ability to keep on growing after death was part of the nature of certain drowned men. He had the smell of the sea about him and only his shape gave one to suppose that it was the corpse of a human being, because the skin was covered with a crust of mud and scales.

[Wondergirl]

You can describe where he came from and who is was. "Little did the children know, but their 'monster' had been a dreaded pirate who -------------" or "The sea would never tell the children that this man had been the king of -----------------"

You can describe his funeral and the village's response to a dead stranger who washed up on their shores.

You can cause him to magically return to life in the form of a sea creature (god, animal, human) and describe the effect on the villagers and what improvement he made in their lives.