All right. The first story of the second year of this crazy project. A little horror, a little dystopian sci-fi. Keep reading to find out what these strange kids are up to, and what this creature is.
Thanks for reading.
Artwork by Luzhan Liu
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5XzByO
DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.
The Story
Eve was happy to be lost at sea, because it had told her being lost was being free. A tornado of fish swept around her, and she swore she could see them smile. A silly thought. She smiled back anyway, then looked down, even though she thought she would be afraid, observing that infinite darkness. Strangely, she wasn’t. Maybe it was the fish dancing around her. Maybe it was the velvet light. A mist of bubbles flocked, sticking to her arms and legs. At first it tickled, then it felt like a new skin. Some collected under her chin, where she was the most ticklish, lifting her head up to face the surface.
A stormy sky, distorted by foamless swells drifed. Turning pages, she thought, and she suddenly wished she could read her book, the one that had told her of this place in symbols she couldn’t read but feel. She saw those symbols now, brushed by clouds, more alive than they had been on the page. Whispers came to her, called to her, and they felt like those symbols, though she didn’t understand their meaning. So many circles.
She opened her mouth to speak and found she could. “I’m here,” Eve said to the sky through the sea.
Fins and scales and tiny teeth scored her feet, legs, and tummy, a great big bite on the tip of her pointing finger from which a plume of red erupted.
The swells that had been so gentle now frothed as if rabid, rising to great waves that came crashing down, sending her somersaulting away. It was as if the sea were trying to chew her up and spit her out. But in pockets of calm, she saw something. Pale and beautiful and beckoning Eve to come into its arms. She couldn’t see its face but knew it was beautiful. An angel. The one who would save her. Eve kicked her legs and scooped her hands to no avail.
Dunes electrified with fractals came into view. The water and sand formed a wedge that she knew was the shore. The waves ravaged the sand into a storm that bit at her eyes. She closed them, wiped them, but that only made it hurt more.
She couldn’t breathe. Then she couldn’t see. Then she couldn’t feel.
Slap, slap, slap.
She could hear. Clapping. Slow. Deliberate. She knew it: palms on wet sand.
Eve shot up in her bed, sheets sticking to her arms and legs, which she peeled off and flung to the floor. She sat in her soaked bed, forehead to knees, and she wept.
Slap, slap slap.
She lifted her head. Her room was still gray and small and lonely. On the concrete floor she dreaded the feeling of, tossed upon strewn clothes, was a small rectangle of a color that reminded her of the stormy sky.
Bam, bam bam.
Furious hammering now. A shadow broke the window’s light on the floor. She twisted around. It was James, his stupid teddy bear head ruining the color she loved so much, missed so much.
“Go away,” Eve said.
James wouldn’t stop, his palm turning into fist against the glass.
Eve huffed and donned her own gear. A large copper sphere with tiny circular windows, uncaged so she could see the world as if she wasn’t wearing it at all. She flipped the suction vent to her room and waited for that sensation of near-weightlessness before opening the window.
Eve drove her knuckles to her hips. “What do you want?”
James’s chest pounded as his fist had. “You have to come.”
“No I don’t.”
James froze then, dumbfounded, and through those stupidy beady lenses, Eve saw him. He stared. “You already know.”
“What?”
“Look at your arms,” James said. “It’s just like you said.”
Eve found marks. Hundreds. Thousands, maybe. They weren’t the work of fins, but they were the work of tiny teeth. Not fish teeth. Perfect circles. Bleeding.
“Does it hurt?” James asked.
“Yes.” Without another word, she climbed out the window, locking it behind her.
She recognized the sky overhead, but she didn’t smile. It wasn’t right. Once they left the neighborhood, they mounted the hills that blended from grass into sand. James fell more than once, but when Eve tried to help him up, he shied away.
The white noise of the beach blew over the dunes. James crested the one ahead, then dropped out of sight.
Eve wiggled her toes until her feet were buried in the sand. The pull of her small gray room was overwhelming, the sheets, even though they were wet. A nightmare brewed in her gut.
The wet sand. Not far now. Cold. Her collision with the shore hit her again just as hard. She fell to her knees. When she looked up, James was there again. So were Chris and Clive, the bucket-head twins. She let them help her up and take her to where she didn’t want to go.
Slap, slap, slap.
Eve heard it above the roar of the sea. Her helmet did nothing to muffle its horror. Deliberate no longer. Fists breaking jaws, bodies impacting concrete. The sound of dying.
It was. The poor little fish with their little O mouths unable to find water. Among them was something pale and angelic, but not at all beautiful. Seaweed and netting tangled in the creature’s tangled limbs, it lay heaped on its side, great wings broken by the surf, flattened to the sand, where its head of tentacles were piled, armed with circles of teeth.
Nina was there, too, inspecting from a safe distance upon a rock, and Liam, closest, bent over, ready to touch it. The angel that was a demon.
The rest of them gathered around the carcass from the sea, the angel that wasn’t, but Eve sat on the cold sand, knees to chest, head down. The air was full of hungry flies.
“See,” James said. “You were right. We’re saved.”
“No,” Eve said. “I wasn’t. We’re not.”
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