Every so often he donned his best camouflage and peeped at the world above to see if it was ready. He sniffed at the air and poked at the soil, checking for seasoning, marinade, and a full-bodied flavor. It wasn’t quite to his liking just yet, so he settled back into Below. After a million or so years of waiting, he saw no point in rushing dinner now.
The children were hungry, so their father sailed low over the orchard. It was a risky venture in the daylight. If they were caught, who knew what havoc would be wreaked by their presence. He tried not to think about it as he cast his net. When he pulled it up a handful of apples tumbled out. His children leapt upon them and ate their fill as he steered them to the safety of the clouds once more, his heart pounding and his sails full.
This baby hydra first appeared on the shores of the Bay in the summer of 2016. Most people looked upon it with an idle curiosity. Others, perhaps with some ancient Greek DNA hidden away, felt a shiver despite the August heat. Most important: no one did anything about it, and the hydra was left to grow, safe and hidden away in the cool depths of the Bay.
The sunlight winked upon the water’s surface, sending secret messages to the bottom of the sea. There the mermaids scooped them up in long lost buckets and relayed them to whom they belonged. Who that is, I cannot say, but I’ve always dreamt of hidden sea beasts, impossible and mythical, whose deep sea movements become the waves that greet us on the shore.
She fell from her branch and faded to gold from the forgotten bits of sunshine she’d eaten once upon a tree. Insects came and chewed at her flesh, styling her into a delicate filigree for the finest of fairies to wear to their moonlit balls and midnight masquerades. The day came when she was forgotten in the grass, and a little girl found her and pressed her in a book, little suspecting the wonders the tattered old leaf had seen.
We went away last weekend and our daughter was very concerned about what hotels were like. She must have asked us thirty times on the way to our hotel where she would be sleeping. Getting a bit frustrated with explaining that there are beds in hotels over and over again, we told her she would have to sleep in the bathtub. She was silent the rest of the drive as she thought that over. But we had forgotten that it was a four-year-old we were dealing with. She insisted upon sleeping in the bathtub when we got there.
The old cliff croaked and groaned, but at last he spoke, his voice garbled with seaweed. “Its been a long time since anyone’s asked me for a story. I’ve seen a thing or two, that’s for sure. Where shall we begin? Is it sea dragons and ghost ships you want, or the romantic preenings of a mollusk in the Bay?”
She looked out at the world with her good eye, the one that could see past illusions to all the things unsaid and unseen, and it made her sad to see that people hid the best of themselves deep inside where no one could ever harm them, and no one ever saw.
“Mummy, does that frog look like a dill pickle to you? Do you think it tastes like one?”
Jennifer Shelby 