you see there was this sea cucumber and normally they don’t talk but for the sake of the story…
Last week someone typed that run-on sentence into a search engine and ended up here.
I don’t know who you are. I probably never will. But this is what happened next:
she did.
What she didn’t have was a name. She didn’t need one to be honest. All of the other sea cucumbers recognized her from the faintly-sweet taste of her hormones floating through the water. If sea cucumbers had names her would have been Strawberry.
But I digress.
One day Strawberry spoke.To her siblings and children (although she didn’t know the word for either of those concepts) the word looked like a tiny burp floating up from the ocean floor. Unremarkable.
What she meant to say was this: “Light.” They’d all seen it. Only she had noticed it.Strawberry swallowed her last mouthful of plankton and gingerly floated up.
The light grew strong and bright. The currents were stronger in the heavens. She found herself floating away from her herd.
A shadow fell across the water. Something large scooped her up in a painfully firm grip. She couldn’t breathe. Panic.
Pbbbth.
Some of her breathing tubes spilled out into his hands.
“Ewww,” the stranger said, dropping her back into the water.
She sank.
Down.
Down.
Down.
To the edge of her colony.
Plop.
Back onto the ocean floor.
Hearts quivering.
Her lungs grew back in a few weeks.
Her courage did not.
But sometimes when she had a fully belly and a quiet circulatory system she’d stare up at the surface again, looking at that light.
And when the eggs of her eggs hatch, when the moon hangs still and bright in the sky tomorrow, next week, next months she’ll hunker down with the hatchlings and tell them of the world without water.
