Fiction

I suddenly become aware that I am being watched, and glance to my right. Sitting on a rock I see a short, stocky figure with dappled skin like coral lichen: Farrah. I frown. 

“Spying again, Farrah?”

Farrah laughs. “That, coming from the Glade’s most notorious people-watcher? Your mooning over Emmaline is on the lips of every dullbrain with nothing better to occupy their thoughts.” 

At this depth, in this place, the lack of visibility stifles you. Sometimes I think it’s like the surface air when night closes in and thick cloud cover shrouds the moons and stars from the night sky, and there are no fires breaking the fabric of the night. But that doesn’t quite fit, because the colour is not the same. Or the absence of colour. You know?

The source of the light surrounding you is no longer discernible, and the particulate in the water is thick enough, the limited distance your eyes can penetrate through that fug, is such that you can’t tell up from down. Everything is just the same gritty grey-green.

She waves, the gesture languorous in the soupy sun-warmed waters of the shallows, and smiles. Her exposed teeth are bright-white even through silt and salt. Then she turns her back and pushes away, supple legs braced together to drive wide, powerful finfeet. She vanishes between tall strands of notkelp.

I have to suppress the instinct to give chase. At no point did her eyes, glossblack and warm, turn their gaze toward me. As I wait, unconcealed but not seen on the abandoned calcite halfshell of some long-dead mollusc, I see another supple figure darting forwards, pursuing her into the forest. He’s so fast, so strong that he moves across my vision before I can consciously register who it is. But of course I know.