Caught

"What is it?"

The voices came through the glass.

"We've never seen anything like it. But there are a lot of things we haven't seen before on the ocean floor."

"It should be dead. Anything coming up from those pressures would die before reaching the surface."

"Some of them do come up for feeding."

Bracklin listened. It didn't make a difference now, but it might later.

"The man who brought it in said it tried to sink his sub."

"Is it malicious?"

A laugh. "Aren't we all when it comes to the food chain?"

The room became quiet as they stared in at him. Then, "They're sending another sub down there to look for a nest."

Bracklin squinted his eyes, all of them. Bralla knew how to hide.

"I don't think they'll find it. Those eyes will see it well before we spot it. It's like evolution pushed a little too far in that category."

"Evolution doesn't happen by accident. Some environment down there caused it to become this way."

"What would it take to need all of those eyes?"

"Predators?" someone suggested. "It does look like a delicious ball of jelly. What are those Japanese delicassies called?"

"If there are that many predators, the crew won't last long at all."

"We are the predator." Another laugh.

"The man who caught it also gave us this." The man tapped on a glass behind the glass. In it floated Bracklin's gift to Bralla. "I thought it was just a bit of seaweed and almost threw it away. But take a look. It's woven."

The crowd moved from the window to peer at the material, and Bracklin flung his body from the cage. He stretched every finger to find a crevice in his container, any crack that might allow him to escape from his prison. The surface was tight and smooth.

Someone turned, and he shot back to the enclosure.

"Did you just see that?" the human asked.

"Nope."

"Maybe it was a reflection."

Bright lights streamed through the water into his eyes, and he shrank and shut them.

"Keep an eye on it, that's our job."

"Yes, sir."

Bracklin huddled, and missed home.

___

This week's prompt was "Show someone longing to be outdoors, but stuck inside." It was a tad difficult to find a small story to fit this because one of my novel's main characters is dealing with exactly this issue, and it's taken me an entire book to explore it! What's exciting is that my WIP has only a few chapters to be completed, and then I'll be sending it out to readers for feedback. So stay tuned... yeah!!

Lucky Penny

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I'm alive again, thanks for the anti-zombie wishes :).

Don't you always see the pennies on the ground and snatch them up? Because as Grandma says, "a penny saved is a penny earned", right? Ha! Mostly, it's because it's free money and in this age of beautiful, wistful electronics, any penny will help add up to that iPad purchase (humming here). This poem is for Lucky Penny day. It's written in two simultaneous parts so I had to copy it in as an image. I hope you can see it clearly!

For more Lucky Penny fiction, take a look here at Suzanne Warr's blog hop. Have an awesome week!

Urg

My friends, the flu has caught up with me and attacked my writing cells. I hope you understand if I fight back for a week and recover! Love, health and cheers,

--Elm

Excavation

"Gently, gently. Now the brush, yes, very good," Ms. Razel said, and scurried off on her many, dusty limbs to the next student. Jayna, a hundred meters over, was a bit of a boss, and Ariel was glad they had separate stations for the day.

But that's about where the gladness ended. Ariel smeared an arm over her sweating brow. It was so hot. And brushing granules of sand like a delicate arteest was not what she'd signed up for. Get her away from anything resembling her lacy-limbed sister's snobby hobby--Ariel wanted to discover things, find mesmerizing and grand fossils of how the previous civilization had lived.

Why she was fascinated with ancient life was beyond knowing. Unless it was a direct reaction to living with present life.

Present present life included. This wasn't what she'd planned. She chucked the hard end of her brush against the dirt, just a smidge. Then she bit her lozzel as the fossil she'd been excavating crumbled.

I'm so in trouble.

As she considered whether to burst into tears or sit on her disaster and say the fossil had been a figment of the noonday sun, the dust began to settle into itself, and she blinked as a small, dark crack opened up in the earth. The remains from the fossil trickled downward and disappeared, followed by the surrounding sand, into a place she couldn't see. Keeping five eyes up to appear like nothing had happened (Jayna was acute), she stretched one eyeball low to peer into the darkness.

Nothing. At all.

She reached an arm back for the light strap she'd tossed to the side because it'd kept slipping over her lozzel, and fastened it back to her midhead. Then she pointed the light into the fissure. A warm and brilliant glow made her eye blink, and forgetting secrecy, she stretched the remaining five to take in the scene.

Under the earth were colors. Red and pink and purple and blue and grass green, piles of them in solids and dizzying patterns. She leaned to spread her eyes further in and then the edge of the crack gave way. She gasped as she found herself falling into blackness, her beam lighting only the dust floating above her.

It felt like she fell forever, then she landed with a fwump into softness.

She shook the colors that had settled onto her head and focused her beam on what lay beneath her limbs and in her lap. They really were soft--cushy and strange and shaped like an elbow. Their patterns were amazing down to their very weave, but what could they be? Bandages for broken eye stalks? They were closed on one end and open on the other... maybe they were wart warmers.

Or a primitive flower collection.

Or a mountain of... feathers from a particularly ancient burial ground.

She raised her lightbeam to the scenery around her. Other mountains like the one she'd landed on surrounded hers, fading into the dark. Several were white, others dark, some mixed. And at the near end of the cavern, she saw a plaque on the wall with characters on it that were at once strange and familiar. She squinted all six eyes in order to read it in the dusty light. She'd learned the ancient text's sounds years ago, in one of her dad's scrolls when she was a Little.

LOST SOCKS

LOST. That meant unfindable. SOCKS. These squishy things? Were they a mystery of their time, too?

Above her, she heard a scream.

"Ms. Razel, Ariel's disappeared!"

Trust Jayna to notice before she'd gotten time to see almost anything, but a warmth spread through her--this was her discovery. Socks. She didn't know what that meant, but she liked them. Quickly, before anyone saw, she thrust a handful into her deepest orifice as a memento. Whoever had brought these here, she figured they had enough.

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This story is dedicated to the box of--no kidding--forty-two lost socks in my dresser drawer. (See that fuzzy teal and orange sock in the pic? That is my lost sock, sniff.) I know that one day, their mates will appear when somebody needs them the most. Apparently I don't, even though I think I do. :) What is your most exasperating lost item?

Unicorns In Space

Space wasn't meant for witches. Or was it vice versa?

But there she hung inside her bubble with her unicorn beside her, gaping out at all the other witches and unicorns inside their bubbles. They glimmered like sparkly little planets in the middle of death's black field.

Below them, the shadow of Stalyn's space station glowed in the purple aura of atmosphere, and stretched across their forests, withering their world's belief in enchantment and its source of life.

All those sweet little fairies, bursting into the wrong kind of dust.

"This is it," Jill said, and her unicorn snorted. She touched his velvet neck and chanted the seven hundred and seventy seven words that would take her army to the peak of their power. As she completed the spell, light began to crawl in streaks across the universe from stars too far away to measure, and Jill watched in awe as they crisscrossed like water nymph webs and made their way to the horns inside the vessels.

She closed her eyes as the bubbles filled with energy and became too painful to behold, and then the heat intensified and she cried out the final word.

"Fine!"

The light dwindled and she squinted at the world and its shadow that were suddenly quite smaller. The force of the spell must have propelled her vessel in the opposite direction. A knot tied itself tightly inside her gut as she squinted toward the enemy. She didn't know how they'd get home. But that part didn't matter.

As the light hit the space station, a million butterflies? fairies? dragons? erupted, fluttering blue wings that were breathtaking even from this distance in their glitter and grace.

Jill gaped in disbelief.

The space station hadn't disappeared.

Then where had the butterflies come from?

Had the spell transformed the light instead? Were spaceships truly untouchable by magic? Had she and her people used all of their power to create butterflies for Stalyn to just... watch from his cushy bedside window? Slowly, Jill crumpled to the bottom of the bubble and laid her head on her unicorn's heaving flank.

She hoped it would be enough to make them believe.

She had a long time to believe in space.

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Today's story was brought to you by International Space Day, and a love for sci-fi and fantasy that can never quite meet in the middle. For more creative space fiction, head way out here and enjoy the stars. :)

Tic-Tac-Toe

[GRAPHIC ZOMBIE WARNING! If you don't like zombies, don't whimper, I'll give you something livelier next week.]

I scratched at a flake of skin that was peeling off my calf. I'd last a lot longer if I didn't scratch but by this point, it really didn't matter. And Jeck wasn't watching. He was lying on his back in the long sunray that had miraculously bled through the brown fog. The sun made even the dust look pretty.

But not my friend.

He was a worse scratcher than I, and he'd taken to eating his flakes to ease the hunger, like paper mints before the world blew. I caught his flicker of pain each time I crumbled one in my fingers and watched it blow away in the wind. I could offer him mine, but that was against our rules.

But our rules hadn't helped us much. Whole chunks of cheek had fallen off my face like hard marbles, and Jeck was mostly corroding muscle. He didn't even have eyelids.

The nice thing about this disease was that it left your mind dull, so you didn't think about things too much. In this landscape, there was nothing left to really think about, anyway.

"You trying to embalm yourself?" I asked my friend. His eyes rolled to mine.

"The sun feels good. Like it'll clean me out if I get hot enough."

I almost said he'd make some good jerky but thought better of it. The hunger didn't bother me as much, I'd felt hollow for long enough it didn't matter.

Everyone else had eaten each other but Jeck and I refused and escaped. Maybe that's why we rotted so slowly, because we'd never injested anyone else's bacteria. Who knew? Here we were, the last two humans in Arizona and even the bacteria, it seemed, were dead.

"Come play tic-tac-toe," I said.

He said nothing and I sighed, done with the whole drama. We were the longest, boring-est performance on the after-life of the planet. Carefully, I pulled off a toe. The place it'd hung throbbed with a dull and nagging ache. I shrugged. I tossed the toe onto Jeck's chest.

He caught it and rolled his eyes back up to me. "What the crap, Mutt?"

"We're playing with real toes. Let's have some fun."

I wasn't sure how many limbs I'd have to lose to get out of here, but if it made my buddy a little happier in the end, then it made me happier, too. I drew the cross in the sand.

Little Puff Big Puff

In the great black pupil, I could see my reflection and Bee's, fastened with our belts to the back seat of the stranger's car. The pupil was ringed by a brilliant red iris, and beyond that a soft white skin, and I longed to reach out and stroke the layers of fluffy, perfect feathers that surrounded it, to see how soft they were now that they were big. But I knew if I did that my arm would be gone in a snap, quite literally, and I held perfectly still, not daring to breathe Puff's name.

Bee sighed in his sleep and the pupil disappeared. The gigantic black beak slammed into the roof of the car, puncturing the metal, and I screamed. It formed a jagged reef between Bee and I, and I knew I could touch the hard ebony of the beak's end if I dared. Instead, I clung for dear life to my seatbelt as our hiding place was lifted high into the air. We began to shake in a rhythmic, lilting pattern, and foliage rushed past our windows.

Bee cried out and I reached my hand around the beak and found his. "Hang on tight. He's taking us to his nest."

"Will we become food for his babies?" he hiccuped.

"We'll see," I said. "It depends on if he remembers us."

That wasn't much of a hope.

Puff used to be our pet. Before the volcano blew and all the Carbon dioxide got trapped under the atmosphere, people had lots of pets. Dad thought it was a trick of the government plotted at the same time, and my best friend's mum thought it was an attempt by scientists to save life on the planet, that triggered plants and animals to grow so quickly. It hadn't taken many years for the quick-breeding animals to become giants. Bugs, then birds, then who knew what was coming next.

Puff started out small and helpless, and Dad let us keep him for a bit, but he grew so fast that by the next week he wouldn't fit inside the house. Dad was afraid he'd mistake us for bugs--the smaller kinds, so we let him out with the rest of nature gone wild, and then we did our best to hide.

I wasn't sure what I believed out of all of it, but it didn't really matter anyway, especially after Dad disappeared while trying to find us food.

Bee and I went out to search for him the next week because we were hungry. We snuck car to car in the dark, hoping a bat or rat wouldn't swoop down and grab us. But daytime was more dangerous, even, which is why we were sleeping inside the hot, bright vehicle. I was glad I'd made us buckle.

Not much longer, our car was dropped and I whuffed as the seat belt caught at my chest with full gravity. Bee whimpered and I hoped he was all right. When nothing more happened, I quietly unclipped the seatbelt and clambered around the metal rift to unclip Bee's. There was a chance, if we were quick, that we could escape before Puff came back.

"Let's go," I whispered to Bee. "Out this window. Let's see if we can hide."

White-faced, he nodded and followed me over the glass shards into the shadow of a very large rock, and then we held our breath, waiting. I wrapped my arm around Bee, who tucked his face into my shirt.

A voice swept all of our caution to the wind. "Dandy! Bee!" it called.

"Dad!" I screamed, and raced around the rock into his arms.

"Oh Dandy, Bee. I was so scared for you. Are you two all right?"

I nodded and after he checked us all over to be sure, he said, "Come into the cave. I can't believe it. Puff found you."

"He seemed to have," I said, shivering as we pulled into the shadowy crevice. I wrinkled my nose at the bug legs strewn across the ground.

"Watch your step. After they dry, I'm going to take those and weave them into a barrier for the front door," Dad said. "Puff snapped up the apple I was harvesting from and brought me here. I tried to sneak off four times but he found me each time and brought me back. Finally, I yelled at him and told him I was trying to find you. And then he did," he smiled. "He recognizes us, my loves."

"And now," he said, "I believe we're his pets."

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This story was inspired both by Suzanne Warr's prompt "the car-trip of a lifetime" and by my own birds. I have four of them, two sun conures and two caiques, and their fluffy, know-better attitudes inspire all sorts of soap operas. Just to show you what they're like, here are pics. The first one is Ari, our white belly caique. The second is Phoenix, a male sun conure. And the last has Storm, our black-headed caique up on my head, Phoenix again on the right, and Angel, our female sun peering at him. No, we're not encouraging babies, and they live for a very long time, at least thirty years!

If the tides were turned, what pet would you pick to take care of you?