Spring is in the air… but what’s in the water?!? Dive into this week’s creepy flash fiction to find out!
The water terrified him ever since he lost his trawler to it. He could have got a job in one of the island’s cafe’s and restaurants serving tourists, if he’d been able to cook or talk to people. And as much as the heaving grey brown of the ocean terrified him, it was still home.
The doctors told him he’d been lucky to survive.
He never told them it felt more like he’d been rejected.
Nobody wanted to know what lived down there out of the sunlight: they relied on fishing near the surface and already looked at him like they knew he should be dead.
And he hadn’t actually seen it. He’d only seen where it lived.
After the water had dragged his trawler to the seabed, he’d clung to an empty fuel jerry can for several hours before the cold had loosened his grip. The dense murky gravity of the freezing ocean had pulled him down, his feet merging with the silt of the ocean floor as the last bubbles of his oxygen burst escaped to the sky high above him. His trawler was already there, vague through the stirred up sediment, almost like it had parked at the side of a long winding road. But the road had not led to the open ocean or to land. Despite being laid out in front of him, it had somehow led further down.
Kelp and sea anemones grew along a path which wound around enormous algae-covered columns. Even the closest must have been several hundred foot tall. Its round base was thicker than the length of his trawler.
It proved that the path led down as they must otherwise have broached the ocean’s surface.
But the worst thing was the pyramid crouching at the far end of the downward path, hidden behind the murk, except where a green light shone from its windows. He was sure that it was the thing’s size, rather than lack of oxygen, had shut his brain down at that moment.
It took a while, but his insurance bought him a new trawler. By any objective measure, it was a better boat, but he hated it because it didn’t feel like his. He found a crew of men and women unable to find work anywhere else and returned to the waters.
He’d never wanted to become a fisherman, but that was the work that was available. The only thing he liked about it was the silence, and he got plenty of that with his new crew. Superstitious like all fishermen, as soon as they left sight of land, they avoided saying a single word to him.
He knew they wouldn’t believe him anyway, wouldn’t want to. And he was half inclined himself to believe he’d been concussed and dreamed shadows into fantastic shapes.
But that couldn’t explain the hook dug into his stomach through his bellybutton which pulled him out to the waves each day.
One day, the invisible cord would pull tight and tug him, twitching and struggling, into the water by the fisher thing that lived in the pyramid behind the garden under the sea.
Help the Ukraine while listening to great music? Sounds good!
Berlin-based Pelagic Records is releasing a limited edition double cassette sampler with 100% of the proceeds going to Berlin-based Be An Angel charity which is accompanying Ukrainian refugees, finding them homes, jobs and deal with paperwork (paperwork in Germany. That’s a big job!) and more.
Prefer podcasts? Great!
Podchaser is a site for reviewing podcasts, and throughout April they will donate 25 cents for every review you submit. In other words, support your favourite podcasts be leaving them a review AND feed people from the Ukraine!
Here are the full details on how it works and here are a couple of podcast ideas to get you started: https://www.podchaser.com/users/morgandelaney/reviews
