A New Place

The honeyed early-morning sun glinted off the lapping waters like a thousand tiny jewels. Birds sang in the June air, small voices lilting in a soothing natural orchestra. Past the waterside reeds, the fronds of tall palms whispered in a light breeze. Puffy cotton candy-colored clouds drifted across the pale blue sky, in no rush. Fisher birds, early to the hunt, dove and splashed into the sunlight-speckled water, and swooped back into the air with their quarry wriggling in their beaks. A few gulls rode the gentle waves, only to take to the air shrieking as a hand emerged from the blue water in a shower of droplets.

A woman, to whom the hand belonged, surfaced, and gasped her very first breath of true oxygen. The breeze stung her opalescent skin; the sun pierced her pale silver eyes. She moved her arm to shield her eyes, and saw her skin in daylight for the first time. Translucent, scaled as a fish. Blue veins ran patterns in the hollow of her wrist. She twisted her arm this way and that, watching the colors in her skin change. The burn of the bright light ebbed, and she could see clearly.

The creature let out a burbling call, and it sounded strange to her own ears. Life underwater. Never before had she heard her own voice so loud and clear.

Something called in return, and the creature turned toward the source of the noise. The sand rose up into a mound of /land/, an island, dotted with tall, spindly things that erupted in green fronds at their tops. Small, flying things, like fish, flitted from these fronds. They chirped, as the creature did. She knew their name from whale song. Birds.

The sand bubbled around her toes as the creature struck out for the island. The beach sloped upward, drawing her out of the water, until the brilliant gold sun was warming her back. Water streamed down from her hair. Her feet sank into the foamy sand as she stepped from the ocean. More bird calls sounded, and she answered enthusiastically.

This island was alive. Land-native plants stretched from one end of the beach to the other. Birds fluttered to a fro among the fronds overheard. A green thing the size of a tuna fish with a long, snakelike tail and a scaly beard, meandered lazily from a bush and passed by the creature, walking on strange five-toed feet with the toes facing two different directions. It watched her with tiny eyes that also reminded her of tuna. Then it wandered off.

Excitement budded in the creature's chest. She followed the green quadruped for a time, admiring its zig-zagging gait, watching its long, tapering tail score furrows into the sand as it wriggled its skinny body along on its short legs.

Before long, a crab scuttled between the creature and the object of her attention. She eyed the crustacean as it slipped down the beach to where the sand was still being wet by the surf. She'd seen crabs, down on the seabed. This one only interested her because of the way the climbing sun turned its pale yellow shell to orange flame. This new place was so alive with color.

A bird's frantic flapping and crying turned the creature's head. At the base of one of the land plants laid a small mass of browned fronds, woven tightly together. Moving steadily, the creature stepped over to the thing and moved it with her hand. She turned it over, the rough texture poking her delicate fingers. It was concave and round. Soft tufts, presumably the bird's, poked from different angles in the recesses of the creation. Bits of eggshell stuck from the woven pieces as well, and the nest was sticky with yellow ooze.

Panicked shrieks forewarned the creature of the sharp jabs that pounded into her head with vehemence. Startled, she dropped the bird's home, and held up her arms to shield her face from its righteous fury. She called an apology, recoiling from the stinging in her arms and head. She fell back, her body connecting abruptly with the sand, and wished the bird would go away.

The assailing stopped. The creature moved her hands and checked for the bird. It had vanished, shrieking, into the air. She looked on her arms, striped and dotted with pink and red, and her stomach turned. She shouldn't have touched the bird's home. She wished she hadn't.

Unsteadily, the creature pushed herself to her feet. The sand had begun to shimmer and burn on her skin. This new place had seemed so magnificent at first, too.

Back down the beach, the brilliant blue of the sea appeared, incredibly inviting. To go back and have no more angry birds striking her head and arms, no sand nor sun scalding her sensitive flesh. The idea had its merits.

But this island was large, and her misfortunes exploring had been few. Perhaps she'd see more wonderful things, more scaled quadrupeds or more forgiving birds.

The creature pressed on, drawn into the lush foliage beyond the edges of the beach. The plants that tickled her skin as she walked by were soft, and swayed gently behind her. Gulls cried from the blueness up above, gliding smoothly towards the waves, to feast on the fish coming into the shallows. Nearby, clinging to the rough skin of one of the skinny fern-like plants, a watery green animal barely longer than her little finger rested. It, like the green being from earlier, was extremely akin to a snake. And yet, very much different.

When she stretched out her hand, the other creature darted out of sight. She breathed it a soft farewell, even as she searched the brown limb before her for its enchanting little shape. The fronds overhead swayed, scattering sunlight across the bounteous ferns around her in a silent rhythm.

Pure oxygen even smelled different than the sea. The scent of earth and dry rock, animals of countless kinds, the skybirds, and the plants themselves all together emitted a strong and yet lovely perfume that tickled the creature's delicate nostrils.

The sun traversed the sky, inching steadily toward gargantuan black rocks that jutted upward, hulking and wondrous.

As the creature continued her adventure, she kept her pearl-like eyes wide open, all the better to miss nothing.

Ever more land animals moved about in the world around her, calling and cawing and crying in a harmonious push-and-pull melody that only ever grew louder. The tall, wood-bodied plants surrounded her, so the song was all her ears knew. The only beast not joining the symphony was a gray-and-brown dappled turtle, which had thick, sturdy legs instead of flippers, and shambled across her path without hurry. The creature touched the rough shell where a snail had made a gleaming path of mucus in the thin dry layer of earth that covered the turtle. The snail trail wove a dizzying pattern on the already-complex markings of the beast's home. The creature followed the design with her eyes until the ferns swallowed the turtle once more.

Still further into this place, the creature plunged. The land sloped in places and erupted in places. Earth and rock were interspersed. The lush ferns that were so soft on her toes, at times, gave way to sharp stones that sent ringing pain up through the flesh of her feet. She peered up a steep rock face, unforgiving dark silver stone that reached so high she couldn't even make out its peak. Nothing lived on this cliff but white birds that sounded their calls and swooped in deliberate arcs from one crack in the stone to the next.

The creature turned from the cliffs and the sharpness of the ground back into the soothing green shade of the jungle, where once again soft moss and ferns made walking so much more pleasant.

An unfamiliar noise drew her attention aloft. A beast draped in thick, algae-like red hair, rested its short-bodied form on a vine-swathed limb. It made the noise again, watching her with small, twinkling eyes. It itched its hairy round belly with one of its long arms. The creature peeled back its fleshy lips and showed to her a row of teeth, yellow and long, flat but for two pointed fangs. The creature stretched her own lips and returned the gesture. The animal above bellowed and scrambled from its perch, alighting on a different wood plant further along, chattering jovially.

The creature moved to follow its path, but her toes caught something rough and sent it clattering. She turned her eyes to the source of the fuss and her breath caught. A bizarre-looking skeleton, firm and dark gray, lay in a misshapen heap in the midst of a fern bed. The ribs were wide and flat, some broken off, leaving jagged edges. There were the moss-riddled bones of what must be a hand, not so different from the shape of her own, half-covered by earth. The creature examined this sight, feeling along her own ribs, visualizing the bones in her hands as she turned them back and forth before her face. It was the skull, though, lightly whitened, perhaps by the sun, that intrigued her most. It was jawless, and rested just above the ribs. The creature moved closer and eyed it, tracing her teeth through her skin. Her cheeks. Her brow. She compared it to the skull on the ground. A pang of sadness caused her to frown. This creature may have been like her. At the very least, it must have looked like her. And here it was, long dead, unremembered, not far from the sea.

She tore some greenery from one of the plants and laid these gently across the eye hollows of the fallen beast. She burbled a brief tribute, and then she got to her feet, and turned herself back toward her ocean home.

By the time her feet met the sand once more, the birdsong had faded. Turning her face to the broad blue sky, she found that it was no longer blue. It had exploded into a startling, almost violent cascade of flaming orange and violet and even green. The sun vanished beyond the distant cliffs, and before long the colors followed it into a pale blue, leaving behind tiny dots of brilliant white lights.

The creature followed the trail of the dots until she was staring straight up in dumbstruck wonder. Innumerable, pristine, glittering miniature suns, like countless jewels, lit the sky from horizon to horizon. The world around her, this strange, melancholy, magnificent place, sat in a breathtaking deep indigo hue, unlike anything she'd ever seen.

After a time, she tore herself from the starlight and slipped back down the sand until her toes squished once again into the wet surf. The water met her ankles and then her knees, familiar and chilly. The sky went on forever over the black waves. As the creature sunk below the surface, she took in the sight of the bright lights above scattered across the surface of the water in neverending motion, and imagined carrying them into the depths with her.