It’s a strange thing that has come from the sea. Some of the youngest skip about it where it lies, shouting and laughing. Their soft bare feet pluck wet sand from its bed. Others huddle low nearby, squatting like crabs. They lean close to whisper its names in the ears of their friends. One hand points, the other cups the skull. Breathless giggles part hair like the breeze.
The older children come marching when they hear, over the grass and down to the beach with sticks and stones in hand, leaving their game pieces strewn on the ground. Stuck shells and seaweed pave the path of their striding column, and the little ones scatter like the froth of a wave before it. The bigger ones do not squat about the thing, when they find it. They know how to stand on two strong feet.
It’s not as good as it sounded. Doesn’t it do anything? It’s not much to look at. Just a squashed wet mound. Splayed on its back, still, shapeless, limp, dark, slick. No features to speak of. Like a soft sea-smooth stone gone to rot. Smaller than they’d hoped, too. Could fit in a cooking-pot. The suspicious point of a stick jabs down. Nothing happens, so the stick comes down again. Perhaps a little harder. The thing goes black. It was dark before, but now it’s black. And it squeezes into itself, for a second, maybe, no more. And goes still.
They gasp. It moved! A foot comes down. Huge flat flesh plants down hard, right in the middle of the thing. Breaths hush as its skin presses down, down, down. The whole rest of the thing bloats beneath the weight. Its opacity breaks. And curtains of colour ripple out from its heart, a glossy silvery spectrum dancing on its surface like the iridescence of oil: pink, green, red, white, blue, purple. And the watchers shout and point and clutch at their neighbours as slow black ink leaks from under it, stinking, spreading. The children hop backwards as the cold liquid slips over their toes. They can’t get away fast enough. At the front they push back, at the back they push forwards, they want a better look. Hands claw shoulders. Toes stretch, necks crane. Disgust tugs mouth-corners, wrinkles noses. Jeers and noise and laughter burst from their ring of flesh.
Do it again, do it again! Sticks and toes and groping fat fingers swarm down. The soft translucent dermis bends taut in a flurry of quick concavities. It squishes, pulses, shudders, tenses, throbs. High voices hoot and cackle. Its colours slide over it, faster and faster, red, green, purple, orange, brown. Grey sand blackens beneath the drumbeat of ink-stained feet. The younger ones are watching too, now, eyes wide, round lips slack.
When the thing stirs, the children run. None of them goes first, but they all go. Their circle bursts in all directions like fingers unclenching a fist. It doesn’t move fast. Its locomotion is like a worm’s. It bulges and contracts from end to end. Inches over the sand.
Come away, children, the wise mother calls. Come and greet your fathers, back from the hunt. She doesn’t know this thing, but she knows that it is strange. Every child of the seashore knows when a thing is strange.
‘Strangeling’ was published in the Easter 2023 edition of TTBA, the Cambridge University Science Fiction Society (CUSFS) magazine.
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