Tundra

The shore was long and dry and cruel. Curved like a fishhook, it had caught many things that had beached themselves, or else that the tide washed up– small fish, sea urchins, a great number of animals in shells, the occasional crab and even an octopus, which lay flat, its head an exhausted balloon and its suckered limbs arranged in a crown. Here in the great floating, countless things lost their lives, but that was not the only strange thing about being out of the water. A rocky stage, like the staggered ones that stepped down to the edge of the continental shelf, jutted out over the ocean. Along its top, roaming beasts as large as elders could be seen marching single file in their shoal, their backs coated with fine threads of brownish weeds. Strangest of all, however, was the orb up in the sky. Aais couldn’t have said what that was, only that it was red and engorged like a huge, baleful eye.

Nevertheless, the sea was still present. He could hear it sucking restlessly on the battered beach, and he could see the waves muscling and jostling to be at the head of the pack. The mantle of the breaking tide was a bright foam that each wavelet wore around its shoulders like a fur stole. Though suicidal, they were comforting, his companions on a long trek along the bay and around the headland where a pyramid of driftwood, territorially arranged by someone, marked its end.

As he staggered up the shore, walking on two legs like a man, Aais experienced thirst for the first time. He had no word for the pining that told him to jump into the water despite being no more than three or four steps from the lapping edge of his home. He only knew the dryness in his gills, the fact that he was periodically driven to dip them in the salty sea, and that when he did so, he felt better. At intervals, he would rush back to the ocean that was his mother and his world, dive in and then drag himself up the incline again, the water nagging at his waist, hips, ankles and feet.

Finally, he came to a point where the beach ended abruptly, and there was only forest rising out of the shallow depression where sand bunker met bay. He would have to leave the sea behind. Thankfully, he had a plan. Filling the pouches in his cheeks and the larger pocket down his front with water, he hoped to carry enough to sustain him throughout his journey. Besides, didn’t plants need water? He wondered. Wouldn’t there be trickling streams he could follow in the forest?

As he headed away from the ocean for the first time in his life, Aais hoped so.