Friday 31 August 2012

123: Coralicious



Life under the sea is much the same as life on land, except for the air, I guess.  And fire.  We don’t have fire.  Nor electricity, that wouldn’t be safe.  So other than air, fire and electricity, life under the sea is much the same as life on land.

We have jobs and mortgages and politicians who you wouldn’t trust as far as you could propel them.  We have families and roads and most of us have pets, although most people choose a fish.  We read and dance and have dreams just like you do.  And we have adventures.  One day we’ll invent something so we can come up and see you on land instead of just holding our gills and diving into the air for a glance landward.

My dream of adventure just came true.  I was exploring the great coral lands off the shore of Penzance.  It is miles from home, almost five miles, but adventurers should be brave and prepared to risk everything in search of that new discovery.  And I think I finally found it.

I swam over foot after foot of white coral, the sort you land dwellers expect to be in exotic locations where holidays cost as much as your car.  Then there was delicate yellow then pale green fading to grey and lastly a muddy brown probably close to a horrible outlet pipe.  Just beyond that was an outcrop perhaps the size of one of your buses.  It was blue.  Then green.  Then blue and green together.  The colours changed as I watched, pulsing before my eyes, colour swirling and splodging at random, never the same pattern or shade twice.

My grandmother told me about such a place when I was small, reading from story books as I drifted off to sleep in my crib.  It was mythical, much like the “Atlantis” we suggested to your people.  Nobody really believed but in the darkest part of the night, we hoped that maybe it would be true.

Explorers would normally plant a flag somewhere like this but I had none with me.  The most I’d hoped for was to discover some treasure, probably old junk discarded by your people but invaluable for us to build our towns.  I snapped as many photos as my camera would take, then called in my find to the Coralogical Society.

“Will you call it after me?” I asked.

“That’s usual,” he said.  “What’s your name?”

“Ishus,” I replied.

Maybe I should have spelled it out to him, but it's close enough.




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