Welcome to this week’s installment of many micro stories, ranging in length from 100 words to 500 words.
With each story we hope to deliver a little whimsy into the lives of our readers.
WHAT MAKES THEM GLOW
Between the smog and light pollution, only the brightest few stars burn visible. Twinkling lights stare from an oil derrick miles offshore, its silhouette cutting a jagged hole in the sunset’s afterglow. The ocean, sweetly rank, makes a mindless black roar over a haunting spectacle of blue light playing on the beach and rolling in the curls of waves.
“What do think they want?” Carla asks, bare skin cloaked in twilight. Her eyes gleam at the corners.
I can never tell when she’s joking.
“I doubt they know we exist,” I say.
“And yet they’ve lured us here.”
I think my exposition on how the luciferin in their cells makes them glow might have brought her there.
She turns away from the phantasmal lights to face me. Brilliant froth ripples around her heels, wetting and lighting my toes.
Mid-kiss, her jaw goes slack, lips parted as if pregnant with something urgent to say.
“What is it?” I ask.
She falls with a wet thud. Bioluminescent sparkles creep up her legs with the surf.
I can’t tell if she’s joking.
The sound of damp scraping, a brief gurgle in the water, and an eerie blue glow the size of her body glides under the waves. In a blink it’s gone. An empty depression in the sand fills with water at my feet.
Wordless terror joins the ocean’s tumult as I grasp fleeting waves, groping through the dark, stirring sea fire.
Nathan Sweem is a graduate of CSU Sacramento and Western Governors University. He studied Arabic at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, serving five years in the Army as a cryptologic linguist. He graduated top of his class at Goodfellow AFB and spent a year in and around Mosul, Iraq with the 66th MICO, 3d ACR. He left the Army and taught math for three years at South Medford High School in Southern Oregon. His work has appeared in The Literary Hatchet, Diet Milk Magazine, Solid Food Press, Land Beyond the World, The Worlds Within, and others.
If you enjoyed this drabble you can find it and more in the Hawthorn & Ash 2023 anthology.
Iron Faerie Publishing 