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.
FATHOMLESS
In the murky depths, he could just about see it coming. The sheen of slick black and stark streaks of white cutting through the dark water at impossible speed. A giant of the deep. His most natural predator. The orca, a lone young bull who had been hunting him for hours now, was starting to gain on him. Oisín could already imagine the orca’s maw opening and swallowing him whole. He tried not to give into panic. The same panic he had felt when he was separated from his kin, mere days ago. But he knew that once the orca’s teeth clamped around his tail it would be all over. He could already feel phantom teeth marks against his skin.
His seal skin used to mean so little to him back when it was sandy brown and dappled. He had traded it in for one more befitting him, a sleek, dark grey, not long after he had realised he was a boy. To a selkie, their coat was their most valued treasure. But for Oisín finding one that at last made him feel like himself had made it all the more precious.
As he propelled himself through the water, he sensed the orca gaining. Oisín was a fast swimmer, but not the fastest of his clan. Memories of the last moment when he had seen them all, rocked through his mind. He remembered his own teeth clamped around taut rope as he had thrashed with all his might. He and his kin had been fighting to free a humpback whale caught in a whaler’s net.
Humpback whales had always been kind to him and his people. To selkies and ordinary seals alike they were considered a friend. But as this one, the matriarch of her pod, had kicked herself free, Oisín had found himself propelled by the tide of her tail fin far away from his clan. At least if he died now alone at sea, he would know that his final act, which had led him down this unfortunate path had been a good one.
As he felt the first brush of the orca’s teeth against his tail, his heart pumped faster. This most certainly would be the end of him. But then he heard it. A song, haunting and beautiful. A vast mass of grey blurred his vision. Oisín blinked, and the mass came into focus. It was the humpback whale. She had found him. And she now blocked the orca’s way. Oisín stared at these two titans of the deep braced against each other.
He couldn’t fault the orca for hunting him. He supposed to every fish he caught in his jaws, he was a monster too. But as the humpback whale came to his aid, Oisín could only be thankful, as luck won out over nature this day. He turned away from the giants behind him to face the endless sea and resumed his journey to find his kin.
Robert Kelly, is a trans writer from Northern Ireland who writes both fantasy and horror. He was a runner-up for the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2022 and his fiction has appeared in the United Faedom Publishing anthology Love Like This and the Dragon Soul Press anthologies To Hunt and to Hold, Magick & Mystery and Rogue Waves. He enjoys writing stories that focus on finding the strange and supernatural in the ordinary, our relationship with nature and centre around LGBTQ+ characters in fantasy settings.
If you enjoyed this story you can find it and more in the Hawthorn & Ash 2023 anthology.
Iron Faerie Publishing 