YAFF Muse: Small Fish, Big Pond

By Cam

YAFF Muse is a new weekly blog series featuring some YA Fiction Fanatics members. In this series, we’ll post original short stories created from an image meant to inspire our Muse. Hope you enjoy! And don’t forget to check out the other *YAFFers participating in this series (links below).

Photo Credit: Musical Burial by Official Twilamore

Small Fish, Big Pond

He had fisherman hands. Cracked. Hairy. And slippery enough to make it seem like his palms were really neoprene mitts in disguise. When he grabbed hold of my wrist, I remembered cringing at the contact.

“It’s easier if you don’t struggle.”

Somehow, I doubted this. I remembered all those stupid stories about females too naïve for their own good. Females who jumped at the chance to have a male smile at them and say something debonair like, “The boys in your school must go crazy when they see you.”

He didn’t say that to me. If he had, things might’ve turned out different. As it were, he yanked me over the dock and hissed a “stop thrashing, will ya?” as he pressed his fingers into the muscle between my neck and my shoulder. It stung and for one second, I froze and forgot to struggle.

My face kissed the sand when he tossed me. I expected softness, like the powdery stuff on the Gulf’s white beaches. But it wasn’t anything like that. It was gritty and mixed with what felt like leftover bits of the crumbling concrete pillar by the pier.

“Come on, I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

And just like that, the only thing left behind was the impression my cheek had made in the sand.

* * *

The water frothed by my stomach. I expected it to be as cold as everything else. But it felt like sun-ripened water after nine in the morning.

The surf swept up again. This time, it washed over my stomach and splashed my chest and my face. It was only a matter of time before those waves owned me. I ground my teeth and tried rolling the other way, toward the gritty—dry—sand. But as soon as I wiggled my hips, the trench my body had dug opened up and swallowed me into a deeper, wetter, colder hole. The sand turned into hardening cement. I couldn’t feel my lower half.

When the next wave rushed over me, my body slipped out of its skin. But something wasn’t right. The familiar tingling sensations in my extremities—like a deep stretch after a long nap or the arousing zip of salt water pumping through my veins—was absent.

I blinked. Bubbles swarmed my face and it took me a moment before I truly realized how bad this situation was for me.

Liquid filled my lungs. Instinct took over and I fought to keep my head above the surface, to guide my arms through the water and kick my legs in propulsion. But red seeped out of my limbs.

I stopped moving.

No. There were no limbs. Not anymore. I remembered now. He’d cut them off, thrown them into the ocean like worm guts or broken lures. And he’d left me here to die, to drown in my blood and in the unfulfilled dream of being something other than me.

© 2010 Cambria Dillon

(Author’s Note: So apparently when I see iPods on the sand, I think about torture and drowning. Sorry Steve Jobs. And because I think my concept is a little more subtle this week, I’ll clarify here: the narrator in my story was a fish. The guy was someone fishing who caught her and didn’t think the little swimmer he hooked had any big aspirations…but she did. She wanted to be anything but a fish. So there you go. Catch and release, peeps. Catch and release. )

*Don’t forget to check out other stories from YAFF Muse participants:

RM Gilbert
Min Buchanan
Rebekah Purdy
Traci Kenworth
Vanessa Barger