Alien

There is so much here that can kill me. I know that. I think about it constantly.

That little purple slug with the florescent orange spikes? Yeah, deadly poison.

That fish over there that looks real pretty with the pointy fins? Deadly poison.

Those barracuda that have been following me for the last mile or so because they're attracted to the silver of my watch? Teeth.

I swear if I see anything bigger than those fucking barracuda I'm going to freak out and firebomb the whole ocean. Yeah, I know how silly it sounds to say firebomb and ocean in the same sentence. Yeah I know I don't have any feasible way to actually firebomb anything.

But I'll fucking do it.

When I swim up to the top and float on my back I start thinking that some giant toothy beast is going to think I'm food and rip me to shreds, or that gulls are going to think I'm dead in the water and try to tear out my entrails with their beaks and I'll scream and thrash as I watch the blood and sinew and intestines and a myriad of things I never even knew I had get ripped out of my body and devoured, and my blood will all leak out and it wouldn't count for more than a speck compared to the rest of the ocean. Thinking about that, though, calms me somehow, and I'm able to look at the sky and see shapes in the only three clouds in the sky and as the terrier collides with the fire truck and merges into an amorphous blob I see something else and call "amoeba" out towards the sun.

I'm letting the tide take me in; I watch the island come to me and the waves wash over me. One gets under and carries me like a magic carpet on roller coaster tracks, fluid but jostling, and I roll in the wave and the surf and the sand without cause for concern.

I forget to breathe for about thirty seconds until my lungs begin to throw a little pain my way to let me know I should. I push my head up out of the wet sand and take a deep breath and feel life enter my body.

It's staring at me when I finally open my eyes. It's looking at me with its claws up in a defensive pose, or, I guess, what I imagine its defensive pose to be. The fuck do I know about crustacean behavior, anyway? Anyway, it's frozen in place, by, fear if the creature could actually feel something like fear. It doesn't know what to do. I stay still as it does and just look at it. I relax my face and try to give it one of those Bodhisattva stares, as if that would tell the thing that I have no designs to harm it, as if it would understand. It scuttles away so who the hell knows. Still, I realized that it was something of a kindred spirit, alone in an environment where everything can kill it, where it is out of place, even with the legs. I always used to believe they came from space, building tiny empires in the sand and coral of an adopted home, but I suppose everything finds itself alien sometime or another.