SSCS 02: Installment 14 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 14 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
She clipped the flowers, one, two, …five, …. Before she could get to the sixth, a quiet, horrible sound reached her, like iron nails dragging along the side of an iron drum. Flinching back but trying to hold still, Mina risked a peek to her right. There were the kraken eye-stalks again peering around the boulder, a second one coming into view as she watched, and then a third. They blinked at her again, two of them, out of sync, then whipped away out of sight. Holding still another moment, Mina caught sight of movement near her feet, and looked down to see one silvery, purpley, half-translucent tentacle also drawing back behind the boulder, as though being extra stealthy.
And what in the fucking, pig-riddled, slime-drenched, purple, foggy kraken pits was she supposed to do in the face of that?
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 14: 20.0219
Afterwards, Mina wasn’t sure she could ever properly tell the story of what she went through to get the rest of those stupid oyster bells.
It ought to have made a great story, being so wildly improbable as to be rightly hilarious. But Mina was too furious through most of it – and too terrified the rest of the time, that even weeks later, remembering, her heart still pounded so hard with the fury and terror of it that she was sure she must be visibly shaking. And the thought of trying to tell someone else and knowing they wouldn’t feel the anger right along with her just made her heart hammer all the harder.
But, she told the story to herself a few times even still, so she wouldn’t forget it. It really would make a good – probably hilarious – story …just not any time this century.
The story – the facts of it anyway – went like this: One horrible day, the spire’s kraken ate a stupid, greedy pig who had eaten flying fruit. And that pig, along with all the other greedy pigs, had eaten all the roses off of the spire’s high rose vine. So, long-suffering Mina got sent down to the base of the spire to gather oyster bells to substitute for holy tea on the same day there was also a terrifying, flying kraken on the loose. Fortunately, the tide had just gone out, so she had a fair amount of time, and fortunately the oyster bells – at least on the north side of the spire – were blooming with what was, for them, relative abandon. But unfortunately the kraken-who-could-now-fly – and who had probably pooped on Mina earlier – apparently decided that it would be great fun to sneak along after Mina while she gathered oyster bells from the crevices of the very sharp spire boulders, and occasionally jump out and say ‘boo!’ Not only that, but when she finally gave up in a fit of rage and screamed ‘boo’ back at it, it apparently found this a marvelous addition to the game and made its own ‘boo’s after that even scarier and louder to match hers.
At first, after the first really scary time, Mina had tried turning back toward the spire stairs – and to damp, salty hell with the oyster bells! the Other One herself could just come down here if she needed them so badly. But as soon as she did that, she noticed one of the kraken’s tentacles snaking toward her from that side of her path just a moment before two eye stalks flipped up out of the waves just ahead of her with that same awful nails-on-iron sound screeching through the air. So, Mina turned around and went back in the direction of more oyster bells.
And on and on it went.
She made it around the next spire boulder, and was ‘rewarded’ with the sight of several clumps of shiny, black oyster bells peeking up from cracks in the salty, wet rocks. The kraken even waited until she was kneeling down at the third patch before it jumped out at her again. But this time was worse than before. This time, it managed to sneak a tentacle over her ankle before dropping the rest of them down in front of her face from above. Because it had been hugging the line of boulders on the wall above her just as though it was perfectly familiar with how to bob around and sneak through the air like that was where krakens normally lived and not under water at the bottom of a spire well.
(And never mind that when Hedwin ate flying fruit he really did bob around, like the steering mechanism for up and down was something well outside the realm of his control. But then, even the pigs had gotten enough the hang of things to get absolutely everywhere on the spire – as evidenced by the sudden, ubiquitous presence of their shit. Maybe it really was just people who were incompetent fliers.)