SSCS 02: Installment 31 of 32
How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
This is Installment 31 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…
The First Hum stretched and stretched, and somehow the waves seemed to move slower, and slower, as though their song was asking the sea itself to pause. Then gran-Tom nodded, and Mina’s voice slipped over into the Second Hum, so easily that at first she didn’t realize that it was just her singing it and that gran-Tom had stayed with the First. The waves moved slower still, almost crawling up the faces of rock, and they hadn’t quite crested before Mina realized something else: There were still two voices singing the First Hum.
And that was when the great, flowing body of the kraken made itself visible to her, riding just beneath them within the churn and coil of the waves.
…How to Catch Flying Pigs, and Sea Monsters
Installment 31: 21.1101
They were much, much, much too close to it! That was the first coherent thought Mina’s brain was able to muster, even though her mouth and throat were still somehow steady and singing just the way they needed to be. And her arms and legs hadn’t so much as twitched, so she was still sitting securely on her perch of rock, rather than flailing down to her bloody death the way the sudden shriek of those thoughts and the sharp jabbing of her heart against her rib cage would have had her doing. She was still singing, and so was gran-Tom.
And so was an enormous, deadly kraken that was near enough to her to snatch her down to it by an ankle. It might have played her a horribly drawn out and terrifying game of peek-a-boo yesterday, but the one thing Mina was sure of from her sing with gran-Tom last night was that the kraken was the deadliness of the sea. Always, and unfailingly. And it was singing – and watching her.
But then gran-Tom nodded again, and Mina’s voice shifted up to the Third Hum, perfect and smooth. And the sea changed. The sea changed.
The waves were still moving slowly, but they were far away now. And instead there was the Moon. Like the sea was Mina’s body, and – even though the Moon wasn’t risen yet and she shouldn’t have known where it was – her whole self was swaying toward that Moon.
Except that the sea wasn’t her body. It was too vast for that, too shining blue and depthless black. Instead her body was the song, twining in and around the rest of the song, gran-Tom and the kraken, tentacles locked close. Holding steady against the deep, deep wash of the Moon.
That was when the Other One joined them, too.
She came in on the First Hum, riding the voice of the kraken – the perfect door into the sea. And for a moment Mina was drowning in Her, in a compulsion stronger even than the Moon. It insisted on singing the old songs. All of them. Down in the deepest depths of the sea. There was nothing else there but the songs. Over and over and over. Over and over. Mina felt herself stretched thin between them, too small and weak to do anything but circle them ‘round and around, too bent into that circle to swim straight, or to stop.
There was nothing at all, but the songs, and the sea.
And then the waves were receding again, still slow, but faster than before. And the kraken was gone. And Mina, alone, would have slipped and fallen…somewhere, except that there again was the Moon, pulling her and holding her close.
She’d fallen back to the Second Hum without knowing it, but now already the other half of the song was pulling at her, gran-Tom’s First Hum, buzzing beneath her own, until she gave in and joined it.
They stopping singing altogether in the same moment, on the same breath. And for that bare moment, nothing moved at all.
And then everything moved much, much too quickly, and Mina would have fallen, this time from the rocks she sat on – lurching over sideways to heave up what little bits of water and awful breakfast had been left in her stomach – except that gran-Tom’s tentacles had wrapped tight around her waist now and held her fast.
When she was finally able to make her body stop shaking and shuddering, Mina found that, in the meantime, gran-Tom had called up a quiet song to fill the emptiness. It wasn’t one of the Hums she’d taught Mina, and it didn’t really sound like a Moon song at all, except that there was something ragged and hollow inside Mina’s chest that felt soothed by it somehow. Something that had been shrieking, or sobbing, allowed to go still.
When gran-Tom stopped singing, the edges of the music seemed to tuck themselves into that grieving hollow so that, within the noise of the crashing waves, the song wasn’t entirely gone. It was Mina’s now too, for always.