one million eyes

The Costa Rican sun baked my shoulders as I sunk my toes in warm sand. I gazed across crystal water towards the rocky cliffs while sparkles shimmered off bouncing waves as though diamonds had been cast across the ocean’s surface. 

With a final breath of sunshine air, I positioned my snorkel’s mouthpiece and dove into the sparkles. Cool water swept over my skin, and I pulled my fins over my feet. As I followed the gentle swirl kicked up by my husband, the steady pssshhh… pssshhh… of air flowing through my snorkel held a meditative quality while I moved my fins in repetitive serenity.

We glided through emptiness, not a speck of life to be seen, white sand and swirling bubbles our only companions as we closed the distance to our destination. 

As though crossing into another domain, the ocean floor transitioned from monotonous sand to rocks and boulders, and with the change in scenery, the ocean awoke. Mounds, crags, and crevices of all shapes and sizes were a playground for creatures whose colorful patterns glowed under flickers of sunlight that stretched below the surface. 

My pulse quickened, but not only because of the beauty of the underworld. 

I stayed well back.

A small school of black-striped yellow damselfish rippled by. They kept their distance, spying me with considerate eyes. A parrotfish, orange lips puckered in an almost-kiss, bobbled up from a fissure in the rocks, regarded me, and left me alone. 

I smiled through my snorkel. The unbroken pssshhh… pssshhh… emptied my mind of schedules and to-do lists as the colorful ocean community went about their day. Angelfish, urchins, queens, and devils played their part, showing off their beauty but keeping clear of the human with ichthyophobia. 

My eyes eager for more wonders of the sea, I pushed my fins through the water and glided around a rock. As I drifted into the shadows of the cove, the temperature dropped. Goosebumps sprung up across my torso. If the ocean could talk, it had fallen silent. The rainbow community was gone, the rocks and crevices a ghost town. 

I scanned the barren space. A lone butterflyfish, its purples dulled in the shadows, zipped out of sight. The emptiness pressed down on me as though I was fifty feet under the ocean rather than floating on the surface. 

And then, movement—a ripple, a flash. A great wall of fish emerged from the darkest corner. Their tiny, bullet-shaped bodies, glistening silver in speckles of sunlight that breached the water, undulated in unison as they stared at me with beady eyes. 

Ten thousand bullets, pulsing and watching me as though they were a single organism. 

Psh. Psh. 

My flippers stopped flipping. My feet slowly dropped. Their weight pulled me vertical before I kicked again and bobbled my body level. 

The wall watched me. I watched them. An extraordinary school, too many to count. Enjoy this. Take it in. It’s beautiful.

I nodded to the bullets. They watched me and pulsated. 

With a flip of a fin, I turned away. Pumping my legs, I swam back around the rock, towards the damsels and parrots, towards an urchin minding its business on the side of a boulder, towards the most gorgeous yellow pufferfish I had ever laid my eyes on. The puffer grinned and winked. 

Pssshhh… 

I smiled. My heart rate settled.

I shimmied through the water as the puffer disappeared around a bend. I followed, the sun warming my back and water caressing my belly, as I searched for the banana yellow, but Ms. Puffer had vanished like a ghost. Only creeping shadows lay in her wake. 

Those beady-eyed bullets flashed through my mind.

A tap on my leg shot blades of adrenaline through my heart and I jumped, as much as one can jump when suspended in the otherworldly realm of fish. I whipped my head around and met my husband’s smiling, goggled eyes. With a nod and point, he let me know it was time to head back to shore—to leave this world and resume life as a biped. 

With our eyes and hearts filled with the wonders of the ocean, we swam around a rock and stopped short. The mass of gleaming silver undulated two feet in front of us. The organism had grown to twenty thousand individuals—a monster with forty thousand eyes, all staring into me. 

Psh.

I spun back around but another twenty thousand bullets, where crystal waters were a second before, pulsated and stared, stared and pulsated. Vacuous eyes incapable of blinking.

I spun, and spun again, dancing an erratic subaquatic pirouette. The school was now one-hundred thousand strong and multiplying like a cruel magic trick of the sea. It surrounded me and pressed in close, forcing me to be their heart. My husband was gone, lost to the monster, a sacrifice to the water gods. I was on my own.

Psh. Ps. P. 

Kick.

With my hand pressed against my bikini top to keep squirming, slimy invaders from intruding, I swam.

Five-hundred thousand undulating bodies. One million eyes. I searched for an escape, but I was closed within the wall of fish—my own personal Cask of Amontillado—and they were all staring at me, blurping, “Uno de nosotros. Uno de nosotros.”

“No!” I yelled through my snorkel, but the mouthpiece distorted my voice to a garbled wail. My frantic attempts to scream were lost in the weight of water and fish swarming me. 

A nip on my thigh seized my muscles; the edges of my vision darkened. Psh. Psh. Psh. Psh. Another nip, and another.

My greatest fear was absorbing me. The once-small school had become my existence and it went on forever. Everywhere I looked, fish fish fish fish fish fish…

Burst through the wall. Psh. Pick a direction and keep going. Psh. 

Darkness enveloped me as the cave of fish cut all sunlight. A final push, a final kick towards the open ocean, through the empire of slimy, scaly bodies and eyes. 

“Kick!” I gurgled as slippery, wriggly, slug-like bullets bumped my belly, neck, and cheek. I was a salmon struggling upstream through fish soup, my life dependant on tenacity and endurance.

And then it was over.

I had breached the mass. 

I gazed through clear blue. Bright water and white sand stretched out for miles. No fish. I was out. 

Pssshhh… Pssshhh…

I pushed for shore, not daring to look over my shoulder for fear that the black magic would surround me again if I only glimpsed the beast. 

As the waves carried me back to land, images of my husband filled my head. He was tough. He was resilient. He could make it out. 

The ocean spit me out onto the sand. Spluttering the snorkel from my mouth, I blinked at sand-speckled legs standing in front of me. I lifted my head, shielding my eyes from the sun’s glare, and met my husband’s smiling face. “Anchovy pizza tonight, my dear?”

Published in Morbius Blvd Issue #7 available at Amazon.