Author’s Forenote:

            For some reason, my short stories always end up coming out weird. I always try and make them mean something, but sometimes that meaning gets a little lost and buried during the transition from mind to paper. It might help you understand them if you have a little background knowledge. The girl in the story is supposed to represent a sort of Mother Nature, and what her impression would be if she who started this planet, left and then came back to discover how it is now (I am really bad at personification, but I think it was still a pretty good attempt).

                A sort of stillness permeated this soft beach, a feeling of emptiness that not even the gentle rushing of the dying tide could disperse. The seagulls cawed, the crabs scuttled, and yet none could quite intrude on the soft quietness of this tender stretch of sand. None, until a soft, and yet somehow important, ripping sound tore quietly through the middle of the oasis of perpetual quiet.

            In midair, a tear in the fabric of time and space appeared, like a zigzagged piece of a too-bright sunbeam. And out of this small opening stepped a girl, her bare feet barely leaving imprints in the soft sand.

            She was in no way human, although a passerby would have found it impossible to tell you exactly why. Somehow, she was both everything and nothing a watcher would expect to see, until one would simply have to call her different in order to put ones’ mind at rest.

            Her eyes watched the antics of the endless beach with the same sort of innocent wonder and delight that a child who had never seen the sea before would possess, and yet at the same time held a sort of sorrowful amusement of one that had seen many such worlds and had always ranked this better than the last.

            The silent visitor took a slow step forward, drinking in the surf and the wind as if it would all disappear before she had seen her fill. A crab danced over her foot, angered that she might intrude on its territory. With a knowing smile she took a step back, allowing the miffed animal access into its dark tunnel. It had been so long since she had seen these curious creatures; indeed, the sons and daughters of this planet had come far since she had last visited. She had forgotten how beautiful a planet at its prime could be.

            As she gathered herself to watch the falling sunset, the antics of a winged seagull caught her attention. As she watched, the seagull closed two slender claws over a small gray rock, and flapped its wings doggedly. She laughed as the seagull nearly made it off the sand, only to be promptly pulled back down again by the unbalanced weight of the stone. But it was a determined creature; with a soft drop of its wings, it fell upon the stone once more, determined to get the pebble airborne. In a ferocious flurry of feathers, the seagull succeeded, and rock in hand managed to fly high above her head.

            Suddenly, to her horror, the stone accidentally slipped from the creature’s grasp, plunging from its height and falling atop the crab she had early sighted. For a second she worried that the creature might not have survived the stone’s fall, but then the steadfast little crab’s eyes popped out unharmed once more and she smiled. It would be horrible for so dreadful an accident to befall such a helpless creature. She glanced up, searching for the seagull.

            The bird was trying to lift another rock, a smaller one this time. She couldn’t help but smile. It was a clever little creature, for such a small brain; it knew that if it used a smaller pebble, the stone would be less likely to slip and such an accident could be avoided. The gull soared up into the air once more; but this time, instead of flying high as it had before, it dove, flaring its wings at the last minute and releasing the stone – directly on top of the crab.

            Her heart froze in horror, but there were no miraculous recoveries this time. The tiny creature never had a chance against the impact: its tiny shell had shattered, its back had nearly broken in two and its eyes were matted in blood. Her eyes shot accusingly to the sky. This- this was no accident! What . . . why . . . What was going on here? She was so utterly shocked at this senseless death that she just stood there, her hair billowing around her, her eyes trying desperately to look anywhere but at the crab’s corpse. But somehow it seemed as if her eyes could look nowhere else but at the dead crab. She simply stood there, staring, trying to reason it all out. Creatures died of old age, or accidents, but not at another creature’s hands! She couldn’t even think of a word for it. An un-accidental accidental death? A word came suddenly, unbidden, to mind. Murder. But that was the sort of thing that bacteria, and other mindless substances did, not creatures as alive as herself! Desperately, she cast her senses around. Perhaps this was just a fluke. A genetic accident. Not everything on this planet could be programmed to kill.

            But even as she searched, her heart only sunk deeper and deeper. In the woods – an animal, four legged, with saber fangs and shaggy fur – a wolf, designed for nothing but the killing of other animals. In the sea, all living things’ ancestral home – fish, whose only thought was the ending of others lives, not seeing that they themselves would suffer the same fate. In the trees, there were monkeys who stripped gigantic, inanimate creatures – trees,her mind told her – of their limbs, and then ate them. Everywhere she turned, more and more murder – fish-like creatures whose high intelligence should have prevented them from killing, but instead merely aided them in their hunt – dolphins. Everywhere she turned, not a single animal had not steeped itself in the blood of others, until it all became a whirlwind in her mind, until her mind desperately grazed the oceans, the plains, the mountains, anywhere for anything innocent – and yet still found nothing. Even those with stronger brain power, who relied on their instincts less, still killed – or let a few of their species do the killing for them, and eating the remains.

A sorrowful cry escaped her lips as she fell to the ground, summoning the last of her power that had not been used in her search to take her somewhere, anywhere, far, far away. And as the rip-like portal enveloped her, the same creature who had created this place vanished and left it to its fate.