Short Prose
Clam
In the tidal pool there were two basic occupations with which the residents whiled away their worthless lives: hiding and cowering. When the tide was low, they cowered from the sun, fearful of the flying gulls. When the tide was high, they hid from the legions of hungry starfish. Generations of clams and crustaceans lived, never leaving their little pool, which was the entire world to them.
There was one crazy old clam named Talop who thought that there was more to life than the tidal pool. Talop went around arguing with the other sea creatures, trying to tell them that there exists a greater world beyond the bounds of their pool. The other clams weren’t stupid. They let foolish old Talop argue them into the mud with his ‘wisdom’ and wit. They knew better than to mess with fate.
“Imagine, if you will,” Talop said to his companion one day, “that a cluster of clams lived within a single spiraling shell buried in the sand. Imagine that they never attempted to leave this shell, and spent all their lives buried beneath the muck, never seeing the glory of the green seaweed or gray rocks. Try, I beseech you, to imagine what it would be like to live like that.”
“Uhhh, wouldn’t they die?” was the clam’s reply, answering perfectly yet understanding nothing.
Frustrated with his fellow pool dwellers, Talop decided that it was time to leave the tidal pool, to prove that there was a world beyond the one in which he had lived his whole life. At low tide, the wiry old clam dragged himself up out of the pool. Looking back over his shell he saw not his home, but the mirrored reflection of the sky, shimmering pale blue above, with wavy white clouds wafting in the wind.
The wind, Talop felt this strange new sensation brushing at his shell. It was odd, harsher than the pull and push of the tide or the circular action of the waves, harsher, yet at the same time exhilarating. Then the wind stopped and Talop felt for the first time the hot sun radiating down on him, heating his shell. He had only a moment to marvel at this newfound warmth before a dark shadow covered him. Looking frantically back towards the pool he saw the reflection of a giant white form plunging down upon him. The gull grabbed him and took off into the air.
The pool, his world, shrunk away below him. All around he could see other worlds like his. Then, beyond his world, beyond the neighboring worlds and the dark voids between them, he saw something that took his breath away; a vast world compared to which his was but a grain of sand. “Would the others believe me if I told them of what I have seen today?”
Talop never found out the answer to his question. The gull dropped him on a rock and pecked out his innards. Serves him right for messing with fate.
“Tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, [than] to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them” (Hamlet 3.1)