Andrew Mackay - Pink Symphony

A few laps of her tongue across her mouth and she was off to the oceanfront. As she trundled ever nearer to the shore, she stopped occasionally to turn around and see if the Opera Beta was there.

It wasn’t.

She might as well have jumped through a portal for all the good her bearings were to her. Usually, she’d be on point in that respect. Geography had always been her strong point – a sense of belonging and territory.

In the infinite vastness of Pink Symphony she felt naked and alone.

The crystal blue water lapped against the white sand, turning it a strange yellow color as it rolled across, settled down, and clawed thousands of grains of sand with it into the water.

The journey to the ocean took longer than Jelly expected. Storming forwards, exercising every muscle in her body, the faster she sped the slower the ocean arrived.

A perplexing mirage for a cat.

On the way there she passed the odd fish bone. One of them resembled a ribcage with a skull in the shape of a helmet.

A quick sniff around confirmed what she knew all along. Whatever this thing was, it had well and truly expired.

She felt the pink-colored sky watch her every move. If she moved her left paw, the clouds seem to tilt to the left, like an angry lava lamp.

The right claw moved forward taking with it the clouds in the sky. They didn’t move as they had back on Earth. Calling them clouds were as comparable as possible to what they really were. More like explosions of distant galaxies; silky, smooth, as if one had poured full fat cream into a sky full of candy floss.

Jelly might well have had second thoughts about moving in any direction. The water, at least, seemed benevolent enough.

Eventually, she reached the shore. A careful probe with her infinity claws resulted in the wet sand tearing apart as expected.

The metal claws fizzed subtly as the waves crashed around her paws. She stepped forward and lowered her face, exploring the liquid with her tongue.

Two successive gulps – and success. A fully lubricated mouth. A wave of relief ran through her entire body. She felt better, energized, and ready for more.

Lap, lap, lap … the refreshing water soaked into her coarse tongue and swirled around her mouth. Above her in the sky, the white ink-like clouds bled out, creating a harmonious voice for the duration of its travel.

Jelly’s ears pricked up as she continued to drink the water.

The thought occurred to her that she should get back to the ship and alert her crew of the seemingly plentiful supply of H 2O. Said thought evaporated when the oncoming ripples of water grew higher, quickly turning into medium-sized waves.

“Meow,” she squealed and hopped back, fearing the wave would entrench her entirely. She loved the water, but the concept of swimming was way beyond her grasp.

In fact, she didn’t even know if she could swim.

Stepping back wasn’t enough. She had to run around and run across the sand just in time for the end of the wave to envelope her hind legs.

“Meow!” she yelped in defiance, determined to return and satisfy her thirst.

As the wave rolled back into the ocean, her eyes followed it back to the tree dead in the middle of the ocean.

It was a tree, yet it wasn’t a tree. It merely resembled one.

Jelly knew what a tree was. Fat at the bottom, thinning out in the middle, with hundreds of blossoming branches fanning out from the top. Usually brown, or dark brown, and made of wood and covered in bark. She’d got stuck in many of them during her young life.

She loved to climb the one in Jamie’s garden area. Occasionally, in her good old kitty days, she’d need rescuing.

This tree wasn’t made of wood. If it was then the wood was made of a spongy, black mucous shooting out from the water and blossoming one hundred feet in the air.

Its towering effect antagonized her.

Where there might have been branches were, instead, darkened shafts of coal about twenty feet in length. It was as if an aircraft’s wings had melted in intense heat. They curved around the midpoint, arrowing back toward the water.

The stem bulged in and out as if it was breathing. Jelly saw the bulge shoot up from the root, causing the water to rupture away. It traveled up the stem and dispersed among the twenty or so branches and died out toward their ends.

Jelly sat perfectly still and took in the sheer size of the tree. She blinked hard, expecting it to move. Of course, it had no such intention. Being an inanimate object, it didn’t care much for the strange being sitting before of it.

Being curious in nature, Jelly wanted to know more. But she’d be damned if she went into the water to quench her thirst for knowledge.

At least the place was quiet, though. The sky acted strangely. The tree added a perversely morbid air to an otherwise wistful utopia. Jelly rolled around in the wet sand and cooled herself down.

“Jelly!”

She jumped to her feet and turned around. A recognizable shape in the shifting sand seat warbled into focus. The contours of a woman named Bonnie steadily approached her.

“Hey, girl,” she finished, confidently striding closer, “There you are.”

Jelly hopped to her feet and meowed back.

“I know,” Bonnie yelled as softly as she could. “It’s nice here, isn’t it?”

“Meow.”

Bonnie let out a hearty laugh and flung her long, brown hair across her left shoulder. “Aww.” She squatted to the sand and held her arms forward. “Come on, pet. Come here and give your auntie Bonnie a cuddle.”

Jelly found the human’s behavior a little strange. Stuck in a strange place and with little-to-no recourse for rescue, Bonnie seemed uniquely at home.

Her demeanor was enough reassurance for Jelly. She hopped along the sand, digging her infinity claws in with each step for good measure, and raced into Bonnie’s opened hands.

She arched her back and held Jelly out at arm’s length against the sky.

“Hey, sweetie.”

“Meow,” Jelly licked her lips and flipped her tail around, wondering when the cuddle would commence. She lifted her right leg for balance.

“God, you’re such a gorgeous creature,” Bonnie said with a deft admiration, her eyes fixated on Jelly’s. “Look at you.”

Then, the cuddle came. Bonnie’s left cheek nestling safely on Jelly’s forehead.

She took a look at the blackened tree to find a waterfall of dark pink liquid gushing from a slit that tore near the top of the stem.

“Oh, look. It’s crying pink.”

Jelly took a look and immediately grew concerned. She dug her titanium claws into Bonnie’s inner-suit sleeve, wanting to be set free.

“Okay, okay,” Bonnie huffed. “Jeez, you’re cranky—”

The middle of the tree’s stem heaved out, as if taking in a lungful of air. A pregnant pause befell Jelly and Bonnie as they waited for it to exhale.

Where would the exhalation come from, anyway? Apart from the slit, there was no sign of a mouth anywhere on it.

The branches slumped down, appearing to weaken as the tree bent back.

“What is that?” Bonnie squinted at the alien object as it gently lilted around.

Then, a deafening blast of sound rippled in every direction from the root of the tree.

Da-da-da-dummm…

“Huh?” she said.

Dah, dah, dah…. dum .

Bonnie clamped her hands over her ears and let out a cry of pain. “Agh!”

SPLASH !

A wave crashed out across the sand. A large fish plopped to the shore and shuffled around in pain, trying to breath. Its rounded lips gaped in and out.

“Meow,” Jelly kicked up some sand as she entered the prone position. Her tail bushed out, ready to attack.

“Jelly, honey, what—”