Andrew Mackay - Pink Symphony

“Shhh,” Jelly fixated her eyes on the fat, circular fish as it flapped across the sand and gasped for air, “Shhh.”

“Sweetie? How are you saying that—”

“Mweh,” Jelly coughed up a lump of pink phlegm and spat to the sand. She darted over to the fish intending to tear it to shreds.

“No, Jelly. Don’t touch it—”

The fish bounced over the damp sand in an attempt to escape its impending doom. The back end of the blue creature lifted up and shed its skin.

A bony tail shot out and slapped to the ground.

Jelly screeched to a halt, kicking sand into the air with her paws. She didn’t like what had happened and would soon be terrified of what happened next, “Muuuh.”

The creature whipped its tail in retaliation. The end thwacked against the sand sending a shock wave through its bone, shattering its blue, oily skin across its body. The fish’s lips stretched back over its face. A row of sharp teeth jutted out from its skull, as the blue skin flaked away.

It had turned into a bizarre armadillo-type creature. Four small limbs, bent at the middle, with claws.

Jelly widened her eyes in terror as the creature turned to her and growled. A swish from the creature’s tail made sure Jelly took a few steps back, hoping not to get murdered.

The beast crept forward with its chunky feet and slammed its razor sharp jaws together.

Da-da-da… dum… the tree appeared to sing.

Bonnie found the whole spectacle puzzling but wasn’t afraid of the abnormality creeping towards her. She gripped her metal leg and made sure it was armed in case it tried its luck.

“What the hell is going on, here?” she turned to Jelly and raised her voice, “Come here, girl.”

Jelly didn’t hear the command. She froze on the spot, scared that the creature might lunge at her.

The tree heaved and lilted to the left side as if quietly dancing to its own rendition of a classical tune. The mimicry of organs and trumpets came out like a confused amalgam of croaking wood and belches.

Bonnie recognized the attempt, finding the entire scenario eerily reminiscent of Opera Alpha.

“Is that… Beethoven’s Fifth ?” she gasped, piecing the tree’s segments of harmonious rumbles together. “It is, it is…” She turned over her shoulder and saw a transparent spacecraft wreckage in the horizon. The ghost of the deserted Space Opera Alpha.

“Huh?”

Jelly, meanwhile, found herself crawling backwards on her hind legs as the recently-evolved beast threw its spindly arms forward.

“Maaw,” she kept her fattened tail up and swinging around. A failed attempted to allay the creature’s desire for feline blood.

The beast growled at her, forcing the air molecules to ripple together and throw her fur on end.

“Meow,” Jelly screamed back and swiped her right claw in retaliation.

So hard was the creature’s roar that the reptilian skin on its face broke apart and slapped against the sand. A gray-colored skull broke forward and shrieked, shedding the rest of its skin. Its skeletal structure fizzed and sparked, cracking onto itself.

The spine curved in the middle and sprung stems either side, meeting around its exposed organs.

A liver.

A stomach.

A pancreas.

The ribbed bones crept around its lungs and heart, forming a protective cage around them.

The pinkish under skin blistered in the intense heat from the pink sky. A sun, previously unseen, introduced itself from behind one of several milky clouds.

All the while, the tree continued its interpretation of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony across the air. Croaky and strangely harmonic, given the absence of a coherent orchestra.

Bonnie unhooked her Rez-9 firearm from her belt and pointed it at the creature. She’d seen – and had – enough, “Don’t move.”

Jelly turned around and meowed at Bonnie. The look in both her eyeballs screamed don’t shoot .

“Don’t look at me in that tone of voice, young madam,” Bonnie said. “Look at it. It’s in pain. I’m doing it a favor.”

Jelly turned back to the creature.

It resembled more an ape than a scaly reptile. The sunburn blackened most of its skin. Tufts of hair had formed on it as it squealed in immense turmoil.

“Meow,” Jelly chanced her luck and crawled nearer to the pained monstrosity writhing around in front of her.

“Enough,” Bonnie cocked her Rez-9 and loomed over the crying beast. She held the gun to its head and took mercy, “Peace.”

BLAM !

She shot the ape creature in the head and jumped back when the unexpected made itself known.

“What the—?

Instead of busting the primate’s head apart and disintegrating the rest of its body, it only exacerbated the transformation.

The impact of the bullet sent a bolt of electricity through its body, cracking its shoulders out a few inches. In retaliation, the ape climbed to its feet and stomped its considerably large feet to the ground.

Bonnie kept her gun pointed at the beast. “Wh-what… are you ?”

The ape slammed its furry chest with both fists and roared, frightening Jelly enough for her to run behind Bonnie’s feet for protection.

“Girl, we better get out of here. Let’s go.”

Bonnie walked backwards across the sand, keeping an eye on the ape-like creature as it screamed for vengeance. Pink tears shot down its face.

“That’s one ugly beast,” Bonnie turned around and expected to find Opera Beta sitting in the distance.

It wasn’t there. The distant apparition of Opera Alpha in the horizon had vanished, too.

“God, I must be seeing things,” she stopped in her tracks and looked down to Jelly. “Girl, where’s our ship?”

“Muuuh,” Jelly lifted her shoulders up and down, indicating that she had no clue.

ROOOOAAARRRR !

The ape’s insane exclamation forced Bonnie and Jelly to pay attention to it. They turned around, slowly, in tandem, expecting to be set-upon and mauled to death.

Instead of attacking, the ape slammed its fists against the sand. A loud grunt followed before it snorted through its widened nostrils.

Huffing around the grains of sand, it laid eyes on Jelly and grunted again. It held out its left paw, wanting Jelly to make contact.

The cat was much too afraid to oblige.

“Jelly, stay right where you are,” Bonnie tuned her ears to the tree’s attempt to reproduce Beethoven’s classic symphony, “And would you stop that damn singing! ”

The tree, relentless in its insistence to continue singing, upped its volume. In turn, its rendition grew more strained and perverse.

The ape appeared not to hear it.

“Meow,” Jelly tried in a bid to win favor – or at the very least, time – with the hirsute freak standing before them.

“We have nowhere to go,” Bonnie faced the sky for some semblance of geography, “If we run, we could end up running forever.”

The light from the intense sun blanketed her face. For just a moment, she felt like she was home. Closing her eyes shut and enjoying the warmth meant the world to her, “It’s fantastic, isn’t it?”

Bonnie opened her eyes and saw the sun had split into three, larger balls of magnificence. To call it the sun was a massive anomaly. It wasn’t the sun Bonnie had enjoyed on Earth. The ball of fire she saw in the sky enlarged a few millimeters per second.

A deafening thud came from her left. “Oh, my God.”

The ape had dropped onto its side, crying and moaning to itself. Much of its hair had shed and entwined amongst the grains of sands.

The grunting turned to sobbing as the ape balled up in the fetal position. As the hair shed away to reveal a pink-white skin – like that of a human being.