Your Coral-Star Lagoon Luxe Resort Premium Honeymoon Water Cabin: A Welcome Kit for the Newlyweds!
· The moray eel curled around your water steps in the mornings isn’t dangerous, but we advise you not to enter the water while he’s there.
· If you do find yourself in the water with him, he may flash his glass-white teeth at you. Do not smile back.
· If you do find yourself smiling back, the eel may murmur in a voice soft as mucous that he knows a reef, not far from the Resort, where the coral and the fishes blaze with colours so wondrous and so rare they haven’t yet been named. If you’d care to follow him, he can show you. After all, it can’t do any harm. Don’t believe him.
· If you do believe him and find yourself following him out of the Resort, hold hands with your brand-new spouse. Hold tight. If your hands slip apart, keep each other in sight, waving now and then for reassurance.
· If you do lose sight of your spouse, you should feel a undertow gently but persistently nudging you back. Don’t ignore it.
· If you do ignore the undertow, you’ll find it will disappear, and you’ll look around and find the eel has also disappeared, and there you are, all alone in open waters, learning even undiscovered colours lose their wonder once you’ve discovered them.
(Please remember you were advised at time of booking that Management cannot guarantee continuous unnamed colours. No problem, you said. I want you for yourself, for your powdery sands and your shimmering aqua lagoon, for your fishes glittering in all the pinks and yellows and silvers that have been named, for your turtles and your reef sharks and the promise of dolphins playing somewhere off in the distance. And anyway our honeymoon could be a wet Monday morning in Cleethorpes for all I care as long as we’re together, and that new colleague you say I’m always banging on about? They’re not even my type! I’m marrying you, aren’t I? That’s what you said, remember? So don’t blame a fucking eel.)
Management Advisory:
The journey back to the Resort is treacherous and cold. Even if you do make it back, you may no longer be welcome. You’re not even sure how hard you want to try: there might be other unseen wonders to be seen.
Just keep on treading water while the light fades. That glow on the horizon is a thousand glass-white fangs. Eels come back at night, smiling.
S A Greene’s writing includes stories about a musical vagina, a foetus with dodgy political views, a blue sponge, and lots of tables (kitchen, picnic, dining, mainly). Her words have appeared in Janus, Mslexia, Flash Flood, Ellipsis Zine, Reflex, and other wonderful journals and anthologies, and have been declined by an impressive number of equally prestigious establishments.
