Three children swim between split brown stilts. Their songs can be heard by the jovial Sunday crowd going about their day above them on the pleasure pier. It’s a pleasant sound. Alluring.
Kent Summers is on lifeguard duty. He yells to the children to come out from beneath the pier, to play out where he can watch them. “It’s not safe,” he yells.
But the children just smile and keep singing. The little towheaded boy waves for him to join them. Kent scoffs and surveys the rest of the crowded beach.
When he looks back at the children, there are only two, both of whom look concerned. They’ve stopped singing. They’ve stopped laughing.
Kent stands on the top step of his tall, white lifeguard chair. His tan muscles are glistening in the sun. Then, another child goes under, and she’s down for longer than he’s comfortable with. He jumps down and runs across the hot sand, moving fast, but not too fast. Not panicking. He’s saved children before. He knows that you need to stay calm.
The third child goes down—the towheaded kid—dragged under, but by what? Kent sprints—nobody is dying on his watch.
SPLASH.
He swims out to where the children were, but something has his ankle. It’s sharp—a shark? It takes him down, and he sees her eyes; he drowns in her sea-glass gaze.
Three children pop up from the water; buoyant little kids with buoyant songs that float up to the happy families on the pleasure pier. They swim between the split brown stilts.
Ahh the echo between the first and last lines gives this a creepy nursery rhyme feel!
Nice one! Quick and sharp. Very vivid. Love that "sea-glass gaze". How do you guys keep nailing it sub 1000?? Everything I write bloats like a waterlogged corpse.