Journey

Dedicated to NationalGeographic

Deep within the sea was a fragment, suspended and nearly motionless, so small as to be nearly immaterial. It was a child of man and sea, born in a factory, used then discarded, and shaped and polished by the restless tides; the whole torn apart and strewn across the world by the vengeful waves, until the misshapen orb came to drift, glowing like a flame in the vague light, and just as dangerous.

A creature tumbled through the waves towards it, insignificant and undiscovered, still nameless and unknown; it mistook it for a scrap of organic matter - and so, the orb was eaten.
The nameless creature went on its way, the orb visible through its transparent sides like a gun through a shop window.

Motion. A flash of scales. The flick of a tail.

The creature vanished inside of a fish, a silver-blue dart, quick as moonlight upon shifting waves.
The fish swam upwards, towards the shifting light, where he met a monster, a thing of looming size and armored scales, with fins that could cleave worlds apart. Briefly, her gleaming eye flashed before his, larger than his entire body.
The fragment passed to a new holder.

Near the surface, the fish was faltering; her stomach was full of plastic, eaten with her prey. She didn't react as something that, to her tired eyes, looked like a jellyfish meandered across her path (it was, in fact, a plastic bag, thrown off a pier a month before by a careless tourist), or when the beams of light cast through the waves above shattered, and a beak closed around her body.

Water scattered from the ends of his wings as he hauled himself into the air in a blaze of crystalline droplets. He had been at sea for days, and it was time to return to his nest. This was his first year with a mate, and he was determined to raise his chicks well, even if it ment the death of him.

Mother and daughter walked together upon the shore. She held her shoes in one hand, stuffed full of shells, and a plastic bag in the other, equally full of rubbish - plastic bags, empty bottles, and tangles of rope - two different types of treasure, and Benjy bounded across the sand in front of them, barking at the gulls that hung motionless overhead, resting carelessly upon the wind.

He fell silent. There, on the ground, was a bird.

Its wings, white and delicate as an angels, were tattered, the feathers dirtied by sand, and its beautiful, regal head was cast sideways in a hopeless gesture, lifeless.
Already, flesh was fading from bones, revealing a crude mosaic, countless fragments of plastic, in countless colours and countless shapes, filling the cavity that time revealed.

The girl's young heart broke, and she wept into her mother's arms.

A mile away, on the cliffs below the town, two chicks huddled in an abandoned nest, drowning in the bloody light of the setting sun.