The Bad Rainbow | ✔

I remember when I was younger, my mama and I would go to the surface and see who could jump the highest. Or sometimes we would glide along the water's edges, and blow water from our blowholes, to see whose jet was taller. I always won in both games, but I think Mama always let me win. That was how Mama was.

But we do not go much up there anymore. You see, Mama is sick and I cannot help her. She says she has been like that for a while. She says 'hoomans' did this to her.

I see those hoomans sometimes. They clap when Mama and I jump or used to jump. They point their fingers. Once I waved to them and Mama scolded me. She said, "We do not wave to the bad people." I did not understand then.

These days the ocean is so colorful, beautiful I think, but Mama does not like me looking at them. She says they are bad. Once, I was curious and I tried to eat a color that looked like a fish. It looked delicious. Mama did not let me out of her sight for a week after that.

However, now, even the normal fish we eat tastes weird and Mama says it is because they ate the color and I ate them, and they had the colors in their stomach. The colors are bad. It makes me sick.

I think I understand now.

And now, she says, the color is stuck in her blowhole. I cannot help her, she says. It is stuck and I cannot breathe and I will die, she says.

She cannot die. She is my Mama. She will live forever.

No, she will not. She is gone.

I am also very sick now and I think I will soon be with my mother. I think I am to be gone with her.

I do not like the colors anymore. They are everywhere. I cannot see because of it, and when I go to the surface to breathe, they are there too. Once they were beautiful, but now I can see only that, and I do not know where the sky-blue expanse above me is. The colors are everywhere, and because of it, my Mama is not.

One day, I find I cannot breathe either. My cousin tells me I have something stuck in my blowhole. I am to meet the same fate as my Mama then.

She says we dolphins have given a name to it. When I ask her what it is, she says it is called the 'bad rainbow. ' I saw a rainbow once. It was across the expanse, so colorful and wonderful.

This is not. This bad rainbow is going to kill me.

But it has, I think. It already has. For as I die, I only see the colors suffocating me.

It killed my Mama and now it has killed me. 

Word Count: 490