The Moonfish

  This is just a little story I wrote off the top of my head for a friend a while back, but I'm absurdly proud of it and it reminded me how much I enjoy writing. It's pretty silly and not that great, but I figured I'd post it to get started.

  Once upon a time, there was a moonfish. Moonfish are very beautiful, with their silver scales that glow with an almost white light, and their rainbow tinted fins. However, as there is no water on the moon (which is of course where they live), they have had to adapt and aren't really fish at all anymore. They still have fish bodies, but they have four spindly little legs that look as though they were made of glass and diamonds, and their fins have grown into almost reptilian wings. No one knows how they came to be on the moon, and nor do they really care. The only hint they have of their history is a story they tell the children in the evenings, about how they used to live in a place called the sea that was full of water, and used their strong bodies to move instead of their wings and legs.

  This particular little moonfish was very lonely. He was often left out of the other children's games because although he had a pair of quite spectacular wings, he had tiny, thick little legs and could not run around like the others. Because he was so lonely he loved listening to his mothers stories, and the one he loved the most was the one about the water. So one day he set off on his own to find the sea, He spread his beautiful wings and flew off around the moon, but he couldn't find it. He journeyed for 40 days and nights, all alone. He found craters and deserts, mountain ranges and forests of rock, and wondered at them all, but he could not find a single drop of water.

  Then one day, just as dawn was breaking, he looked to the horizon and saw the most beautiful planet. It was emerald green and azure blue, shrouded in clouds which caught the light and sent it off in to streams of rainbows. He looked around at the barren moonscape and thought how dreary it was, how bland, and without a second thought he spread his magnificent wings once more and set off for the distant jewel.

  It took him a year and a day and was very hard work, but then one day he found himself surrounded by sparkling clouds. He was nearly there! He was very tired by this time, and as the gravity of the planet took hold he found himself tumbling down through the sky. As he fell he had a terrible thought: what if the creatures on this planet didn't like him? He had left the moon because he was left out because he was different, surely it could only be worse on a different planet? But this thought vanished as he plunged into the cool water (luckily for him he had been blown towards the sea- I doubt he would have been worrying about being liked had he been crashing towards solid land!). Gasping with joy, he soared back above the surface, dancing between the sky and the waves...

  And as he danced, he became aware of other fish around him, leaping out of the water, gliding a few meters above the surface with their delicate, wing-like fins, before sliding back in. They were not so different from himself, he thought.

  All of a sudden one erupted from the water just behind him, almost knocking him out of the air. She quickly turned to apologise, flustered, but he barely heard her- she was so beautiful. Eventually she realised that he was looking rather dazed.
  "You're not from around here, are you? Are you lost?"
  "Well, it's kind of a long story", he replied.
She smiled at him, "Why don't you come along with us? You can tell me later."
He accepted her invitation gladly, and they set out side by side. From watching her he quickly learned to rely less on his wings, instead tucking in his legs and cutting through the water like a silver arrow. But his spirits sank as he thought about telling his story, his fears of rejection returning. What if they didn't believe him, and chased him away as a freak? After all, his story must seem bizarre, and of course they would not accept him anyway. Nobody ever did.

  But he need not have worried. His new friends listened to his tale with rapt attention, believed every word, and accepted him into their family. Later, as they lay in the water and gazed at the stars, his beautiful friend turned to him, and, pointing at the moon, murmured,
  "Do you miss your home?"
He glanced at the far off orb, and then at the rippling waters around him, the tiny flashes of silver and iridescence glinting off the family surrounding him, and last of all at her. He smiled, finally content, and whispered a reply.
  "I am home."

Cheesy, I know. But considering this was originally written in a series of texts at some time between midnight and one a.m, it could be worse.
   

Words

  So, I have a blog. This is new. I've been kind of meaning to make one for a while, and then a friend made one earlier so I thought I'd tag a long and see how it goes. Hopefully this will encourage me to write more, so long as I actually remember to post.

  Anyway, my name is Rachel, hello! I'm in love with storytelling, whether in the form of a novel, a poem, a film, a play, a photo, pretty much all of them. Words hold a particular power, they can pull you right in, captivate you for days, casting a kind of haze over reality even after you finish a story. I tend to read fantasies, sci-fi and historical novels, basically avoiding reality as much as possible- books about real people in real situations in the present day just seem to bore me, I can see that any time I want, so why read about it? Though it's probably just reality that I find dull, everything is better with imagination and creativity.

  When I manage to motivate myself I love storytelling myself, usually short stories, and hopefully I'll start writing more often over the next year and put up stories regularly on here. I also write (or will write when I get round to it) music reviews on Skeplunk, and I may do book reviews etc on here- I might be changing my course to English so I should probably try writing all sorts of things. So this blog will just be whatever takes my fancy really. Which is kind of the point of a blog. Words.