Beyond the Blue

     Jini hung in one corner in the shade, a small shock of bright orange in the shadows of overhanging vegetation, and watched the patches of sunlight on the surface of the water. When the one that started at the edge of the pond became aligned with the tree just beside the fence, then she knew Anna would come out and give her lunch, and they would talk for a moment before her owner would disappear again.

     “How is your work going?” Jini would ask.

     Anna would launch into long descriptions of numbers, things bought and sold, that Jini did not understand; but she listened to hear the sound of her owner’s voice. It made her feel like someone was with her, for just a moment.

     “And do you like the pebbles I bought you?” Anna would ask.

     “Yes,” Jini would say. “I like them very much.” She couldn’t say any more than that, about what they really meant to her; it was too dear to her.

     “Good, I’m glad.” Her owner would smile and disappear until lunchtime the next day.

     Jini collected blue pebbles and set them aside in one corner of the pond, searching for any new ones her owner had dropped in. Blue, the colour of the sky she saw wavering through the water--the colour of the ocean--the opposite colour of herself. The colour of something she did not have--but when she looked at the pebbles, it was almost as if she did, and it was very precious to her.

     After she had taken all of the blue pebbles, Jini began arranging the others, sweeping them carefully into place with her broad, feathery fins. She made mosaics of them, colourful tiled patterns that formed rainbow swirls and stars at the bottom of the pool. She worked rapidly, in a hurry to finish before shadows covered the pool, knowing that was when the pets would come by.

     They came, out of their schools and offices, and trooped through her yard along the stepping stones her owner had laid, standing on two legs and four legs and some on their tails, and stared down into the pond at Jini’s latest arrangement. Then they would burst into smiles and exclaim and jostle one another, all calling out about the marvellous pond with its ever-shifting colours, and where was the pet who always did it?

     Jini would hide in the shadows, shielded by leaves dragging in the water, her orange well-guarded by a veil of green. She watched the wavery images of the pets moving about behind the surface of the water, and their gestures of excitement told her that she was loved.

     Being admired without being seen, without the danger of getting too close, was how she liked it. It was how she liked to be loved.

     And yet, it was never really enough. The blue pebbles reminded her there was something else she wanted, and yet when she looked at them, she could almost believe she had it. Night after night she would swim to the corner of the pond blanketed in blue, and fall asleep pretending she was in the ocean.

     The truth was that the real ocean scared her. She liked the one she had made for herself. Small as she was, she was safe in it. She would have been happy in it, if only... If only everyone didn’t leave when the shadows shifted. If only there were another pet beside her, to share the riverbed of blue.

     There was a hole at one end of the pond. Jini had followed it once, long enough to know that it went a long way, but she had grown scared and turned back, relieved to return to the safety of her pond. It went in the direction that she smelled the sea breeze coming from, and she thought it might go nearly as far as the ocean, but it must be stopped at one end or things would enter her pond through it.

     She was glad of that. She didn’t want surprises or sudden visitors. The pets who came by every day were enough for her, and she was glad to receive their praises from a distance and let them go away again. The sea, she knew from her owner, was full of sailing boats and nets she could be tangled in, Jetsams with sharp teeth, and a thousand other dangers she never wished to know.

     She never wished to know, and yet... and yet... out there, she might find someone like her. Someone who would share life with her, so she no longer had to watch the shadows, counting the hours until she could be loved.

     One day Anna asked, “Do you want me to get another Koi to live in the pond with you?”

     “No,” Jini said, horrified by the suggestion. She didn’t want some stranger thrown into her midst, suddenly living with her. She wanted to pick someone herself.

     Her owner’s face grew worried. “Then I don’t know what else to try. You’re just not getting any bigger. Are you still eating the plants?”

     “Yes,” Jini sighed, tired of being asked. She liked herself the way she was. There was nothing wrong with being small.

     The next day, her food at lunchtime tasted different. It was large and hard to swallow.

     “I’m trying a new brand of extra nutritious Koi Flakes,” Anna said.

     Jini choked it down. Within minutes, she was seized with the sensation that her body was swelling. She hated it. She felt panicked. She swam to the end of the pond with the thickest leaves and hid in them, wishing with all her might that the feeling would go away.

     For a long time she couldn’t bring herself to come out and move the pebbles around as usual, but at last she did. She found to her horror that her fins had grown, dragging wide swaths of stones at once; it was too much effort now to push them carefully into place one by one. It wasn’t fun anymore; she didn’t want to do it anymore.

     She hated that her owner had done this to her. She knew that Anna had done it out of love. It was the kind of love that does what someone thinks is best for another, regardless of what that person wants.

     Jini left the pebbles all mixed up. The pets came in the afternoon, muttered in confusion, and went away without saying anything. Over the next several days they kept coming, but soon fewer and fewer of them came, and then none at all. What could Jini expect? She’d never talked to them. They’d never known her, only her pebbles.

     And she, also, had never known someone else--only her pebbles.

     Jini let the sun cross her pond and turn to shadow, day after day, without coming to the surface. She wouldn’t eat anything Anna threw down at lunch anymore; she didn’t trust it. She only ate the plants, wishing day after day that she would shrink again, return to her old size, but every morning she woke up and still felt horrendously swollen. She was terrified that she might run out of plants and have no choice but to eat more of that horrible food that would make her grow more and more unlike herself.

     Suddenly she had a thought. Could she still fit through the hole at the end of the pond?

     What if, one day, she couldn’t? What if this were her last chance to get out?

     She thought of the pets she had never known, who had all gone away, and her owner that she wouldn’t look at anymore, and knew there was nothing left for her here.

     So what if she were devoured by the ocean waters? She would never find what she wanted here anyway.

     Jini swam straight to the hole in the pond, the dirt bursting around her sides--she could just barely still fit through. She wriggled all the way down the long tunnel, and where it ended--as she had known it would--she pressed forward, butting against the dirt over and over with her head and all the strength in her still-small body, feeling as little by little it gave way.

     The last chunk of dirt came free and she was swept out into a world of blue, the colour she had so carefully gathered and collected around her, piece by tiny piece, all these years. Suddenly it was endless around her--and filled with other finned pets, a whirl of strangers rushing around her, closer than she had ever known. The water had always shielded her from others, but now it brought her to them. She felt terror. No one knew or loved her here.

     She searched for plants to hide in as she always had, but the blue was inescapable, stark beside her orange scales--she had no hope of camouflage. However swollen her body had felt, besides all the other pets, she knew how small she was.

     She saw the undersides of boats floating above her, just as her owner had said--hulking shadows that blocked out the light. She saw in the distance Jetsams slicing through the water with their terrible sharpened teeth, chasing fish her own size. She felt tender and fragile and terrified floating exposed in the open sea, but she couldn’t go back, because what she wanted was here. She knew it as surely as she saw the blue.

     I shouldn’t want it, she thought. I’m doing something wrong. I’m being a bad pet. If something happens to me, it’ll be my own fault.

     But still she wanted it, and couldn’t stop. She knew if she stayed in her pond all her life, she would never have it. Her only choice was to enter the sea, full of all the danger she now felt herself in.

     Then she saw, as she swam close to the sea floor, a trail of pebbles along the sand.

     All her life, she had fascinated others by pushing pebbles around; now, she couldn’t take her gaze away from this sign that someone else had done the same.

     She followed the trail to its end, at a patch of lumpy rocks and sand. She blinked. She felt as though the sand had blinked, too. There were arms spread out over the rocks, their skin the same mottled pattern as the grains of sand. Like liquid, a Mutant Jetsam rippled into being before her, his skin rapidly shifting colours until it settled into a dull red.

     Jini would have been terrified if she hadn’t been so awed. How long had she spent pushing colours around in the sand, and this pet could change them at will!

     “That’s beautiful,” she said, unable to stop herself. She hadn’t said what she thought for so long that now it just tumbled out.

     “What is?” the Jetsam asked, turning his big yellow eyes on her.

     “You,” Jini said. “The way you just changed colours like that .”

     “Oh, I--I don’t really think about it.” The Jetsam looked self-conscious.

     “What’s your name?”

     “No one named me. I don’t matter enough to anyone, I guess.”

     “I name you Liam,” Jini said, on a whim. “Did you make the trail of pebbles?”

     “Yes,” Liam said.

     “Why?”

     “To lead small fish to me.”

     “Well, it worked,” Jini said. “I’m here. I’m still small, aren’t I?”

     “Very small.”

     “But not small enough to push the pebbles,” Jini said sadly. She shook her fins, and one of her blue pebbles, caught on her scales, fell and rolled in the sand.

     The Mutant Jetsam’s eye caught it. “Blue,” he said. “A colour I can’t be.”

     “Why not? It’s all around us.”

     “It looks so deep and rich because you see so much of it at once, but I can’t make myself look such a vivid blue just from the water I’m touching. I can’t mimic a whole ocean. I would love to flow through the open ocean instead of scuttling in the sand, but it’s too dangerous for me.”

     “You?” Jini said incredulously, looking up at Liam’s massive bulk and many waving arms. “You, who sit there luring small fish to you?” You, who can be anything you want to be?

     “I’m big, but my body is soft,” the Jetsam said. “I have to hide, for my own good.”

     “But--” Jini burst out, unable to contain herself now that she was talking face to face with another pet; for the first time in her life, the water was not a barrier. She couldn’t bear the idea of such a marvellous pet hiding away forever, not mattering to anybody, trying all his life to look as though he didn’t exist. “But you want to swim up there, don’t you? You want to swim through the ocean! What’s the use of living your whole life in the sand, if you’re not really living?”

     “I’d rather survive,” Liam said. “But if I could turn blue, I’d spend my whole life in the open waters.”

     “And could you turn blue,” Jini asked, an idea suddenly occurring to her, “if you had a lot of blue pebbles like this one?”

     “Yes. But where would I find them? They don’t appear naturally here, and I’d have to travel too far through the open sea.”

     “Can you fit through a small hole?” the Koi asked, eyeing the Jetsam’s large body.

     “Any hole,” Liam said, unfurling his boneless tentacles. “Like water.”

     “Then come with me, and you’ll find the blue pebbles,” Jini said. “But promise not to catch me and take me away, like those other poor small fish.”

     “If you can show me blue pebbles to line my cave with, I’ll wrap my arms around you and protect you, as long as you travel through the sea.”

     And I will never tire, Jini thought with a thrill, of watching you change colour, as effortlessly as breathing. She felt, perhaps, a taste of the delight she had brought to others with the ever-shifting patterns she had made in the stones--but stronger, so much stronger, when it came from a living, breathing pet who could talk to and swim beside her.

     She led him to the hole, and the Mutant Jetsam slipped through like water, as effortlessly as breathing.

     They had told her to adopt another Koi, but Anna couldn’t bear to change the pond from how Jini had left it, though the plants had overgrown it and the multicoloured stones were a jumble on its floor. She couldn't even look at the corner that she knew must still be lined with Jini's favourite blue stones, like a splotch amid the mess.

     One morning Anna walked out and stared. She pushed aside the plants to be sure it wasn’t her imagination. The base of the pond was arranged in a colourful mosaic pattern, just like it once had been.

     From then on, every few weeks or months, the pattern would change, the stones shifting once again. Word got around, and pets began coming again to see it. Again they marvelled and said, “Where is the pet who always does it?”

     And just like before, they saw nothing. The pond stood empty, and all of the blue stones were gone.

     The End.