Sea Monster Eggs

12 months ago this was my patron reward story. Hopefully non-subscribers have not found mysterious objects in sea caves in the meantime and unsuspectingly picked up...

Sea Monster Eggs

They’re probably sea monster eggs. What else could they be? Round, as big as a melon or a child’s head, dull glassy, jade-green. They were in a cave under the cliff, one you can’t normally get to. You can only approach when the tide is very, very low, a spring tide, and even then to get there you have to take risks, crossing the sand, avoiding the sinkholes and sucking mud, clambering over rocks slippery with weed, racing tide and sun to get back before the path is sunk again. They tell people not go along that piece of coastline, people drown there, someone vanished there two years ago (though they whisper that he was always depressed, his mother had died of cancer and his girl had left him).

Anyway Annie thought they might be glass floats from fishermen’s nets, but they’re surely too big, and they don’t break. (I told Dan not to hit them or drop them but he did and it didn’t damage them). Sally said they could be big pods from sea weed, but they’re too hard, and why weren’t they attached to the plants, sitting in a damp hollow in the cave? We’ve put them in a disused shed, down by the beach, and pour buckets of water in there every day to keep it cool and damp and dark like the cave.

I can’t wait to see what hatches.