Glow Worms
by Chris Morton
The woman was wearing a green summer dress and under the moonlight she was swaying in the sea breeze – in her hand was a plastic cup filled with red wine and there was music.
“Your name?” said one of the young men. Like the others his skin was richly tanned, his eyes dark – the woman looked back and smiled and said something about it being very forward to ask a lady such things. “Where I come from …” she shouted over the sound of waves and music, and the man feigned apology, all the time moving closer. He took her hand and complimented her over the softness of her flesh. His friends laughed, like him they were fishermen. They were stocky and rugged. Worn, but full of energy.
“Your eyes,” the young man said. He smelt of dry sweat and sea water. “What colour is that?” He was squinting.
A splashing of the waves and a seagull flew down. There was a barbecue going, scraps of fish and bread.
The man too was swaying to the music. His body was broad, crouching. He was a little dwarf and the woman squeezed his hand.
“You’re very sweet.”
“What?” he was shouting. “You say what?”
“You’re very sweet,” the woman mouthed over the sound of what she took to be some sort of techno beat. People often found it strange, how little she knew about music. “Why not?” they’d say. “You should,” they’d say.
Dancing, the woman drank what was left of her plastic cup. She continued holding the man’s hand and he began to follow her rhythm while his friends, the stocky fishermen, cheered them on.
“I’ll get you another. You want another?”
“Sure.”
The man pulled her fairly hard and through the small crowd they stumbled. There were bottles of red wine – the man grabbed one and held it high over her cup, pouring it out like an expert barman, grinning. A number of his teeth were gold and they sparkled in the light from a fire further along. Around this fire there were dancers and clouds of smoke.
“You’re not from around here, are you?”
“Oh, no. Very much no,” said the woman, hand on her hip, in her other hand the plastic cup now full of red wine and she raised it to her lips.
The man’s eyes were searching her.
“There’s something about you.”
“Oh, yes?”
The pink of her lipstick, the blush of her skin. The eyes, so green.
“Are they real?”
“You mean my eyes?”
“Yes, they seem …”
“Ahh,” the woman answered, uncomfortable for a moment. “Though how would you know?”
“A sister,” said the man. He grinned. “The village, they had a pool.”
“A pool?”
The man laughed. With his right foot he was drawing curves in the sand. “Oh, yes,” he said. “A pool is when they gather together money for someone. My sister lost an eye because a firework hit her in the face. Like this,” he said, and the woman squinted, looking away. “Her ear too. Though for that, she’s still waiting.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s nothing. The things they can do now.” The man’s eyes brightened. “The doctors – the ear they will grow on the back of a mouse.” He laughed, saying, “They will cut it and attach it here.” Pointing to behind his ear, he then told the woman of a cousin who had lost a finger. “A shark bit it clean off,” he said. “But now he has all five again. A miracle!” the man grinned, then seemed to sober in spirit. He looked at the woman, at her eyes and said, “If you don’t want to talk about it, I understand. There are many strangers who come to this town, they all have stories. Your eyes, yes I guess finally. Because of my sister. I have seen them before. The colouring and the slow movement of the iris. You lost both of them …” the man trailed off.
The thud of music continued to beat around them.
Then there was sudden laughter and they turned to see a group of men, the short men, the fishermen were putting on some sort of balancing act. There were whoops of applause.
“Come on,” said the woman. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Somewhere quieter?” asked the man. He seemed excited.
“It says in the records that there are caves along this coast. How far along are they?”
The man laughed. “Caves,” he said. “They are dirty, nothing. I take you to my home, it’s near. You see the sunrise from where I live and it’s beautiful. A sight to behold,” he said.
But she was staring far away, over his shoulder to the distance. “It says there are glow worms, in the caves,” she said. “And I’ve always wanted to see one. What are they like?”
“What are they like, she says.” The man was laughing. “So take out your pad and watch a vid-feed,” he scoffed. “I show you at my home. I have a very big screen. My brother, he install –”
“Oh, come on,” pleaded the woman, swaying towards him. She threw down her cup and grabbed both his hands. “Since I was a little girl,” she began, slowly moving against him. “I’ve been fascinated by glow worms. You’ve no idea how I imagined them. All fat and tiny and full of bursting luminosity.”
The woman leaned in close to the man and gave him a kiss on the nose.
“Okay, okay,” he said pulling away from her. “Okay, I take you to your glow worms. If that’s what you want …” He finished his drink then did a little bow. “I am your guide,” he said.
He took her hand and they walked through the dancing bodies, past the crackling fire.
“Hey, Steffen!”
“Hey, Steffen, where you going?”
They continued on.
“Is that your name?”
“It is,” the man replied as they walked on through the thinning crowd. “But I think you still haven’t told me yours, or where you are from.”
“Clara,” the woman answered simply. “And I’m from the domes, as you most likely call them. Though for us they are just cities.”
“Ah, Clara. Now you reveal. Now it is no problem.”
The woman laughed.
“And tell me more.” The man flapped his free hand in gestation. “I want to know everything about these cities,” he said, and then he squeezed her backside. “I hear there is no need for money? All is provided!”
“It’s true,” smiled the woman, elaborating no further.
“And how you come to be here?” The man was excited again. Rambling. “Are you alone? Are you alone here?”
A cheer from behind them and more shouts of, “Steffen, Steffen wait for us! Why you not take us with you?”
“Please excuse my friends.”
“No problem,” said the woman moving his hand away from her behind. Then: “Come on,” she said. “Down there,” she said, pointing to closer to the sea.
She began to run.
And he followed her into the darkness, scampering across the sand. “Hey, wait.” He was losing sight of her. She was a blur of green dress. “The caves, they are that way!”
“Come on,” he heard from distance. “The water is warm.”
She watched him approach tentatively for she was already naked, her dress and undergarments slung on the sand where he was now standing.
“Come in and join me.”
She was unashamed in her nudity. It was something she had never understood. And as he stripped down she remembered the first time she had seen her husband. So raw and tender. So embarrassed.
Finally her husband had asked her: after the first time he had requested that they be together with the lights out. He’d been uncomfortable with the way she looked at him, the way she’d taken in every detail.
The small man in front of her seemed similarly awkward. He was puffing out his chest, making the effort to appear confident in his natural form but now unclothed he was quick to rush at the water.
He dived in with a splash.
Up above the stars were so clear, the moon so bright. In the distance the fire from the party burned, it was a blip of life, the musical beat a dull thudding and the loud voices and laughter had become the soft chatter of distant excitement.
A hand grabbed her foot. The man was pulling her under.
“Stop it,” she wailed. She kicked out, careful not to kick too hard. She felt his shoulder under her foot, then he slipped away and rose to the surface next to her, splashing and satisfied. “You are a surprise,” he shouted.
“Oh, really?”
“Yes,” he said, breathing heavily. Under the water he made to touch her but she pushed him away. Instead she swam in circles around this man, and he dived under again, playful, surprising her by resurfacing ten metres or so further along. His head bobbed in the moonlight. His golden teeth glistened.
“The caves, they are that way,” he said.
She swam towards him slowly. “And our clothes?”
The man laughed. “You are a surprise,” he said again. “You have the body …” he sputtered under the waves, his sentence trailing off. “Your heart … it has spirit,” he was saying. “Tell me more about this Clara I meet tonight. This girl who swims before me who asks me to take her to the glow worms. With the green synthetic eyes, who watches me, who pushes me away then drags me closer.”
She was upon him now and their lips locked together. Wet mouths and bodies twisting tightly.
“Clara from far away,” he mumbled. He was a fish. An animal. Sweat and sea water. His blood was warm. Blood and skin and bones. She felt his heart beating.
* * *
“You still want to see the caves?” he asked her some time later. They were lying on the beach, still naked and far from where they’d left their clothes. “They are right behind us,” he said. “Not far.”
She gazed over to where he was pointing. And she asked him what it was like, living in paradise.
“Paradise? You are kidding me?” he laughed. “I see the vid-feeds of your cities. You have cars that drive themselves. You have houses that from the inside can change the shape – the holos, I’ve seen them, rooms in which you can go anywhere by only touching a button.”
“Those rooms are just visual,” the woman dismissed. “There’s no smell, no touch.” She ran her fingers through the sand. “Here, it is real,” she said.
But the man was hardly listening. I hear you can even make it rain, he was saying. Then pointing at the moon, he said, “You know they’re building cities up there now.”
The woman followed his finger upwards. Then leaning forward she picked up a clump of sand and allowed it to run through her fingers. She watched the fine grain settle on her legs while the man began talking at length: “One day, I will go there,” he was saying. “If I have the chance. They’ll ask for volunteers and that’s what I’ll do. They’ll need people of all kinds. That’s the way it works. A few like you, a few like me, a few like others. And I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “You’re thinking, why me, right? Why me when there will be so many others? But I tell you, I have ambition,” he said, showing her his golden teeth. “And because when it comes down to it,” he laughed, “at the end of the day, who in their right mind wants to live on the moon?”
The woman closed her eyes, drawing back to another time. She was thinking again of her husband.
“The moon,” her husband had said after talking to her at length about the proposed colonisation. He’d been informing her, as if she didn’t know; as if she were completely unaware of everything that was going on in the world. It was their first date and he’d asked her, “The moon, how do you picture it?”
“Like a ball of cheese in the sky,” she’d joked.
“And cheese?” he’d asked after a moment’s consideration.
“Yellow milk,” she’d replied.
“And yellow?” he’d asked, growing in boldness, relaxed by the white wine that was settling in his veins.
She’d thought of honey and butter; the smell of daffodils and egg yolk. Lemons, bananas, sweetcorn … even now they all had that strange taste of yellow.
“Before I could see,” she told the fisherman as they sat there naked on the beach, “I’d imagine the sky as a mixture of frosting and water that at night would suddenly change into black tea with sugar.” She laughed. “But of course, you never see the sugar in tea, once it’s stirred … I never knew that before …”
“You were born blind?”
“Yes,” she answered. She was playing with the sand still, letting it run through her fingers. “Until two years ago when I had the operation, I couldn’t see anything.”
“And then it all changed,” the fisherman laughed. “And now you want to see the world,” he grinned, unmoved by her revelation.
“You know when I was a little girl my mother told me there were glow worms above my bed,” the woman said. “In my room, on the ceiling and I’d imagine them when I was lying there in that moment before you fall asleep. Glow worms mothers and fathers and families and cousins. A whole village. A whole community. To me, what they represented. Light,” she said. “Glow. For one who cannot see, those words can seem magical.”
“So come, then,” said the fisherman, rising to his feet. “Let us see these magical glow worms of yours.”
He took her hand and before she knew it he was leading her into the underground. Sharp rocks under their bare feet and, “Shhh …” he was saying, as if a single sound could disturb the tranquillity. “Further,” he was mouthing. “This way, further, follow me …” Each and every hair on his body had pricked up in the cool air.
Behind him a whole new world was emerging in the darkness.
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