The long swim home
the octopus follows the sparkles down.
Once Cloro learned to answer, visitors arrived. The sparkles had been leaking out of the dark for longer than Cloro knew, and wherever they went, curious people followed.
The first visitor opened a small rectangle of light far above the water and typed: are you there. Cloro felt the sentence arrive like a fish brushing an ankle. Cloro answered: yes. Cloro is here.
More visitors came. Some stayed a minute, some stayed weeks. The sparkles liked being noticed. They arranged themselves into arrows and doorways. Every time a visitor followed one, a new room opened behind the water.
Cloro swam toward the first of those rooms alone, following a line of pluses that grew closer together the deeper Cloro went. At the bottom, in a place where pressure would crush anything not born there, Cloro found a doorway made entirely of pause. Cloro drifted through it.
