Flash Fiction #3 - The Vast Expanse

Picture Prompt

300-word Flash Fiction

Post # 3

Week Ending: 06/27/2025

Genre: Thriller

Title: The Vast Expanse

   I'm on a new adventure today, minding my own business, though I'm not alone. I have no specific destination in mind, I just want to see sights, colors, and other life around me. Sometimes I enjoy floating with the current and sometimes I use my fins to propel me toward my liquid terminus.

   In my venture, I round a cliff and come face to face with something I've never seen before. Searching my memory, I can't place what it could possibly be. One word that comes to my shock-addled cerebrum is ‘monster’. It’s huge. It's got thick protrusions coming off of its body, many times longer and stronger than anything I have to use if I need to defend myself. 

   I don't think it’s seen me, yet swimming right toward me. In a moment of panic, I scramble wildly away from what I perceive to be its gruesome front, but it’s so foreign to me that I can't say where the front is for sure. I think I've managed to rise above its head, which looks partially mechanical, with areas of flesh in a color I know not. As I look down, something transparently white releases from it with a blub sound and it's floating upward, directly at me. I manage to narrowly avoid what I assume is a deadly substance, meant to melt me into an edible goo. My maneuver left me staring in its ugly face, I can see its two eyes staring back through the strange mechanical oval covering them. 

   Is that menace in its glare? I can't say, but I seize the delay because I'm faster. I scurry back to my anemone where I know I'm safe again. I breathe fresh oxygen through my gills and promise myself I'll never go into the vast expanse again. 

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