18 February 2012
Like many in his school, Alan made the trip to the ocean resort in the spring of his senior year, seeking the sweet newly found adult pleasures of alcohol and sex. Strong drink was readily available at a variety of boardwalk bars, but romance eluded him until he met her one night, a striking blonde whose hair wafted in the cool ocean breezes.
It took surprisingly little for Alan to charm this seaside vision back to his motel room, although she had surprisingly little to say and smelled faintly of the sea, a mixture of salt spray and ocean water; perhaps, Alan thought, she had been out fishing that day.
The sex which followed was to Alan satisfying but strangely detached, the girl seeming to use him rather than the usual opposite. Feeling drained and tired following the end of his long but by most accounts wildly successful day, Alan lapsed into sleep, awakening some time later to find his strange lover gone.
The young man hastily threw his clothes back on and went in pursuit of her, realizing as he did so that he didn't even know her name. Summer romances often tended to be temporary, but Alan hoped to recapture the encounter perhaps later in his vacation.
After much fruitless searching, Alan at a distance caught sight of a lone figure on the beach in the first rays of the rising sun. She was naked and appeared to be crouching, using her arms in an almost flipper-like fashion to hollow out a depression in the wet sand. Alan froze in the dawn light to see leathery eggs drop from the girl and fall into the nest that she had made. Her head turned towards Alan, who realized that the face he beheld now bore a reptilian aspect. Hastily, the humanoid creature dragged sand over her eggs and scurried into the sea, her mating and reproduction rituals completed...
Alan staggered off the beach, knowing that he could never tell anyone of the events which had transpired...and the sea, that ancient cradle of life, rolled on, forever mysterious and secretive...
Instinct • Opuss № I