Snippet #1529244

Nerin woke slowly, stirring. Grainy sand, quite unlike the soft, organic surface at the bottom of her ocean home, ground against her smooth skin. She moaned quietly at the unpleasant sensation. The sand opened tiny cuts in her skin; too small to bleed, but large enough to burn with the chemicals in the water which surrounded her.
Water? No... but it was water. The last she had known, she had been lying on the beach, tangled in kelp, unable to escape as...
Humans. The humans had found her. That was where she was. In one of their tanks. In one of their poorly simulated oceans, surrounded by contaminated human water, with its simulated current and tough sand. There was nothing alive in this water. The billions of tiny creatures which always surrounded her in the ocean... they were gone. Their constant whispers were missing. And the silence frightened her.
Slowly, she forced her eyes open, sitting up on the bottom of the tank. Her soft brown hair floated eerily around her as she peered about, trying to see outside of the tank. But she couldn't. There was something covering the glass... like a blanket of kelp. She strained to remember what her teacher had called them. A tarp. That was it. The tank was covered by a tarp, and she could not see the room beyond.
Her heart began to pound wildly. What was she going to do? Trapped here by the humans, far from her people, far from Mother Sea. All she could do was wait for death, which the humans would surely bring. That was what they brought her people, wasn't it? Death?
Dissection.
With a wail of panic and despair and one slash of her tail, she rocketed off of the tank floor. Such a powerful stroke could have carried her easily for hundreds of feet. But this tank was far too small for her, in the end.
She slammed into the glass, ricocheting back against the hard sand. She lay stunned for a moment, and then curled up, bending her tail to hide her face beneath her graceful flukes. And she started to sob. There were no tears here, beneath the water. She had never shed tears. Nothing shed tears that lived beneath the sea; it would be pointless. But the noises she made were of grief nonetheless.