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Slowly, gently, the amphora churns the burgundy surface. Its passengers do not tumble as it rolls. Nor are there seatbelts to buckle. The amphora brims with gravity. Its passengers recline lazily in their cushions. They watch, through pictographic windows, the passage of the vessel through the wine. Their rooms slip between light and dark; the windows slip in and out of the fermented sea. The amphora hums like a monastery. Its passengers droop their heads and lower their lids. The ceramic chant and the sloshing waves dull their senses.
The amphora stops, still near the docks.
The sea vibrates. Wine splashes on the surface in tiny, glittering spires. Beneath the amphora, something unseen. Something colossal.
One grey passenger asks; is there possibly some issue?
The vibration stops.
The sea behind the amphora rips, an explosive crash of waves. A sea monster, a Mogul Koi, punches the top of its head into the air. It’s eyes - its translucent eyes - are wider than the sun when he watched the world close. Wider than the sterile ivory balls of the marble train, and almost as lacking in soul. The wine crashes from its scales - translucent scales - in waterfalls. Through the crystal armor, the organs of the koi work their individual industries. The see-through heart pumps see-through blood through see-through veins. The stomach wall lets sight pass to-and-from its immense cavernous hold, where crude oil sloshes. The upper jaw of the monster and its house-sized, square teeth - translucent teeth - arc over the amphora. The colossal fish swallows the amphora whole. The ship slips down the invisible gullet-walls, and slides into the slimy dark of the stomach acid.
And, as quickly as it comes, the Mogul-Koi punches back into the sea.
Diving with a will, the Koi beast corkscrews. Spinning. Circling. Deeper. Deeper. The amphora sloshes in its belly. The passengers tumble from their cushioned rests. Through hieroglyph windows and a glass stomach wall, they see the organs toil. The gills shiver like great sheets of crystal in a moody Wind. A workhouse heart rumbles with volcano energy; liquid glass blood bubbles through its veins. The rooms swelter. The air grows heady. Beyond the window and the lung and the ice-flake scales; through the murky wine; thick forests of candy coral crash upward. Licorice seaweed, gummy elkhorn, malt chocolate branches; all give sudden way to clearcuts of rock and sand. The seafloor slips by. The stomach-ship humidifies. The passengers sweat and tumble. The Koi labors down.
Swimming with a rhythm, the Koi beast corkscrews. The dark wine shifts suddenly to water. Light shines from far below. It glints brightly on the flushed faces of the passengers. They tumble and roll through increasingly dense air. The Wind - last of the passengers - blows hot and sticky and hollow through the chambers. The passengers’ ears pop with each rumble of the leviathan heart. Their blood pushes heavily in time with the beast’s. Between each pulse, the constant bubble of the bladed gills, aerating the sea. The gills work the water. The passengers lungs work the thickening air. The Koi fish labors down.
Drilling through the deep, the koi-beast corkscrews. The air is syrup. The passengers flush with effort. Every pair of hands - even the driest - drips with salty sweat. Each pound of koi heart and whirr of koi gills pumps the hot-wet Wind through tunnels and chambers, steaming around the tumbling passengers. Each pop of their ears is a wave of nausea. A growing golden glow below pierces see-through scales and stomach and hieroglyph window. The glow fills the rooms with light, battles the darkening eyes. But the air is muting. The amphora toiling madly. The stomach oil rolling. The earthen walls jostling. Every set of senses is beaten. Hammered.
Remorselessly, the Mogul Koi labors and drives and drills and corkscrews. Deeper and deeper and deeper still. Into an unknown brightness. Its heart and gills work air into porridge, too thick to digest. Every set of eyes slips shut. Noses run with slow-moving blood. No set of eyes remains to see the huge domes on the bottom of the sea. The domes glow with light, like bubble wrap on an east-facing window at dawn. No eyes see the bigger fish - giant, lambent, loitering - casting daylight rays across the ocean deep. Every sense has been baked in the heat; battered against the tossing ship in a stomach lake of oil; compressed and extruded into unconsciousness by the dense air. The Koi fish labors down, unheeded.
Mr. Grey sinks, senselessly, inside the monster-koi.
This has been In Different Color, a fairy tale.
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