{"id":1010,"date":"2018-03-12T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2018-03-12T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2018-03-12T09:00:10","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T13:00:10","slug":"peek-a-boo-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/?p=1010","title":{"rendered":"Peek-A-Boo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ana-Aquaman-26\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I had a good breath diving under\u2026good for at least 3 minutes.\u00a0\u00a0Fifty yards out from the dock, I angled down deep for\u00a0about 35 feet.\u00a0 It was exhilarating. \u00a0The fish were strange today. They weren\u2019t acting right.\u00a0 It was\u00a0just my instinct but\u2026they seemed to crowd me instead of scattering at my approach. Pensive.<\/p>\n

Weeds were thick but I liked swimming through them, like parting curtains\u2026..until I saw the eyes \u2013 big eyes \u2013 cunning eyes.\u00a0 I stopped, dead.\u00a0 Froze.\u00a0 They were staring at me with unnerving intelligence and all the little fish\u00a0began darting about frantically \u2013 and I nearly lost my breath.<\/p>\n

Through the gloom, I began to make out the long, hulking form behind the eyes; Strange limbs, sharp fins, long feelers, fleshy lips with menacing barbs, monstrous teeth\u2026..smiling at me?<\/p>\n

Now I was afraid! In one swift motion my hand swept down to draw my knife from it’s ankle sheath \u2013 but lightning fast, the creature\u2019s arm shot out from between the weeds and wrapped its long scaly fingers around my throat \u2013 my jaw \u2013 my entire skull.<\/p>\n

I lost my air\u2026and then, lost consciousness.<\/p>\n

I woke up…breathing. I started to remember\u2026..swimming through weeds \u2013 fish acting oddly \u2013 then the eyes\u2026and a massive claw, engulfing my head.\u00a0 And as it all went dark I thought I heard a sinister, gurgling \u201cPeek-a-boo!\u201d<\/p>\n

I was inside now. It was stifling and smelled like cat food mixed with burning tires. I sat up in a lumpy soup of viscous bile and big bloody chunks of meat. My hands and face burned but my wet suit protected the rest of my skin. A sphincter opened behind me and sucked me out,\u00a0like a dumpling in a\u00a0steaming meat-soup, down a tube whose bulbous nodules bathed us in a spray of acid. It stripped the fur and skin from the meat and dissolved my hair along with\u00a0a painful layer of exposed skin.<\/p>\n

I dropped into a bony chamber in which long, razor sharp blades shredded the meat into hamburger (along with most of my wetsuit). I was quickly evacuated into another chamber which flooded with thousands of tiny, finger sized worms (with very sharp teeth), who consumed every speck of the remaining meat sludge before I alone, the squirming, inedible lump, was expelled once more, through slimy bowels, into a vat of solid waste.<\/p>\n

This wondrous fleshy sack looked and smelled like the inside of a rotting, bloated elephant carcass.\u00a0 Minutes passed, possibly hours, while a steady stream of sticky, gloppy gunk filled the space, until there was no more room.\u00a0 I thought this\u00a0must be\u00a0the end. With goop filling my ears and covering my mouth, I took my last\u00a0full breath of air (a three minute breath?) before black sludge covered and consumed me. One minute\u2026two minutes\u2026nearly three minutes passed before I felt a great shuddering shift, followed by a resounding (satisfied) grunt\u2026.and I was suddenly shot, like a torpedo, out into clean, cool\u00a0lake water.<\/p>\n

I surfaced near the shoreline, gasping for air. Although I emerged from the lake a raw, tattered and thoroughly disgruntled piece of fish poop\u2026I was alive. It was, perhaps, not my greatest adventure but surely a \u2018fantastic journey.\u2019<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

***The only thing better than a giant fish swallowing a dude and crapping him back out is doing the same thing to a great old\u00a0Asimov concept (like I just\u00a0did here).\u00a0 Aaaaah, fish poop!\u2026one of the great mysteries of life.\u00a0 The\u00a0image was originally a cover John did for the May, 2011 issue of Analog Mag.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 -Marsha<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a good breath diving under\u2026good for at least 3 minutes.\u00a0\u00a0Fifty yards out from the dock, I angled down deep for\u00a0about 35 feet.\u00a0 It was exhilarating. \u00a0The fish were strange today. They weren\u2019t acting right.\u00a0 It was\u00a0just my instinct but\u2026they seemed to crowd me instead of scattering at my approach. Pensive. Weeds were thick … Continue reading Peek-A-Boo<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[150,124],"tags":[7,210,38,176,10,249,102,22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1010"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1013,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1010\/revisions\/1013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sallemander.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}