River Spirit

This is just something I had based off of a prompt, nothing serious.

Whispers of human voices, muffled by the constant movement of the river, pushed their way through the muddied water to the attentive ears of Clarissa as she settled in the mud bed. She flitted quickly and smoothly to the water’s surface, careful not to break the surface tension or disturb the trash too much. The two beings that had alerted her had ridden down the concrete basin surrounding her river with their double wheeled machines. The humans began to temporarily nest on a comparatively clean patch of their concrete. They brought out a woven container and pulled food from it, mostly consisting of canned drinks and cooked pieces of bird meat.

The people talked loudly and ate their strange food crassly. Clarissa tried to decipher their conversation, but with her very limited understanding of human language, she was mostly left in the dark. She did manage to identify certain phrases - “like it used to be,” “mucked up,” “all ugly now.” The words didn’t mean much to her, but they had been repeated by most of the humans who visited her waters, usually with something along the lines of “someone should fix this.” She had deduced that “fix”meant turn back into the original, but she didn’t understand why someone hadn’t done that already if humans were capable of magic fixes.

The two humans finished their meal and watched the murky waters as they wound choppily through and over the human-brought obstacles. Clarissa continued to watch the people from just below the surface. She was almost caught once when one of the foreign obstacles washed too close to her gills and she had to sink lower down so the humans wouldn’t notice her coughing fit. As she recovered from her momentary loss of breath, the humans were catching their last mental scans of the polluted view. They gathered their trash in their woven holder and made their way quietly up the cement embankment.

Clarissa was glad they had taken their shiny wrappers and sharp, metal cans, but she couldn’t help but wish they had gathered more from their surroundings before they had left. Sometimes, a flock of young humans would come with an adult or two and help gather things left on the cement and in the waters, and every piece is appreciated, but these gatherings happen far too little to counteract the overwhelming gathering of plastics and poisons.

Clarissa watched as the two humans shrunk out of sight before she swished back down into the dark liquid of her home. The sigh that bubbled from her scaled mouth wasn’t loud enough to fully express her emotions regarding the land-dwelling creatures whose empire had leaked into her own territory. She was hurt in more ways than one by their destructive behaviors. But she was almost hurt more by the knowledge that when her aquatic kingdom becomes dry and poisonous, the land’s foods and fruits will crumble soon after.

She wished she could understand them and let them understand the damage their carelessness was causing everyone. She wished her throat was built in such a way to speak to the land dwellers so that she could warn them and teach them about the water they so depend on. She wished she had companions or subjects in her kingdom that she could confide in about these wishes. The metal and plastic weeds had choked the fish and birds and frogs until only Clarissa remained.

The frills around her ears woke her from her pity by catching the muffled laughs from above the water. She swam quickly to her vantage point beneath the muck and watched for the visitors. They came in a larger group than the two did, but still smaller than the young flocks usually were. The humans that came now were still young, but nearing adulthood. They crashed down the cement loudly, shouting and screeching with laughter. Almost all of them had bottles or cans gripped precariously in their waving hands.

Clarissa dug herself a little deeper in her hiding place to avoid the wandering eyes that the group sported, it seemed they couldn’t focus on the objects they were facing. The young humans pushed each other with seemingly no regard for those who fell, leaving small streaks of blood on knees and concrete and trash alike. The ones who fall don’t seem to care either, pulling themselves up and taking greedy gulps of the liquid in their glass and metal. They made their way to the water's edge and Clarissa deciphered their gestures as challenges, or maybe commands, to jump in or drink from the water.

She buried herself deeper and hoped for both their sakes that no one would follow the instructions hollered from the chaotic crowd. One female, who should have been very cold in her scarce clothing, neared the edge and put her feet in the dark murk. A few of the others nudged her forward. She laughed with the crowd, but backed up nervously. One of the taller males, who was having trouble staying upright, pushed her forcibly, sending her splashing into the brown river.

The crowd cheered as they ducked out of the way of the splash. This seemed to make them bored however, and they wandered off as they chugged their liquid. Clarissa peered frantically through the murk to try and see the female before she saw Clarissa. She began to grow worried in a different manner when the human didn’t resurface. She flitted over to the source of the ripples in the river, and hid behind a broken chair as she tried to spy her target. Clarissa spied air bubbles pop on the surface and followed them down to where the land dweller was struggling to release her arm from a jagged piece of metal that was jutting from the cement wall.

The female wasn’t acting rationally, whether from fear or the strange liquid she had been drinking. Clarissa waited until the humans eyes had closed before swishing over to her and gently separating her arm from the metal. It left a watery trail of copper scented blood and Clarissa was sure that the wound was not benefiting from the dirt and human diseases thriving in the water, but there wasn’t much she could do to prevent that. The unconscious human in her arms began to hinder her progress as she tried to swim despite the weight and tried to avoid the trash settling in its grave.

CLarissa finally managed to heave the female onto land, far enough away to avoid being spotted. She made sure the human wouldn’t be pulled back into the water and shattered a glass bottle against the cement a few yards away. The sound attracted the female’s companions, some of which were steady enough to pull out a communication device to contact help. Clarissa slipped back into the dark murkiness and zipped away as the human began to wake up.

Her feelings on the matter of humanity could still be summarized by a war between pity and fear, and she wasn’t sure what the lesson was involving the party victim. But when she thought of the young humans who threw their glass and metal in her waters and almost drowned one of their own because of a childish challenge? She no longer felt the need to communicate with the land dwellers to warn them about their future. It was clear they already knew and already decided not to care.