This one was conjured up from an inspiration card. It was a painting of two vague girls on a beach, and from there, the sea foam girls came to life.
~~~
SEA FOAM GIRLS
(A Flash Fiction by Maggie Slater)
The sea foam girls with their dragging steps in the sand, the seaweed piled about their ankles, hauled the waves closer to the house. Eve flailed out of bed like a beetle, untangling herself from the net of her sheets, ignoring the arthritic aching of her hands, her knees, her shoulder, to grab her Sig Sauer from her bedside table. She wobbled down the hall, stabilizing herself on the wood frames where she’d torn down the water damaged drywall just days earlier. Through the sliding door in the back, she could just make them out: wispy as sea spray, childlike forms with long seaweed hair tumbling down their shoulders, the gulf water clutched like a blanket in their foggy hands as they dragged it higher, closer.
The slider squealed, still gritty with sand in its track, as Eve shoved it open and stepped out into the dark, fishy night, the handgun heavy in her hands.
“Stop right there!” she shouted, aiming towards them. She’d never shot anything but a target before, but she would tonight.
The girls drifted to a stop just ten yards away, but it didn’t feel like a permanent stop, not like the peak of high tide which in the last year had risen higher than Even had ever seen it since the year her family bought the beach house and started visiting every summer. This was only a hesitation between waves. The hammer of her handgun made a snap like a broken crab shell as she pulled it back.
“You can’t have this house! I refuse!” She tried to keep her voice steady, but it rippled with her desperation.
Out at the break, far beyond the sea foam girls, the whitecaps lifted, rose, doming into bowed, giant heads. Monstrous sea women rolled up out of the deep and the sea buckled and billowed around their shins as they stepped towards shore. The sea foam girls danced wildly forward, tripping, spilling onto their bellies, their backs, rolling and tossing and cavorting forward, the water rushing towards Eve, splashing over the washed out dunes, over the sea grass, over the porch, and over her bare feet.
“Please!” Eve wailed, arms aching from holding the pistol up, “I love this house! It’s always been my happy place, my retreat, my sanctuary- Please!”
The sea women halted, towering over the beach, looming above the house, their eyes glowing with the phosphorescence of the deep. About her ankles, the girls grew quiet, lapping her calves sympathetically, their hot, wet mouths kissing her skin. The foremost sea woman sluiced down to her elbows, and the ocean billowed up around the house like an embrace as she brought her enormous face close. Delicate blacktip sharps darted frantically through her; a shiver of hammerheads circled at her heart.
In a voice like the hurricanes that had wrecked the house not once but three times in the past ten years, the sea woman said, “I’m sorry, Little One, but change is the way of all things.”
Then her forehead arched upwards, and her face caved inward, and the massive wave coiled far over the rooftop, rushing up, up, up. The sharks—elegant and graceful—were close enough for Eve to each out and touch them. The handgun bucked in her hands, and she watched a single bullet plow a trail of bubbles into the sea woman’s chest and strike a small blacktip, sending it darting away in a cloud of blood.
Then the sea woman bore down, and Eve and her house became part of the sea.