By Denise Diehl

They floated in their life preservers, waiting. 

The water was warm enough; they were in the tropics.

It was a holiday weekend. Most of the thirty people did not know each other. Some were in groups, and the rest were in couples or singles.

Some blanched at the thought of the unknown. Teenagers laughed nervously. Couples and friends held hands, the macho men faked their bravado, and parents thanked God they had no children with them. Words of assurance rang out, and anxious faces gazed at the surface, pushing away images of what might be beneath. 

Then they felt it—the stirring from below. Bubbles erupted around them, making the water roil and fizz. A strong current began to pull on their bodies.

The first screams started. 

Like fish in a net, they were dragged together into a tight circle.

With kicking legs and flailing arms, a giant wave scooped them up and hurled them like Fruit Loops into the vast maw of an enormous plastic sea creature with round, shiny, black eyes and glittering teeth.

The screaming continued as they disappeared into its mouth and travelled down its dark gullet until they emerged in the light and safety of Gloryland.

*   *   *

Denise Diehl spent the last forty-plus years working in Laboratory Science. After retiring with her husband to a small rural town in New Zealand, she wrote her first novels and short stories—a fun new adventure to match the latest decade of her life. Her writing tends toward the speculative and the weird, think The Twilight Zone.

Two of her stories were published in the Academy of the Heart and Mind and Bright Flash Literary Review, December 2024 and a third in Frivoulous Comma, March 2025.