Excerpt: The Oceanagraphic Knight

… a deep sea trench with its hacked black and craggy walls, opening out at the top, fluted there, and some light fluttering, but the shadows down here, cast by what light who could see or say, falling over the fish, the crags, the rocks and dents, the crevices and cracks, the valleys unknown to human science, or the eyes of most things, but known to the feet of small creatures, cold ones, monopods, fringed rugs and slugs and long creatures and short ones, ones that stood on one leg for years and then melted or swam away, there in a trance, they stood, their antennae out, their jelly antennae extended, and waving, or not antennae but a single eye on a stalk, a lip on an arm, the questing stinger, the foot in the centre of the forehead, if there had been a forehead, the shadow cast across these creatures so huge that the creatures never knew that there was a shadow and grew from spawn and lived and died thinking that the world was all one shadow, or all one darkness, or a condition of coldness that had no respite, occasionally a wash of some other temperature frightening them as if wolves had attacked a deer, a fear, that fright of the predator, which the new temperature might be: who was there to tell them it was not?