Short Story: A Tail as Old as…

Short Story: A Tail as Old as Time

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Joan shivered. It was freezing, and her five carefully selected layers were doing nothing to keep her warm. She couldn’t believe that on a romantic weekend away she was wearing FIVE layers. A few years ago a romantic break meant no layers, and never leaving bed, except for essentials like strawberries and whipped cream. But now that she had a ring on her finger, romance apparently boiled down to stalking a mythical creature at the side of a lake in bloody Scotland.

Sure the place was pretty, breathtaking in fact, it was because of this she had been lured out of the warm hotel room, however the first five minutes of standing at the shoreline had been ample time for her to appreciate the beauty of Loch Ness. The other hour and a half she’d spent silently listing the reasons why she was with Simon, while he searched the loch with binoculars. After he had scolded her for talking while he looked for “Her” she listed her ex-boyfriends hoping she would come to the conclusion that, despite Simon’s obsession for monsters, he was still tops compared to the others. At the moment her cheating ex-boyfriend wasn’t looking so bad, as least his obsessions were “normal” like sex and football.

“Couldn’t we start walking around the loch? Keep us warm?”

“I told you to wear a hat!”

“I’m not wearing a hat on our anniversary break away. I look like a small boy in that thing!”

She waited for him to tell her that she looked gorgeous in everything- even a beany hat- but the reassurance never came.

“Simon! I’m fed up, freezing and losing my patience. I want to go back to the hotel.”

“Wait! Did you see that?”

“There’s nothing there, monsters don’t exist! Nessie is an elephant’s trunk, and the abominable snowman is a very cold man caught in the snow. That’s it!”

“Don’t get annoyed. I just wanted to see for myself if the old legends were true.”

Old legends?! She couldn’t begin to understand how he could believe in such nonsense. That old familiar feeling she had spent so long burying deep inside her began to rise once more. Doubt. Could a dreamer and a realist really be suited for each other? Was she condemning herself to a life of chasing myths?

Simon put down the binoculars.

“Come on, we can pick up strawberries and cream from the shop on the way back.”

Joan felt her faith restoring. Simon needed her to pull him out of his dreams and face the world every now and again. And she would make a realist out of him yet.

She picked up the binoculars. Shaking her head she raised them to her eye line. Monsters! What a thing to believe in! Wait. Something was moving, a ripple, no, larger than a ripple, almost a wave, a large wave forming in the still waters of the loch. Could it be? No. It really couldn’t be. Or was it? Joan could see the hint of a long tail just popping out of the water… “SIMON!”