Wheeling Gull Isle not unlike the waves

“Treat? Cookie?”

“Cookie.”

The pearl’s oversized ears flipflopped curiously atop her crown. She did not join her sister and brothers, but flattened herself against the earth to await Stockholm’s return with wide, misty blue eyes. In her mind’s eye, the Grand Ambush would go down like this:

Like a painted bloom — a phrase Coelacanth uses to describe cuttlefish when she forgets the actual dictionary word for them — Koi gradually adopts the color of the earth she tucks herself against. She’s invisible. Stockholm arrives on the scene with a “cookie” in his mouth (which appears to be one of the island’s winged denizens) and his youngest daughter springs out of stealth mode and attaches herself to his face, the most loveable facehugger the world has ever known! Everyone is immensely impressed.

What actually happened was very different.

By the time Stockholm returned, Koi was so deep in the, “I am going to be so ready for this ambush!” spiral that she, uh, wasn’t actually ready to do the thing. She was still wriggling her silvern rump in preparation for launch when he passed her by, causing her to hop awkwardly behind him like a kitten who hasn’t exactly mastered the whole coordination thing yet. The distance from ground to face was so far and he wasn’t facing her anymore and how was she supposed to facehug him if he wasn’t making himself available to be facehugged — with her back arched and her fur puffed out in kittenish displeasure, she crab-scuttled sideways after him and then attached herself to his wrist.

It wasn’t necessarily a breed trait, but Coelacanth was very “soft-mouthed” and had passed this trait on to her youngest — and perhaps this was evident in the way Koi mouthed at but didn’t bite down on her father’s broad paw. This lasted for a moment or two as she regarded the proffered cookie with a healthy degree of caution.