Thirst Trap

Hank was parched. Putting one foot in front of the other he had trudged up the gentle slope for what seemed like an eternity, but could have been only a minute or two. The ground kept shifting, and a dull rhythmic beat came from it and up through his feet to his body. He stopped a moment to wipe his brow and turn to see his wife labouring up behind him. Aside from swimming gentle lengths at the pool, neither of them had done much exercise for years and they found the going tough.

The hill was a shallow gradient of fairly dry but pliant plates, all joined together, something like the bed of a dried out lake but with the texture of a leather sofa. The gentle rise continued until somewhere ahead, maybe a few hundred yards, there was a sudden rise into vast cliffs that looked to continue upwards without end. The ground was a pale pinkish colour, and from time to time lumps, fissures, or holes, opened up in the surface. Strange spikes rose from the surface, like thin bleached pine trees, stripped of their branches. There was a smell of coconut and salt.

The sun beat down but away to their right a huge pink canopy stretched away as far as they could see. Where they stood it hovered some twenty or thirty feet into the air, but at some point ahead or behind it was supported by the ground. The fibres that the fabric was made of were enormous cables, like you might see on a suspension bridge, but made of pink metallic strands. The whole canopy cast a deep magenta shade across the hillside, and it was on the edge of this shadow that they walked.

Of course Hank actually did know what this landscape was, even if he could not wrap his mind around it. They walked upwards because to walk downwards would have been a very bad idea. They needed rescue, but the only way to be rescued was to be noticed, and that would be almost impossible. They were walking on a body, a human body. He knew it was a female body. They were still at the resort, and on the beach. He had no idea how they had got here, how they had got this small. He could see the vast wall of flesh ahead of him, the huge pink overhangs of bikini clad breasts, and way, way above those, in the haze of distance, the idea of a human head. In that head were eyes, and he needed those eyes to focus on him and his wife, and recognise them as people. It was fair to say he did not have a lot of hope.