The first thing I noticed was the color.
Bright blue, catching the morning light, rolling slowly across the patio tiles until it bumped against the toe of my slipper and stopped. I looked down at it without understanding what I was seeing. Then I looked up.
The pool was gone.
Not gone, exactly. The water was still there beneath it all. But the surface had disappeared completely under millions of tiny, shimmering beads in every color I could name and several I couldn’t, blue and green and yellow and red and orange, layered so densely that the pool looked like something between a painting and a dream, still and strangely beautiful in the early morning light.
I stood in the open doorway and forgot to breathe.
Then I saw the shape at the bottom.
Large. Rectangular. Too deliberate and too straight-edged to be debris, too large to have drifted there, too perfectly centered to be anything other than something someone had placed with intention.
I gripped the doorframe.
“Carmelo.”
My husband appeared from the kitchen hallway carrying two mugs of coffee, the same way he appeared every morning of our lives together, unhurried, still in his robe, his hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. He started to say something and then he saw my face.
One mug slipped from his hand and struck the counter. Coffee spread in a dark pool beneath the toaster. Neither of us moved to clean it up.
He stepped past me onto the patio.
The Orbeez shifted softly against the pool tiles, making a faint clicking sound like rainfall against a window. There were millions of them. I couldn’t begin to calculate how many. They moved in slow, lazy circles, and beneath them the rectangular shape rested silently at the bottom, waiting.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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