Pilo and the Deep-Down Dark

High up in the warm part of the sea, where the sunlight still reached all the way down, there lived a very small seahorse. His name was Pilo. He was no bigger than your thumb, with a curled-up tail, a long thoughtful snout, and a tiny round belly that went in and out when he breathed.

Pilo's home was a meadow of sea grass — green and yellow and always swaying. All day long he wound his tail around one soft ribbon of it and let the water rock him… this way, and that way, and this way again. The sun came down in long stripes. The stripes wobbled whenever he moved.

Little silver fish came by in the mornings, hundreds of them at once, turning together like one shiny thought. Pilo liked to watch them go. He liked the tickle of warm water under his chin, and the taste of salt, and the way everything up here was bright, and easy, and safe.

But when the sun began to sink, Pilo grew sleepy — and sleepy seahorses need bedtime grass. Not ordinary grass. The softest grass in the whole sea, the kind that folds around you like a blanket that has been warmed on a stove. And that grass did not grow anywhere up here.

It grew far below, past the edge of the reef, down where the blue stopped being blue. Pilo swam out to the edge and looked over. The water down there was deep… and down… and dark. It had no stripes of sun in it at all. It just went on, and on, and quietly on.

Pilo's little belly did a flip. He held his ribbon of grass a bit tighter. "Maybe tomorrow," he told himself. "Tomorrow I will be braver." So he stayed where the light was, and curled up in the ordinary grass, and it scratched his chin all night long. In the morning his eyes felt small and his fins felt slow.

And the dark down there was still waiting, patient as ever, right below the edge of the reef. So Pilo made himself a promise — a very small one, about the size of a seahorse. He would not go all the way down. Not today. He would only go… one tail-length deeper. Just one. And then straight back up to the light.