There are crooked coral mountain ranges hidden beneath the waves, living and growing and beautiful in the way that graveyards are - lonely, too. She does not mind though, sprawled asleep in the sand in the valleys between. Fish swim laps and disappear inside the coral skeletons, reappearing at times to nibble at the weightless strands of a cornsilk blue mane. She feels at home here - though there are no friends that look like her, and nothing to eat or drink. But she is so many shades of blue just like everything else in these halfway shallow depths, sapphire and cerulean, an iridescent gem doused in the gold of molten sunshine.

She naps until the sun moves too far across a cornflower sky, until shadow steals over her skin and she wakes to a darker world that she loves decidedly less. There are things in the dark that are not meant for little girls. Things with flat eyes and too many teeth.

So she rises in that weightless way, bounding sleepily through the furrow of sand between climbing coral reefs, chasing the sunshine in the shallower places where light darts like little silver-gold fish through every wave and ripple at the surface. In the places where no plants grow and the water is only a little ways above her head, those same darting refractions dance across the sand, and she chases them until she is laughing and exhausted and feeling content.

But the content only lasts as long as it takes for her to stop playing and look around and remember to wonder if anyone has come back to see her. Then, as now, she creeps towards where the sun-spot is brightest and the water is nearly clear, to where the sand climbs toward the cornflower sky until her delicate little brokenhearted face appears above the surface to examine the beach. There are faces there, but none of them belong to her.