Kia ora, my name is Dash, and I’m 11.
Recently I wrote a short description about a manta ray inspired by Jono Ridler and his swim4thegulf and his encounter with a manta ray. I also sketched a drawing to go with my description.
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Bliss.
My spread-out wings carve a ravine of momentary space, black and white, gliding through a void of deep blue. Like a bird I fly through the sky’s mirror, my mouth opens as a buzzing cloud of pink floats out of the haze of the future. The tiny creatures tickle my gills as I torpedo through them, a ballet of hunter and hunted. My smooth, triangular back stabs through the surface as my body rockets out of the sea, me, a black and white photo hanging between the heavens and the deep. The moment of frozen time shatters like glass as I plunge back into the water, gliding down deeper till the oasis of the sunlight zone is distorted into a hellscape. The seabed, covered in the scars of huge metal claws that take and kill and destroy. Where royal pillars of kelp once stabbed at the sunlight just above the water, now a carpet of spikey kina march across the rocky desert. Climbing away from the underworld of Tangaroa, my wings flick as I spiral up into the sky and dive back into the deep. Spinning, dancing, diving, flying. It is the essence of me.
The manta ray.