The story is enclosed. One half-page illustration to open it — the visual threshold before the reader enters. Read it first.
The Assignment
A half-page splash in the pulp-horror style of 1970s science fiction magazines. The dread of deep water and a desecrated shoreline. The image should feel like something that was printed on cheap paper in 1973 and has been quietly unsettling people ever since.
Composition
Foreground — The Waterline
Ossossáné Beach at twilight, or under a sickly overcast sky that has no business being that colour. The sand meets the lake. Where driftwood should be: skeletal fragments — ribs, femurs — partially buried in the wet sand, calcified and bleached to a stark, blinding white. They have been there long enough to belong. That is the problem.
Background — The Water
Far out in the dark bay, a massive, ambiguous silhouette disrupts the surface. Not fully lit. The suggestion of the Mishipeshu: perhaps the jagged saw-tooth scales of its back breaking the water, or the copper-lit reflection of eyes looking back toward shore. It is not approaching. It is watching.
Deep Background — The Tower
A cooling tower on the far shore, letting out steam. It should read, at first, as part of the industrial horizon. It should read, on a second look, as the thing the Mishipeshu has been watching longer than the bones have been on the beach.
Colour & Light
Water & SkyDeep, murky aquatic blues and blacks. The dark of a lake that does not want to be looked into.
Tide LineSickly, radioactive seafoam green where the water meets the sand. The colour of something that should not be that colour.
The BonesStark, blinding white. The only clean thing on the page.
The EntityCopper-lit eyes against the black water. Warm and wrong at the same distance.
Tone Reference
The image shares a shoreline with the Ontario Hydro ad earlier in this issue. The reader who notices the connection is the reader who deserves it. Do not signal it. The bones were already there before the ad ran, and the ad ran without mentioning them by name.
— R.H.