More short stories?

Since I posted that short story last week, I've been thinking about short stories. Though I have tried to write (and have actually written) a large number of short stories, most of them I either don't really like, want to make into something longer (such as the one I posted last week), or are so short they are not really a short story and more a snippet out of a larger story that doesn't actually exist in my head.

The Wet Planet is a rare exception to this. I wrote this particular short story during the course of the wonderful creative writing class I took during my third year of uni (its amazing how many lovely bits of writing your brain is capable of spitting out if you have a deadline and it is 9pm the night before that deadline). So without further ado, I thought I would share that story. While I cannot remember the specifics of the assignment, I believe it was something along the lines of 'write a story in the first person from a perspective utterly alien from your own'... I decided to take this rather literally.

The Wet Planet

It was when I was playing out in the far reaches of the milky way that I found them. They were so small I almost didn’t notice them at first, moving about on a wet little planet. They seemed unable to move as I could, only leaving their planet in little tiny crafts, fragile and breakable. I pulled a couple of them up, plucking them off the surface of the wet planet, their little limbs waving about, to see if they could move outside of their tiny craft, but they crumpled strangely and then wouldn’t move anymore. Even on their wet planet they seemed unable to survive without moving about in their little tiny crafts, except for short periods of time. If they weren’t in those, they were in little straight structures that didn’t move, but still protected them from the wet planet. They moved back and forth from different not-moving structures in their little tiny crafts in strange patterns, all seeming to move at once on one side of the wet planet while on the dark side they didn’t move at all. I watched them for a while before realizing that they would not move in the dark. I wondered if they were perhaps afraid of the dark, or if it hurt them in some way.
There were other little things moving about that didn’t seem to need little crafts. They too followed the pattern of the darkness. There were a great many more moving things without crafts than with. I wondered why some needed the little crafts and some didn’t. Maybe the ones who need crafts were from a different little planet, and weren’t used to the air in the wet little planet. I tried taking some and putting them on a tiny red planet I found when I turned around, but they just lay there and wouldn’t move. I remembered that they couldn’t move outside of their planet outside of their little crafts, so I picked up one of the little crafts from the planet’s surface and put it on a nearby blue planet, but they too wouldn’t move. Maybe they were from a planet far away.
I licked the air of the wet planet to taste it, see why the little moving things couldn’t stand it, and it burned me, so I shook the planet in anger and the little things fell, their little crafts falling over and all about. Some parts of the planet were cracked after that, and I felt bad for my anger. There was heat coming from the planet, and the water had moved. I decided to take it to show Her. She is very old and large and wise and would know what to do with the little wet planet, if I could fix it, and why the little creatures could not move as I could. But by the time I got to Her, the little wet planet had turned white and cold, and all the little creatures had stopped moving, even the ones without little crafts. It was no longer hot, and the water had stopped moving. She scolded me and told me to put it back, that I shouldn’t touch the little things that couldn’t leave their planets, they were all very delicate compared to me. She said I wasn’t allowed to move planets either. I sulked about that for a little bit, but then I put it back.
I watched as it slowly stopped being white but the little things wouldn’t move anymore, no matter how long I waited or poked them. She scolded me again for touching them, so I left it, the little wet planet no longer covered in little moving things.