Throwback Thursday: ‘A Collection of Secrets’

Monkey Business

In the summer of 1967 a girl gets more than she bargained for when she succumbs to the lure of a sea monkey ad in the back of a comic book. ‘A Collection of Secrets’ by Rhea Rose was the feature story in Pulp Literature Issue 35, Summer 2022, now on sale for the throwback price of $8. Warm your winter with summery SF in this transformational tale, excerpted below.

A Collection of Secrets

by Rhea Rose

When I turned twelve, in 1967, I ordered sea monkeys from a comic book. I kept the critters in an old green Jell-O mould I’d found stuffed with cleaning rags under the kitchen sink. I’d filled it with rusty-coloured tap water, water the city warned us not to drink before boiling. 

The creatures soon grew from thimble-sized to the length of my thumb — too many, too fast. By the time I moved the mould from the kitchen to my room, they’d chewed a tiny hole through the thin plastic and it had begun to leak. 

I moved them quickly to a glass bowl on the dresser in the room I shared with my little sister, Taryn. Over time, the sea monkeys, each a different colour of the rainbow, escaped. But they didn’t get far. 

A few leapt free and landed smack on top of the dresser, where their long purple locks caught in my hairbrush and they dried out. Some dangled like golden strings of unravelled yarn, twisting around a dresser-drawer handle. Others lay draped and dehydrated, orange and limp like carrot peels, over a tube of lipstick. 

An old aquarium with no fish, but all set up with plenty of aquatic plants, rocks, a bubbling treasure chest — all of it costing a total of twenty-five cents at a garage sale — solved the plastic-eating problem for a while. 

Still, they escaped. 

I’d find one or two of them hard and crispy in my old flip-flops, the toeholds chewed away. Two curled up behind my sunglasses, but, before they dried up, had bit perfectly round baby-finger-sized holes through the middle of each lens. Some chewed a hole through my tube of Coppertone suntan cream and drowned in the lotion. Turns out the sea monkeys I’d ordered from my Prince Valiant comic book weren’t sea monkeys at all. The dehydrated dust-sized creatures I’d sprinkled into the water had grown into tiny lemon-yellow, lime-green, raspberry-red, orangey-orange, and blueberry-blue … mermaids.

I took my secret collection of survivors down to the basement bathroom, put them into the huge, vintage clawfoot bathtub, with its rusted white porcelain — ‘the spotted cheetah’, I called it. My shimmer of mermaids couldn’t escape the high sloping sides of the tub, and they thrived. 

Then Mom decided to refinish the cheetah …

Find out what happens next in Pulp Literature Issue 35, on sale till January 31st!

Got a short story in you? Enter it into the Bumblebee Flash Fiction Prize. Open now at the earlybird rate till January 15th!

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Rhea Rose has published many Canadian speculative short-fiction stories and poems. She is a three-time Aurora Award nominee, and is currently nominated a fourth time, for her editorial work and writing in Polar Starlight, an online zine of speculative poetry by Canadian authors. In addtion to her feature story in Issue 35, her story ‘The Gamogue’ appeared in Pulp Literature Issue 12, Autumn 2016.