Turtle Island

MOTE Week 23, 2026

This week on MOTE I neglected to submit a prompt, so had to pick up a spare. I went with the picture prompt, created by Fiona Grey:

—

It wasn’t much. Just a small house on a small island. But it was home. It had been home for the past twenty years.

The morning dawned. The birds started to sing as they flew around the island searching for fish to eat. They did this every day. It was nothing special, not anymore.

Yet there was something special about today. One day every year, on the first full moon of spring, the turtles came. They started to gather in the morning – all sizes, from the big of the decades’ old adults to the small of the youngster just survived his first winter.

No-one knew why they gathered. No-one had even known that they did until he and his wife had first observed it some fifty years back. The memories of that day – the pair of them frantically making notes, trying to observe everything and write it all down – were still bright and undimmed in his memory.

It was because of that enjoyment that he’d bought the island when his wife died. Their children had begged him to stay on the mainland, to move in with one of them, but he couldn’t. He needed to be somewhere special, somewhere where he could still feel close to her.

Today, this day of the year, he always felt especially close to her. This was one sight that they had first observed together, and she had always considered it her greatest achievement in exoplanet biology.

No-one knew why the turtles gathered here. No-one had ever observed where they went when the gathering swam away at dusk. Many times it had been proposed that they find out, but it was never important enough to the academics and the university hierarchy to find the funding for doing so.

Tonight though, tonight he would swim out to them, and try to follow as best as he could. It was the last gift he could give to his late wife, to finally find out what had intrigued her for so long.

He already knew that this would be his last chance. Inoperable, the doctors had called it. They had given him only months to live. He hadn’t told his children – they would only have asked him why he hadn’t chosen to live with one of them, where the doctors could have found it in time.

He spent one last day observing the gathering, making notes once more. As evening fell, he got into his wetsuit. Leaving the house unlocked, and the notes in a tidy pile on the table, he waded into the ocean.

As the turtles swam off, he followed. He would swim for as long as he could, until either the turtles swam out of sight, they reached land, or he ran out of energy in the middle of the ocean. Either he would succeed, or he wouldn’t come back.

—

I’m looking forwards to reading what everyone comes up with this week on MOTE.