The Peculiar Tale of the Tentacle Boy – Richard Pickard
Marina Minnow loved to tell tales. How else was a girl supposed to have any fun in a quiet seaside town like Merlington? The place was so uneventful that the local paper was dominated by the yo-yoing prices of pollock, and so obsessed by fish that on the seafront alone there were seventeen fishmongers all vying for power. In Marina’s opinion, having to grow up somewhere as dull as Merlington without any imagination was a fate worse than death. Most people knew they had to take what Marina said with a pinch of salt. ‘She’ll be a great writer one day,’ her mother Sally would tell strangers as they walked down the beach, Marina loudly translating the cries of a seagull or musing on the alien origins of a peculiar-looking shell. ough it was a budding talent in her mother’s eyes, Marina’s tales drove some people round the twist, especially her school friends and their narrowminded parents. She would never set out to cause harm with her stories, or to intentionally mislead someone – but the trouble was she could be quite convincing.