Salty swell over my head, tugging me back, the raw and tender creases of my elbows against the forearms they're linked with. Brine up my nose, in my mouth. The anchor of my feet in the sand holds me fast with the rest.
The water recedes and we breathe, a staccato, asynchronous gasp. The eel coiled about my lungs loosens its grip, slides against the bare stack of my ribs.
Splashing behind us. Unnatural, sloshing. Human. I can't turn to look any more than I can work my stiffened vocal cords to shout. Another called, maybe, to join us.
In other places, feet root in dirt rich with the new infusion of dead flesh, lungs mutated to filter oxygen back into the air, limbs stiff and brittle. In other waters, oil and plastic pass into living guts and do not leave.
Here, the fish make homes among our bones. The crabs weather the tides nestled between layers of muscle, folds of fat.
Another wave, slopping at the hollow of my throat. Spluttering and coughing from behind. My heart—what's left of it after twenty-five years—leaps. I'd recognize that sound if I was asleep, comatose, dead.
She's come back.
Murray,
We used to talk about the way our parents left this place. Our grandparents. Crumbling, heating, burning to the bone. Bleaching. Dying.
I'm not being called. Maybe that makes this worse. Maybe you'll hate me.
I wonder, though. If more people went this way. Made the choice instead of running from the call, hoping they're not next.
Do you think we could fix it? Leave something better for our grandkids instead of our god-knows-how-may-greats grandkids?
She flounders up next to me where I can't see. Where she knows I can't see. I don't want her to be where I can see.
She's thirty-two now. I left when she was seven. She's come here since, twice, the last when she found my letter to Murray. A decent mother would recognize her daughter after any span of years, over any course of changes. Would feel a soul-deep tug that has nothing to do with the insistent hard-rubber mouth of a fish worrying at the white and shredded meat of her calf.
"Hey," she says breathlessly.
Doesn't call me "Mom." I don't blame her.
I want that for her. I want this to get better in her lifetime. I don't want her to have to think about what happens if she has a kid and both she and her partner get dragged kicking and screaming into the ocean.
I don't want you thinking I'm out there wondering why you didn't come with me. I'm not. I want you to stay.
At my right, she is breathing. Treading water in the messy and uneducated way that most who were born into this dying earth do.
Who will swim in oceans with reefs made of living humans, feet cemented in the sand, flesh rotting but never dying? Or in lakes filled with the ever-shifting dead, hair like fronds in the shallows? The waters, the forests, the fields are silent conclaves of the dead and near-dead, the mutated, the moldering, gathered by the inexorable command of a planet that refuses to let us be its death.
"Do you remember what you said to Dad?" she says. "In that letter?"
Between my fingers, in the thin, soft webbing of skin, the sandblast-burn of jellyfish sting. The weight in my chest has nothing to do with the eel and everything to do with what I fear comes next.
Pregnancy was not magic. I ate via veins for two months. I hardly slept. Eventually, I ended up on bed rest, craving things like cardboard and string, unable to smell what Murray cooked for himself without bile crawling up my throat. I dreaded and craved the day this creature would leave my body in equal measure.
I never wanted to be a mother. But when it came down to it, I couldn't evict that little lemon-sized thing from my belly. No good why. I just couldn't. And so it grew to the size of a grapefruit, a cantaloupe, a watermelon, and I figured at some point I'd stop panicking and start loving it. Motherly instinct, they told me, but what moved inside me felt wrong, alien, a devourer of the rest of my days.
I wondered, during the last two months, whether the ocean might call a pregnant woman. I killed those thoughts quick. I was afraid they might start to sound like hope.
Hair drifts into my peripheral on the outrush of the tide. Long. Black. It's the most I've seen of her since she found that letter. It was in Murray's nightstand and I couldn't tell if that meant he was keeping the last piece he had of his love or if he'd shut it in there and never looked at it again. He never came out here, or at least not all the way. I like to think he stopped by the beach sometimes to see me. I also hope to god he didn't. Little sand crabs like to bury themselves in the shredded skin at the nape of my neck in the day.
"He was too scared to come out here," she says, as if she knows the run of my thoughts. "I used to think he was too sad, but now I think he was scared he'd want to stay."
Funny how anger doesn't come into her figuring. He was furious the first time I mentioned the reefs, how they might not be such bad things. He started talking like we might want to move inland. I didn't tell him inland didn't matter. It wasn't a call. It was a choice.
My own mother told me the hormones would kick in the moment I saw her little face, and she was wrong. I was terrified of this small, squirming, purple thing with the dark twist of cord protruding from its belly. This thing that I must now keep alive and make to feel loved and safe.
Murray took her from me and held her to his skin. He took to fatherhood the way lungs take to air, and goddamn if I wasn't jealous. I had everything so many wanted and I wanted none of it: the clean scent of newborn skin, the feeding in the night, the little fingers around mine, warm and fragile and needing.
We named her Birdie in hopes that she'd see one someday. It reminded me of pictures in textbooks, on the internet, of flighty creatures with jewel-hued plumage, and it was then that I began to warm to her. Murray's low, sweet voice, singing her name as he took his turn in the rocking chair. Her fine, soft hair. I wondered, stroking it with my fingertips, if this was what feathers felt like.
"I had a baby, Mom," she says.
Mom this time. My tongue shriveled with salt, heavy. Did I come out here for her? Or did I decide, somewhere buried beneath selfish folds of grey matter, that seven years was enough? That I'd done my duty as far as it could be done?
"She's three months old now."
The eel caressing the thin tissue of my lungs. Slippery, muscled, smooth.
"You told him this would make a better world for me," she says. "For her."
The fish worrying at my calf. Fuzzy white bits of dead flesh float to the surface, are rolled away by the next wave.
"I think," she says, "I understand."
I started pacing the beach when she was three, maybe four. Watching them walk into the sea first in droves, then drabs, then pairs and singles. Watching those already standing in the waves extend those eerily still arms to the newcomers. An act of acceptance, of welcome.
Watching the ocean’s creatures come to the new reef of bone and blood. The flashing, glittering colors of them, like jewels, like plumage.
Wondering if this is what the call felt like or if it was just wishful thinking, escapism. If, at heart, I'd warmed to her or just the idea of her, a trick of the light that gave her the mythical quality of feathered, soaring things that used to wake us with song.
"If I do it now, it won't be so bad," she says. "Three months, she won't remember me. Your only mistake was waiting too long."
It hurt her. I knew it hurt her, knew it from the times she swam out here, the one where she found the letter and the one where she might have drowned if not for Murray.
I am so sorry.
But only partway. I'm sorry she was hurt. I'm not sorry that I did it. And isn't this proof I did right? If she's here now, wanting to do what I did, trying to fix the mistakes I made, this means I was right. That I acted out of love for her.
Doesn't it?
It doesn't matter if she hates me. Maybe I deserve that, but she doesn't. Let her think I got called in the night. Let her think that's why I'm gone. Let her think that's why I didn't say goodbye.
Weight on my shoulder. Her breath wet and hollow in the curve of my neck, the cave of my hair. The eel tightens its grip and the air huffs out of my chest.
"Maybe we can make up for lost time," she says beneath my flayed and waterlogged ear. "I missed you. Even when I hated you, I missed you."
Her arms twine around mine. The warmth of acceptance builds in the tangled flesh of the reef. A tugging in the chest and belly. And relief so sweet it would loosen my knees if they could do that any longer.
She knows. She understands. And now all that's left is to add my acceptance to the rest of the reef. To reach out. To accept. And maybe one day, standing in the waves together, undying, we will hear the cry of a gull.
I want her to live. I don't hope that things will go back to how they used to be, the way they were for our grandparents. That puts us right back here: more hole than ozone, more fire than forest, fewer birds than nests. But I want her to see what normal becomes when we're not driving just about goddamn everything to extinction. I want her to grow up with you and find what she wants of this life, and I want her to be able to take it.
I do not reach to her.
I swallow down salt and I know that she will hate me and I do not reach to her.
Because I want her to live? Or because I am still ultimately selfish, still ultimately that twenty-six-year-old that never wanted to be a mother, that felt only relief when her husband took the warm and squalling thing from her arms?
"Mom," she whispers into my hair. "Please."
Having a daughter is part of it. Part of living, part of finding new normal.
I do not reach out. I will not reach to her.
This was the sacrifice. I don't get to stop paying the price because she wants to add her own soul to the toll.
Go home. Go and tear up whatever letter you wrote. Hold whatever partner you've found and raise your girl.
"There aren't any birds yet," she says, and chokes on it. Chokes on the wave that smashes into my chest and floods her throat. "Not wild, anyway. But maybe in her lifetime. If I help."
I'm choking, too. There's nothing to choke on.
"I started to think." She's crying now, her nose cold against the join of my neck and shoulder. "To think like maybe you did love me. Even though you didn't want me."
Oh, Murray, you bastard. You told her. You never should've told her. She never should’ve known that I started off not wanting her.
"I was an idiot," she spits.
My eyes sting and flood over. She pulls away and I do not reach for her, the way I did not reach for her in that little hospital room when Murray pulled her from my chest.
She could go to a forest. She could find another reef. But she won't. She wanted me, my reef, my elbow linked with hers while the jellies burned our fingers and the fish found homes beneath our skin.
But I can live with it. Have to live with it if I want her to live the way I swore I wanted.
I begin to wonder, as I listen to her sloshing out onto the sand, whether that life is the one she wants. I wish I could've opened my mouth to ask.
Murray, I want her to wake one morning, wondering what the hell that noise is, and I want her to realize that's how gulls sound when they call at dawn.
So I want you to lie to her. Tell her something she can live with. Tell her that I love her, and lie to her and tell her that the ocean dragged me in by the ankles and left my fingernails broken off in the sand.
Hazel
Content Warnings: body horror
