Light does not penetrate water forever. At 656 feet, there isn’t any significant light. Past 3,280 feet, the ocean is entirely dark. No sunlight. At all. Ninety percent of the ocean area is lightless. I – and almost all of the other merpeople – generally live in that ninety percent. Most merpeople make the journey up to the surface at least once in their lifetime, just to feel the warmth on their milky white skin… But I have not made the journey. I have never felt the sun. I have treaded water and watched as my friends and family members began their pilgrimages, going up one at a time, coming back days – or even weeks – later, unable to speak about anything else. I have even witnessed the grim expressions on parents’ faces as they headed off on the long swim for the second time in their life, to bring back young mermaids and mermen who wouldn’t return willingly. A few years ago, a group of my friends all set off together, laughter bubbling up in their chests as they went upward. I stayed behind. I was the only one out of our group to do so, and that threw up a wall between us. Our friendship was never the same.
“You really should have come, Vent,” Current had said a few days after they all returned. We had been swimming low to the ocean floor, darting around and over the heat vents I’d been named for, occasionally giggling as the bubbles lifted our hair up and tickled our skin. “It’s not as cold as you’d think it would be… The sun feels really warm...”
“So I’ve heard. Several times,” I had said back, struggling to hide my impatience. It wasn’t the sun I was afraid of. As a matter of fact, I wanted to feel the sun. Did it bubble, like the vents? Everyone I had talked to said that it didn’t… How could that be so? I did not fear the sun’s warmth any more than I feared the heat vents. It was the massive space in-between – the long stretch of cold, empty water – that I feared. But no one else seemed to understand that. “I just don’t want to go, alright? I’m perfectly content down here.”
“But the surface is so… so…” A stream of bubbles had rushed out of Current’s nostrils as she exhaled in frustration. They had glimmered, reflecting the eerie light that emanated from our tails and long hair. Every so often a fish had strayed close, drawn to the radiance, but we hadn’t bothered to catch them. We hadn’t been hungry. I had glanced upward, waiting for Current to spit out whatever it was she was thinking, and watched the silhouettes of the fish, my large eyes not catching much besides the general shape. That was how things looked that deep underwater. Dark, with occasional gleams of light from biolumincescent fish, and creatures formed from shadows. Eyes aren’t as important as other senses. Feelings and sounds are mostly what form my perception of the dark world I’ve been born into. My musings had been interrupted as Current finally finished her thought. “So alive!”
“Last I checked, we’re all alive down here, too,” I had retorted, scowling. They had tried to persuade me by talking about the ‘life’ almost as much as they had by telling me about the sun.
“Well, yes, but there’s so much more life up there!” Current had gushed. “More fish than you could ever imagine, up by the reefs! All colors and brightness and chaos… All whirling around you, and moving past you, and brushing against you… All in these big groups… It’s amazing, Vent! You can actually catch a fish without chasing it halfway across the ocean! You just reach a hand out and grab one!”
“That explains why Sand gained so much weight before her parents dragged her back down to the deeps,” I had muttered. My sonar clicks showed me Current’s frown, and the way one of her hands dropped to her stomach. I wouldn’t have been able to see the motions otherwise.
“Why don’t you want to go up, Vent?” she had asked. I’d known that she was close to giving up on me; I’d gotten enough people to do so over the years that I could tell how far I had to push them before they stopped trying to convince me.
“Maybe because I’m perfectly content down here!” I had snapped. “Maybe because I don’t want to go up there and then long for it all the time like everyone else in our rotten colony! It’s all any of you can talk about! Honestly, why didn’t you just stay up there if you loved it so much?” Current’s jaw had dropped. She’d stared at me, hurt, and had swum away. The other girls had heard about it, and gradually we’d stopped swimming around together.
I wish now that I had let her convince me. Or at least that I hadn’t yelled at her.
I swim. I don’t know where I’m going. All I know is that I have to go upward. I am numb. With shock. With grief. With cold. I’ve already traveled so far from the vents on the ocean floor, away from the blessed heat that my kind live off of.
I correct myself. Lived off of.
I miss the vents already… The heat surrounding me, the bubbles gathering around me and catching in my hair… But I couldn’t stay there. The thing I miss most is my friends and family, swimming around in clusters, and to stay in that familiar place with the memories ripping me apart from the inside out… I couldn’t do it. Better to swim onward. Upward. Toward life.
Cold. It isn’t a feeling I’ve experienced much. I’ve never strayed far from the vents. Even when I was little, I stayed near the vents while the other children dared each other to swim out farther and farther until their parents brought them back. I don’t like being cold… Even though we merpeople are built to withstand temperature extremes, both hot and cold, along with high and low pressure so that we can go anywhere in the ocean, I’ve never liked the feeling of freezing, so I stayed away from the chilly areas.
Now, cold is all I feel. Inside and out. I am ice. I think that is a thing that’s cold… We don’t have it near the vents, but we’ve heard of it, from the old ones. We know instinctively what times to go to the surface so that it will be warmest there… I have never felt ice, but I’m sure that it feels like what I’m feeling now. It is not that there is little heat. There is no heat.
The heat has left me. Like everyone else.
I stop swimming sometimes, when grief the grief overwhelms me and I’m unable to move. I curl into a ball, wrap my tail around myself, and rub my own glowing scales, mourning. The roughness is comforting, somehow. And after a while I’m able to go on.
Then a thought occurs to me. Am I still going the right way? What if the currents have turned me during one of my panic attacks, when I’m all curled up? What if I’m heading back downward, toward the ocean floor? If I find myself among the vents again, with the waterlogged bodies drifting aimlessly around… I could not stand it. I would die. What if I’m moving sideways? What if I keep swimming and swimming, and never reach the surface or the ocean floor. What if I just keep going and going, lost in endless cold? Do I dare turn around? Where do I go?
I tremble, alone and afraid, shoulders shaking and eyes squinting shut. The old ones say – said – that this is called crying, and when it’s done outside of the ocean, you can tell that droplets of saltwater are leaking from your eyes. What made them cry when they were out of the ocean, if the surface is as wonderful as they’ve said? What if it’s no better up there than it is down here, and I’m just going to die in a foreign place rather than my own home? I cry even harder, fear and confusion now accompanied by doubt.
Without thinking, I’ve curled up again, and I feel that I must have drifted. If not just now, then before. With nothing else to do, I continue to move forward, sending out clicks and squeals constantly, looking for something – anything – that can help me.
I am tired. I have not eaten. I know now that I’m lost, but there is nothing I can do about it. I go onward. Click. Click. Click. Nothing echoes back, apart from the occasional fish. Fish. I should try to catch one. I haven’t eaten since Current died, days ago. But I can’t. I’m so, so tired. And empty. And cold.
Click. Click. Click-ick-ick-ick… Click click. Wait. That sounded different. I felt the echoes of something larger than a fish, and it sent clicks back to me. This is something larger. Danger? Should I hide? As if there was anywhere I could hide. Should I try to outswim it? I’m so tired, I wouldn’t be able to go for very long. Whatever it is would catch me. I don’t even care. I might as well meet my death nobly, like the old ones.
Along with the very youngest children, the old ones had been the first to get sick. Unlike the children, they hadn’t yelled or cried or screamed. They had moved very quickly, separating the infected merpeople from all the rest, ordering the healthy away. They had told everyone that if they felt any signs of the illness to join the infected group quickly, without going to tell anyone. They didn’t want it to spread. Still, quarantine can only go so far underwater, with the healthy and the sick coexisting on the same group of deep-sea vents. One by one, the infected group had grown, until there were only a few healthy ones. Through it all, the old ones had stayed calm. Strong. Brave. Even when the sick merpeople had begun to die.
Then came the day when I woke up all alone. There was no one else. Just me. Everyone else had joined the infected ones. “I should, too,” I had thought. “There’s no way I can escape the disease… I’ll go to be with them, and we can all die together, as a colony. Not split apart. It was wrong for the colony to be split… But when I’d begun to swim toward the infected group, they had refused me before I even came close. Shaking their heads and swimming in frantic circles, they’d ordered me away. When I persisted, they picked up stones from the ocean floor and threw them in my direction. None of them came even close to hitting me, their progress slowed by the water, but the message was clear. Go. Leave us. Stay alive.
I had been exiled from my dying colony.
I had lingered for another day, perhaps. But then I had realized that there was nothing left for me there. Without really knowing what I was doing, I started to swim. Upward. Later, I had realized my own intention to go to the surface. A long time after that, I’d decided that I was not simply going so that I could be there at least one time before I died. I was going for a purpose. To find one of my own kind, and ask to join their colony. Members of different colonies met up all the time at the surface, after all. That was how they kept fresh blood in the different clans, and how entirely new colonies were formed. Surely another group of mermaids would take me in, and lead me to the vents they lived by… I would never find another colony, if not there. We were too spread out. Too territorial. Too possessive of the scarce food in our different areas of the ocean…
“Maybe this strange clicking thing is a merperson from another colony,” I think, hopes rising before I can stop them. “Maybe they’re coming down from the surface, heading back towards their home, and I can go with them! Or maybe it’s a member of my colony, returning, and they can lead the way up to the surface, and I won’t have to be alone anymore… Was anyone on their pilgrimage when the disease first showed up?” I can’t remember. Still, I swim faster, in the direction of the thing that had clicked back to me.
The closer I come to it, the more I’m certain that it’s another merperson. I can see their glowing tail, and their shining hair floating around their head. It could still be unfriendly. If it is someone from another colony, then you’ve strayed into their territory without permission. You could be killed for that. I push the worries aside and keep going, heart in my throat. I didn’t care where this other merperson came from. It’s a person. That is all that matters to me. I’m not alone. Not alone. Not alone.
The two-word refrain echoes over and over in my mind, along with the clicks the other person is sending me. The distance between us closes quickly, and I find myself murmuring the words aloud, bubbles slipping out from between my lips. Without thinking, I throw my arms around the person as soon as they’re within reach, burrowing my head in their neck, still muttering. “Not alone… Not alone…” I sob in relief, too overcome with emotion to process how my savior is reacting to my hysterical greeting.
After a moment, I feel a hand stroking my long hair, smoothing it down against my back soothingly, again and again as the water makes it drift back up. He – for I see now that it is a he – is saying something into my ear, trying to comfort me. It’s okay. You’re alright. I’m here. Things like that. I cry harder, pressing my face into his neck, beyond rational thought.
It takes me many minutes to get a hold on myself and realize that I’m blubbering in the arms of some merperson I don’t even know, who doesn’t know where I come from and doesn’t know why I’m in such a state of panic. I catch my breath with a shuddery sigh and push myself away from him, crossing my arms in front of myself in shame.
“I- Sorry-” I start to stammer. “I was just- I mean- I-”
“Vent.” The sound of my own name is such a shock, it takes my breath away, and my jaw falls open. Do I know this person? I move forward again hesitantly, and he lets me touch his face, feeling his features, even while he speaks. “It’s okay… I mean… Not really, but… I know what you’re feeling. Why were you coming from that way?” It’s him. That… That one boy. Ooh, what’s his name? Shell? Shore? That was it. Shore. The boy who’d been born on the surface, far away from the colony. Everyone had said that his mother was crazy to go there when she was pregnant, but she had made it there, even swollen with pregnancy, and back, newborn baby and all. He had gone to the surface every year since he was old enough to make the journey on his own, and was usually one of the ones to linger there as long as possible.
“I- The surface-” I stammered, pointing vaguely somewhere over his shoulder.
“The surface is the other way,” he said with a frown. I could feel it, because my fingers were still on his face. I jerk my hand away as if I’ve been speared with one of the sharp fish.
“Oh,” I say dumbly. “So I did get turned around then.”
“I suppose,” he replies mildly. I feel the blood rush to my face in embarrassment, and suddenly I’m mad at him. How dare he make me feel so stupid, when I was out here all alone, lost, with no idea where to go. How dare he!
“Where were you?” I shout, shoving him. He wisely does not try to fight back, letting himself drift away as I push him again. “You weren’t there at the vents! And I remember you getting back from the surface just a few days ago! You weren’t at the vents, and I was alone, and- and- and I had to start swimming-”
“I wasn’t at the vents, exactly, but I was nearby,” he tries to defend himself, putting his hands up to try and stop my assault. “I was trying to find food. The fish were staying away from our colony, remember? I had to go far out to find any. When I got back everybody was in the infected group, and I decided it was safer to strike out for the surface before I got sick myself. They swam within yelling distance of me and called over to tell me you were out here somewhere, so I stuck around for a while hoping you’d show up, but you never did, so I left on my own. If you had stuck around a little longer, I would’ve been there and we could’ve gone off together.”
“This isn’t my fault!” I screech. “If you hadn’t been hunting! And if you had just gone off right away instead of waiting for me, you would’ve caught up sooner and I wouldn’t have gotten turned around!” My argument isn’t making sense, but I can’t think straight anymore. I’m angry, but I’m also relieved? And sad. And still cold… And hungry. I feel empty, but the anger fills me, so I let it rage within me.
“I didn’t go off right away because when they said you were around I assumed you’d still be around the vents somewhere! You’ve never left them, have you? You were always too scared to go to the surface.” He says it as if it’s ridiculous. As if traversing miles and miles of cold, empty ocean is a simple thing. For him, it probably is, and that’s part of what makes me so furious.
“Leave me alone!” I seethe. With that, I whirl around and swim, fast, eager to get away from this stupid, arrogant boy who makes me feel like such a child. He calls something after me, but I’m too angry to care. Too hurt to listen to something that’s probably an insult anyway. Too cold and empty and grief-stricken to think logically.
The problem with trying to swim away from the only other survivor of my colony is that we’re both heading in the same direction. Towards the surface. Which means I can feel him, behind me somewhere, close enough that I could find him with my sonar if I cared enough to try, which I didn’t… Or at least… I don’t care enough about it to give in to the temptation to do it…
The loneliness returned to me quickly though. Almost as soon as I began to try to get away from him. And I keep getting the sudden urge to turn around and swim back to him, or at least slow down and let him catch up to me, and say, “Hey! I’m sorry. Let’s start over. Please, swim with me. Talk to me. Help me forget about what we’re leaving behind.” I don’t do that though. I keep swimming, the same stubbornness that used to keep me near the vents now helping me to keep going forward.
I’m tired, and I can feel that I’m going very slowly now. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I left the vents, and I’ve no clue how much time has passed since I last ate. I’m going so slowly, I’m sure that Shore could overtake me in just a few flicks of his tail. He doesn’t though. Nor does he catch up to swim beside me. He keeps a respectful distance behind me, and he doesn’t blast on ahead, leaving me alone again… But he hasn’t made any attempt at an apology yet, and I refuse to forgive him until he does so.
I just hope that he’s not too angry to stop me if I begin to veer off course again.
Tired… I’m so tired… I can’t… I can’t swim anymore. I… I’m cold.
Shore? What are you doing? Why are you giving me this fish? I don’t want it. I want to go back to sleep. Please. Let me sleep… Please…
The next time I regain consciousness, Shore is forcing my jaw to work, massaging my throat until I swallow the pieces of fish flesh that he’s forced into my mouth. I try to push him away, but he grabs my arm and shoves it out his way, grimly continuing his work. I struggle, but he keeps making me eat, bite after bite. After a while, I stop resisting, and even chew by my own power once or twice. Then I fall asleep again.
When I wake up, Shore’s arm is around my waist. He’s swimming quickly, powered forward by his long tail, so accustomed to the long journey that it’s nothing to him to keep moving forward even while dragging along my dead weight. I feel weaker than ever, and start to wish that I had made the trip even once before. I had never gone far from the vents, and I wasn’t used to swimming for long distances.
“Then again,” I remind myself, “he’s probably been catching fish and eating them this whole time, whereas you forgot about food completely.” Merpeople didn’t have to eat all that often, except for on long journeys like the migration, and when was the last time I had caught a fish? Weeks ago. I stir awkwardly, and Shore’s arm comes loose. He stops swimming, and we drift forward another few feet as our momentum wears off.
“So, you’re awake,” he states. Idiot. That’s kind of obvious. “For good this time?” I give a little half-nod, tucking my chin in to my chest, not meeting his eyes. Not ready to break down and thank him. “You’re not dying, are you? I didn’t think you’d been showing any symptoms of the disease, but…” I took in a sharp breath. The disease? Was that possible? Could I have been infected, and that’s why I passed out?
No. I hadn’t had any headaches. No sores on the arms. I hadn’t started shedding the scales from my tail… I was still perfectly healthy. “Just hungry,” I said aloud.
“Yeah, I figured. We’ve been swimming pretty hard for quite a while, and I didn’t see you go off to catch a fish even once.” The heat rises to my face again, but I try to keep the anger in check. He’s right. It had been my own stupid fault. Not his. He’d saved me. Twice, if you counted the fact that he’d turned me in the right direction again when we first met up. I take a deep breath.
“Is it very far until the surface?” I ask. He shrugs his shoulders, and my temper flares up again. “I thought you knew the way!”
“I do. Up. There’s not much to it other than that, until you get way up towards the surface and have to worry about currents carrying you and either taking you miles and miles away from your home, or crashing you into rocks and things like that… As long as you keep going up, you’ll get there eventually. It’s the same thing when you’re going down, but in reverse.”
I bite my cheek, but force the mortified anger down. “So… I guess that means I’m dumb, huh? To get lost when the only thing to remember is ‘go up.’”
“No, that’s not the only thing to remember,” Shore muses. “You also have to remember to eat once in a while.” That’s the final straw. My fist is heading directly for his jaw when he grabs me by the wrist, a stream of bubbles accompanying his weary sigh. “Please don’t swim off again, Vent. I’m sorry. I just… I…” He trails off, frustrated, not seeming to notice that his grip on my wrist has gotten tighter. “I don’t think. My mouth moves faster than my brain. You’re not dumb, and there’s nothing wrong with staying by the vents. It’s just that… It seems weird to me. When I’m on the surface, I almost don’t want to go back down… So it’s just odd to think about someone not wanting to go up at all. Sorry.” The water has made me drift uncomfortably close to him, and suddenly I feel… flustered.
“Whatever,” I snap, as if I feel perfectly fine. “Just give me my hand back.” He lets go quickly, a flick of his tail sending him back a few inches. “If we don’t know how far off it is, then… We should keep moving, so we can get there as soon as possible.”
“Now you want to go to the surface?” Shore asks questioningly. I grit my teeth and begin to swim. I don’t give an answer until minutes later.
“I just want to get out of the cold as soon as possible.”
I’m not sure how long it’s been since we left the vents. But we’ve begun to see light. Not just in small quantities, like in the deep ocean, but everywhere. It washes over everything. There’s more and more, the higher we go. Shore, swimming alongside me, nudges my arm reassuringly. I can make out the expression on his face: a smile. “Nearly there, Vent,” he says, grinning.
A million little fish begin to swim around inside my stomach, creating an odd fluttering sensation. Don’t be nervous. It’s just the surface. It’ll be fine. Everyone’s always said that it’s great. Don’t be nervous. That was all it was, wasn’t it? Anxiety about getting to the surface?
“Good,” I say gruffly, crossing my arms over myself in an attempt to calm the fluttering fish. “I’m tired.” And I am. I had never realized that the ocean was so big. Shore laughs at me and starts to swim even faster, obviously eager to get to the surface. “Wait for me!” I cry. Still laughing, he slows down until I catch up, then grabs my wrist again and speeds up once more and pulls me along with him. I let him, allowing myself to go along for the ride. If he’s still full of enough energy to swim for the both of us, I think, then I might as well swallow my pride and let him do all the work.
As we get farther and farther up, it gets lighter and lighter, and we see more and more life. The fish are like nothing I’ve ever seen before. There are big, solitary ones that lumber along in the water lazily, and then there are huge swarms of tiny little silver fish, clumping together and then falling apart when they attract the attention of a predator. Lots of them come to investigate our glowing scales, and they settle into our luminous hair, tickling our scalps. A bigger fish comes to investigate me, making clicking sounds like ours. I could swear that it’s smiling at me.
“A dolphin!” Shore’s whole face brightens as he clicks to it, reaching out to it with the hand that isn’t on my wrist. It noses his palm happily and squeals, swimming along with us for a few feet.
“I’ve never seen such a friendly fish…” I mutter. I glare at Shore when he starts to laugh.
“Sorry,” he says sheepishly. “I forgot you’ve never seen them. It’s no more a fish than we are. It’s different… Have you realized yet that we’re here?” I blink, then understand.
“Here?” I repeat, jerking my head around and trying to take everything in at once. “Here here?” He nods, beaming as I try to absorb my surroundings. I’m warm, I realize. When did it get so warm?
“What do you think?” he asks, another grin twitching at the corners of his mouth.
“It’s… Well, it’s…” I trail off, struck dumb by the vibrant energy of it all. Beautiful. Wonderful. Everything they all promised it would be.
Suddenly Shore takes off, dragging me by the arm. “Come on, Vent! You have to see the sun!” I think to myself wryly that if I’m going to spend any time with this boy in the future, I should probably get used to being dragged around by one appendage.
We get closer and closer to the surface, and the fluttering fish start up again as I stare at the glare of light that is that mythical thing I’ve always heard about. The sun. “Wait,” I whisper. Shore doesn’t hear me. “Wait, just- Shore! Stop!” He hears me then, and obeys, staring at me in confusion. I can practically feel the excitement rippling off of him. He can’t understand my caution. “I don’t… I can’t…” I look up again helplessly and miss the vents more than ever.
“Vent, it’s okay,” Shore says softly, his hand slipping down my wrist to hold mine. “If you don’t want to go all the way up, I won’t force you to.” Gratitude washes over me. Along with determination. As if, just because I know that I don’t have to, I suddenly feel the need to prove that I can.
“No, I want to,” I say firmly. I take a deep breath and duck my head for a moment, gathering courage. “Can we breathe up there? Out of water?” His smile has returned, now that he knows I’m not shrimping out after all.
“Yeah,” he says. “We can breathe fine. It’s hard to describe, but… We can breathe.” I nod, then look up at the blob of brightness once more before hesitantly beginning to swim. Shore coaxes me along whenever I slow, one hand on my back and the other clasped in mine. When did it change from him holding my hand to me holding his? And I wasn’t just holding it; I was clenching it, desperately.
My head breaks the surface, and it’s the strangest feeling I have ever known.
The first change I feel is in my breathing. I’m doing something differently, though I’m not sure exactly what. I’m using organs that I didn’t even know I have. Air is odd. Thin. I find myself sucking in lots of little breaths, too used to the thick water. There’s still saltwater in my mouth, and it slips down into my throat as I inhale, making me choke. Shore’s laughing and slapping me on the back as I recover.
My movements feel too quick, and my limbs jerk as I move them. My hair hangs limp against my back, and it feels odd to not have the glowing cloud of pearl swirling around my head. Water trickles down my face, catching in my eyes, and I have to blink several times to clear them enough for me to see. The brilliance is so different from where I’ve lived my whole life… I feel completely out of my element. “I’m not supposed to be here,” I whisper, panicked, clutching onto Shore for dear life. “I’m not meant to be in this place…”
“No, Vent, it’s okay… You’re alright…” He pauses, then laughs humorlessly. “You don’t think you belong here? Funny… That’s how I always felt down there in the dark… Come on, Vent, it’s not so bad, is it?” I cling to him as he smoothes my hair, the same way he did when I first found him as I mistakenly swam back toward the vents. Slowly, he coaxes me into relaxing, and I’m able to really take in my surroundings.
The azure sea is everywhere, but not the sea I know. The surface is a whole other world, where currents and swells push you up into nothingness instead of more of the same thing you’re used to. There is nothing above me, except for the sun. The sun… And one other thing, wheeling in circles a million miles above my head.
“Is that a fish?” I whimper, shrinking against Shore. What kind of fish is able to swim in nothingness? Is it dangerous? How high can it go? Can it just keep going up and up and up?
I’ve always thought of the surface as the top of my world, with everything below and nothing above. To a certain extent, it now seems that I’m right. But is there something at the top of the surface?
“Not a fish,” Shore laughs. “A bird.”
“Not a fish… Like the dolphin?”
“Not exactly.”
We watch the bird dip and dive far above us, swimming in the sky, and suddenly Shore pulls on my arm again, dragging me along.
“You haven’t seen all that the surface has to offer yet, Vent.” He grins, pulling me through the waves. “Where there are birds, there’s land.”
When the isle first comes into sight, the thin air leaves my lungs. I had always pictured the mysterious ‘land’ everyone spoke of as being a dead lump of matter. Something solid, plain, and unattractive. No matter how many times a friend told me of its beauty, I could never make myself think of it in any other way. Now, it suddenly becomes very clear to me that the land is alive.
Pale beaches of sand, and farther back there are green things everywhere. All different kinds of the bird-things flying in swarms, not unlike the tiny fish in the sea. Wind – a new thing that Shore explains to me – moves the green things back and forth, making it look as if the island itself is breathing. We go closer to it, and I find that the land doesn’t simply begin. It rises up from beneath – a part of the ocean floor I’ve always known. The water becomes shallower and shallower, until I can lie on the bottom and still keep my head above the water. The coarse sand and grit rubs my skin and gets under my scales, itching. Shore spreads out on the beach, completely out of the water, arms spread as if to embrace the sky and all the life on the isle. I stay in the shallows, not quite ready to leave the water.
“Didn’t I tell you, Vent?” he breathes, eyes closed. “Isn’t it amazing?”
“It’s…” I cannot find words. “It’s…” Speech has left me. “It’s… It’s too much.” The flying not-fish above me are graceful but frightening, the green things that Shore calls ‘trees’ are too alien, the air is too thin, the water too shallow. The nothingness spreads out above me, and I feel that it must be even larger and emptier than the place between the vents and the surface. I miss home, and the colony. Shore is almost too nice to me, even if he blunders with his words sometimes. He’s no substitute for my family, my friends, and all the other people I’ve grown up with. Before I know it, I’m crying again, wriggling around and flapping my tail against the sand, trying to turn around to get back into the deeper water. Shore’s there almost at once, more adept at moving around in the shallows.
He tries to persuade me to stay. I refuse. He promises I’ll get used to the change. I shake my head. He begs me to wait – just for a little while – until a merperson from another colony appears. They all know of the isle, and they’ll show up in no time! But I cannot stay on the surface any longer. I slip further out into the water, where it’s deep.
And Shore stays on his namesake, looking after me helplessly.
Three weeks later, I still miss home. I still miss the vents, which feel so much hotter than the sunlight when you’re right up next to them. I miss the taste of fish that aren’t found this near the surface. And I miss the colony most of all.
But… Things aren’t as bad as they seemed to be at first.
I found an underwater system of caves set into the belly of the isle, and with deeper water and a ceiling of darkness over my head, my fear of the emptiness Shore calls ‘sky’ abates, at least until I venture out to the open surface again, which Shore wheedles me into doing often. The way he usually does it is to show me things. Not the big things, like the emptiness above, and the trees, and the birds… But smaller, more familiar things. Shells, the native fish, things to eat that aren’t fish, and most recently the reefs some distance off the coast of the isle. He takes me to these things and places and shows me all of his favorites. Some of them I like, and others I do not, but I fear he will never give up and resign himself to the fact that I will never love the surface as much as he does.
Which might not be such a bad thing…
He lets me dwell in the caves, while he sleeps on the sandy beach. He’ll visit me, sometimes bringing something for me to look at, and we’ll talk about things. The colony, the vents, the surface… But also other lesser things… Sometimes I wish Shore would stop talking. Sometimes one or the other of us will say something that makes the other mad, and we won’t see each other for days. Every time so far, though, we’ve made up, and slowly these arguments are happening less and less often. We’re gradually learning to live with each other’s company, even though we still want impossible things from each other. Shore wants me to love the surface as much as he does, and I want him to stop talking for at least three seconds here and there.
There’s no sign of another merperson yet… But I wonder if that is such a bad thing? I miss the vents, but I miss them mostly for the colony. I’m not sure I could survive in any other one. Really, Shore and I are faring well on our little isle, and my discomfort is beginning to wane, although I could never tell Shore that or he’d become insufferable in his quest to get me to stay on the beach.
I like my caves. One little cove, especially, that opens up onto the ocean with some rock shelves I can spread out on if I grow tired. There’s a little hole in the ceiling that lights up a corner of the cave with sunshine and moonlight, alternately, and Shore visits often. It’s a nice little cove… I think I’ll almost be sorry to leave it…
If someone from another colony did come… I wonder if we would really leave with them. I wonder if I would dare to make the miserable journey again, just to reside in a colony I don’t know. I wonder if Shore would want to leave his beach, and if he’d stay with me if I decided not to go. I think he would… And if Shore decides that he doesn’t want to leave?
I think I would stay with him, too.
It's so nice to read something creative and original for a change. This story kept my attention the entire time. Well done and keep up the good work!
