Spoiler
Your story is about a doctor at the bottom of the ocean forgetting names.
When the skies fell down the waters opened their arms to you, and so you went: into the deep and into the dark, where fish shone pallid and ethereal and men shuffled silent and skittish, and when you forgot how wind felt brushing over your face you told yourself it wasn’t so bad, because you were still alive.
Not everyone had been that lucky. They were your people, and you could not turn them away, not with the oath still fresh on your lips and heavy on your heart, but—you saw skin charred black and peeling back and eyes melting out of bloody sockets, voices broken and hoarse yet still rising over the shore as the stars blinked away and the sun seared the ground and made pyres of the last ships, the ones that left at dawn and were caught mid-dive, crumpling like sparrows shot in flight.
You saw that, as well, and the image burned like a brand in your sleep that night, and all those that came after. So you counted your blessings and went home to your wife, watched her sleep in the soft glow of bioluminescent algae and hatchetfish and loved her in that quiet, desperate way of yours; you touched her hair, her skin, enumerated scapula, clavicle, sternum, until you knew only her and could forget about the rest of the world.
The day she died you went out into the black waters and let her ashes rise to the surface, and that was when you realized you could not remember how the sun used to look like. You remembered the flashes and the fires but not the laughter or the lazy summer afternoons—knew only the cold neon lights and the fish, still the fish languid and careless through the thick windows. You missed her.
And yet time went on without her, and faces blurred into one another and the lights grew dimmer still, until you were all going bump in the night and talking to yourselves just to hear the echoes of your voices resounding against metal and space in empty attempts to fend off the solitude and the silence. Through your hands passed children with eyes too blue to see and skin so light they burned like rice paper every time the sun flared up and snaked its tentacles of light into your hidden homes under the sea. The few that still responded to visual stimuli were quiet little things that never spoke, though sometimes when the fish danced by they laughed, a sound that rattled and grated but was still better than the grave silence that settled the rest of the time, and that disappeared the moment the last luminescent dot faded away.
When the walls finally snapped and yielded to the ocean’s whispering tides, you were not so afraid as resigned. And yet you reached out for the things that were still precious—you thought of your wife, of the green that was all you remembered of the surface—and you discovered then that you had lost her name to the silence, and that with it had gone the names you had set aside, like so many precious little things, for the boys you could have had—blind perhaps, and silent, yes, but that still would have been yours, to touch and whisper and hide away.
With the last lights out and the waters rising black and loud around you you still could not find your love’s name, and those might have been tears once upon a time, but you could not be sure now: the fish stole them too.
