[2225 words]
Morin pours water out of her rubber boots. No matter how careful she is navigating the final stretch to the old post office, the tidal pools around the dilapidated building are treacherous, their shapes and depths ever-shifting.
The post office used to stand at the crossroads of two busy streets, in the very center of the city. Now it is the final outpost of land. Elevated on what used to be the top of a hill, it’s looking out towards the sea. The façade is crumbling. Eroded by the salt, it’s slowly falling into the tide below.
Morin makes her entry through the last window on the right and walks down the corridor, her soaked socks leaving their wet imprints in the thin layer of dust and salt crystals coating the floor. She has been coming here every day since the ships left.
Ron was so sure that the plan would work. They were standing by the wet docks and the loaded ships were bobbing on the water, ready to go. “Listen, Morin,” he said, squeezing her shoulders. “I’m sure we’re not the only ones in this situation. Someone out there must have come up with the cure already.”
“Why haven’t we heard anything of it then?” she said, eyes roaming over the pulleys and ropes of the ships’ rigging. The taut halyards trembled in the wind, gray against the bruised sky.
The sea has been advancing for a long time. Morin remembers people talking about it when she was still a child. All these conversations always ended with a shrug. No one took the slow, creeping advance of the waves seriously. Perhaps they thought that the sea would stop. It did not.
First, the sea swelled within its borders, then spilled over, eating up the beach adjacent to the city. The mayor said it was just a flux, no harm in getting by for one year without collecting money for sunbed rentals from the gullible tourists. He assured townsfolk that everything would go back to normal by the next season, but the sea kept going. It swallowed one neighborhood after the other. Then it started taking people.
Ron shrugged. “I suppose this cure thing is expensive or licensed or some other shit like that. Besides, the telegraph has been glitchy for ages. I can’t remember when we got a decent transmission. Do you?”
Morin shook her head. The telegraph was pretty much dead, coughing up no more than one message in a fortnight. There was no arguing with that.
“Do you really think we can bring them back?” she asked, her voice quiet.
“Trust me,” Ron said and smiled in that particular way she loved so much. “The sea cannot get away with this mockery. We’ll win them back.” The wind played with his sun-bleached hair, kissed his perfectly arched lips. She believed him. How could she not.
The telegraph machine sits on the table, its keys and levers silent. Morin cannot remember the last time it beeped. Beyond it, in the cracked window frame, the sea is an endless expanse of blue, its level rising higher with every day. Telegraph wires stretch over the gently rippling waves, then dive under the water and disappear. The horizon is empty. There are no ships. Morin keeps looking until her eyes grow dry and itch with salt.
She opens the closet in the corner and stares at the empty shelves. Ron was so sure she would have enough supplies to last until the ships returned, but now there is only one packet of the fish feed left. It sits in the back of the topmost shelf, sad and defeated. Morin yanks it down, the paper flap crunching in her fist.
The boat is waiting for her where she left it, tied to the pole of a street lamp sticking out of the shallow green water covering the drowned city. Light as a fallen leaf, it glides forward, obedient to Morin’s gentle guidance. Small schools of silver-feathered fish dart out of the way, glistening in the sunlight.
Morin sails past the old, imperial park with its marble statues, bird cages, and tall, stately elms. She used to come here with her grandmother, long before the water rose. She remembers running along the park’s shadowed lanes, playing hide-and-seek in the bushes, buying ice cream from the brightly painted carts. Sorbet was her favorite. Strawberry and lime.
The sea doesn’t have any respect neither for the grand history of the park, nor for Morin’s treasured childhood memories. When the advancing waves reached the district where the park stretched between the two canals, water first crept up to the ankles of ancient gods and heroes, then licked at their hips. Now it laps against their shoulders, caresses cold marble skin with salty fingers.
Rain begins to drizzle, and the statues weep. Morin looks on as a spindly-legged spider crawling over the marble cheekbone of the sun god scuttles away, alarmed by the water drops. She wishes she could run like it did, but the duty she has chosen weighs her down like an anchor.
Morin guides the boat further. Here, where one of the old canals used to flow towards the sea, the water underneath the hull is deep. She is sharply aware that her boat is nothing but a small speck on the vast mosaic of green and blue currents.
Morin sails until she reaches the spot where bubbles rise to the surface in a ceaseless stream. This is where they remain, the ones taken by the sea. Down below.
There are many ways in which the sea can lay claim to a person. A breached hull in a fisherman’s boat; a hand of a diver stuck in the clamped mouth of a mollusk shell; a riptide tearing a child away from his mother. The people of the city by the sea have long been familiar with them all. Or so they thought. They didn’t know enough.
A few years after the floods began and the districts of the city started disappearing one by one, an odd illness struck its denizens. The sea seeped into the veins of the afflicted—changing their human eyes into the fish’s liquid orbs, stretching thin, flexible membranes between their fingers. They gasped for air, no longer able to breathe on land. Inevitably, days or weeks later, the afflicted disappeared into the waves, never to return again. Unless they were caught and held captive.
Holding them contained was the only way to keep them safe from themselves and from the sea. The only way to make sure that once the cure was found, they could become human again, as they once were.
Back when the advancing sea was nothing more than a nuisance, a source of occasional incidents to make fun of in the newspapers, an unexpected influx of the tide reached the city’s cemetery, breaking into the undertakers’ storage. Coffins sailed down the streets, making their way towards the sea.
Morin’s brother managed to get into one of them and stirred it like a boat, singing the crudest of shanties at the top of his voice. Mother was furious. She was terrified of the water, worried incessantly about the rising tides. Morin’s brother, on the other hand, thought that the coffin incident was hilarious. Given how different their reactions to the advancement of the waves were, Morin always found it a bit ironic that they were both taken by the sea, just a few short weeks apart.
When the ships left, someone had to stay behind to keep the ones corrupted by the illness safe and contained, until the day the long-awaited cure was found and brought back to the city. Morin volunteered. After all, she was the only one who had lost her whole family to the rising sea.
Her grandmother was long gone, taken by one of the early floods, and her mother and brother were among the ones claimed by the illness. Her only consolation was that both of them were apprehended in time, caught before they managed to escape into the depths of the sea.
They were safe. Held in the locked cages with the other survivors at the bottom of the old canal.
Morin positions her boat over the feeding spot, marked by the stream of bubbles coming up from below, and cuts open the bag. The last remaining bag of the fish feed she took from the post office. The only food left for the ones held in the cages below.
As the blade of her knife works through the paper flap, she thinks of the ships flying over the glistening waves, speeding towards the home shore. As long as they return tomorrow, two days from now at the latest, the ones below will be all right. She thinks of her brother’s stupid jokes, of the way her mother’s hand feels so soft running through Morin’s hair. She misses them terribly. The knife zaps through the last inch of the flap with a whoosh.
Morin stares into the hollow of the white packet unblinking. Inside, in place of the food pellets, bloom the purple flowers of crystalized salt. The sea has somehow gotten inside, and now the last remaining food for the ones below is gone.
Morin screams. Her voice echoes across the still expanse of the water, finding no response. Bubbles keep rising to the surface uninterrupted.
After a while, Morin lets her boat drift away from the feeding spot. No matter how lost she feels, there is no point in wailing over the broken purple crystals in her hands. For the first time since the ships left, she feels genuinely alone. Tears run down her face mixing with rain water and the salt of the sea. She needs time to think. She needs rest.
Night drops like a heavy blanket, black and starless. Morin moors her boat to the stilt of a lopsided cabin swaying gently above the waves. A rope ladder, rungs slimy with seaweed, hangs down from the wooden deck. Morin climbs up.
Pushed by the tidal waves, water swells around the cabin, lapping beneath the floorboards. Morin hears the stilts creak and groan as she peels off her clothes and slides under the covers. The sheets are damp. She remembers the last night before the ships left. How she clung to Ron, how she pressed her body into his, trying to take in as much of his warmth as possible, to take in enough to last until he returns. That warmth is all but gone.
She shivers until exhausted sleep pulls her under. Cold sheets wrap around her ankles like the heavy sails of a sunken ship. Her dreams are full of bones scattered across the sea floor; crabs boasting the crowns of human teeth; eels weaving through the empty sockets of algae-covered skulls. The sea wails outside, pushing against the walls of the cabin. In her dreams, Morin calls out Ron’s name, again and again, and no answer is coming, save for the mournful cries of the gulls. When she wakes at the break of dawn, Morin is certain the ships aren’t coming back.
The tilting floor of the cabin runs with water. The sea is seeping through from below. Wading through the rivulets spilling across the floorboards, Morin takes a rusted iron key off the wall and tucks Ron’s old hunting knife into the loop on her belt. A pair of diving goggles complete her ensemble. The boat waits outside, bobbing lightly on the morning swell.
It takes her all but ten minutes to reach the feeding spot, where the air bubbles rush up to the surface in an agitated stream. Morin stands up on the thwart, catching her balance against the waves. The sea leans forward, swelling on the horizon. Morin feels as if it’s watching her, storm-blue gaze heavy at the back of her neck.
Morin dives. She is going down, down, deeper into the dark, and when her lungs begin to burn, she reaches the ones kept down below. At first, they’re nothing more than a dozen pale shapes quivering behind the iron bars of the cage, but then, as her eyes adjust to the murky darkness of the deep, Morin sees them clearly.
Their hair streams in the deep-water currents like ribbons of kelp—teal, green, and emerald bright. Tails glisten with semi-circles of silvery scales. The ones kept down below strain against the iron bars of the rusted cage holding them captive. They have been begging to be set free, ever since the day the sea seeped into their veins.
The sea presses down with all its weight. Morin looks into the strange, alien faces of the ones kept down below and recognizes her mother’s smile, the wicked laughter in her brother’s eyes. In the world made of water, there is no reason to miss the land, and, for the first time since the change began, Morin is ready to let go.
One turn of the key and the door of the cage falls open. For a split second, Morin is surrounded by the tails and fins—a whirlwind of movement—and then they’re gone, disappeared into the roaring blue. Fire rips through her lungs, and when she raises the blade to cut open the wide, red gashes of gills in her throat, it doesn’t hurt at all.
Laila Amado is a writer of short and very short fiction. Her stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Swamp Pink, HAD, the Deadlands, and elsewhere. Two of her works were included in Best Small Fictions 2022 and Best Microfiction 2024 anthologies. In her free time, she can be found staring at the North Sea off the Dutch coast. The sea, occasionally, stares back.
