By Malda Marlys
Tish’s descent is rusty. Her heels slide on slick stone and her ankles wobble. The steps don’t. They ought to, wretched things, but they’re held in place by something other than physics. It suits the rocks to loom craggily, and so they do.
She’s been to the ocean. Shopping in Boston. A college field trip. A friend’s bridal shower on Tybee Island.
That was not this ocean. It smelled of salt and petrichor. Fish. Sunscreen. Pollution. The ocean that sucks at her knees now, that chased her dreams when she fled inland, her ocean? It isn’t real enough to rot. For all the green-black tendrils that might be weeds, nothing dies in her ocean, because nothing lives.
She picks her way until she’s up to her waist, numbed enough by the cold to feel nothing worse. Shapes gather at the edges of her vision. They might be mistaken for seals. If someone was very determined to be mistaken.
Tish could watch them if she wanted. Her eyes would water and her head would ache. Sleep might be out of reach for a while. But she’d recover.
They expect her to look. She feels it in sound too low to hear, vibrating through aqueous humors to the root of her. They expect mistakes. She’s been gone too long. She tried to escape. Tish doesn’t think they want to punish her, exactly. That suggests more concern with a single, living creature than is like them. But she is a break in the pattern, and she draws their curiosity.
Good.
Her back twinges in middle-aged protest as she bends to dip the baby in her arms.
The kid’s name is Bertha. Better than Letitia. She’ll be able to grow up laughing at it, get really into Jane Eyre in a weird way in high school, be an unobtrusive Beth if she so chooses. Tish is jealous.
Bertha wiggles as she weighs her options (screaming or not screaming). She’s too new to the world to question the water. Tish begrudges the need, despite a lack of better options, to call this surface water. It’s too heavy, clings wrong, follows none of the laws that chemistry insists on anywhere else.
Not water, but cold and wet and sufficient for this miserable baptism. Bertha makes her choice and whines against the saline slime. Babies are the only reasonable creatures.
The shapes underneath stray closer than they should. Tish keeps her face pointed at Bertha but tracks them with her eyes. They’re not good at gazes; animal ways of seeking light are foreign to them. All their alien senses tell them is that she’s a person with a smaller person, dipping her victim-heir in the scum that will claim it and braid the chain anew into the next generation’s chain. Behaving as she ought at last.
She wishes they were wrong.
Tish is out of practice in more ways than one. Their undulations make her queasy, and defiance can’t repel nausea. Looking into any body of water twists light and space in your average tetrapod eye doesn’t like. That’s without the subtle misbehavior of this uncanny sea, the bulbous bodies that are not even a little bit seals and the multiplicious, reaching things beneath. They don’t resist the weight that water should have. Their trajectories and their relationships with distance won’t resolve.
People in town call them tentacles. Tentacles have skins and muscles, volition and purpose. Try calamari once and you’d never mistake these for tentacles.
But Tish can see how you might grasp for a known, any known, right before your eyes start bleeding.
Beth—yes, she’ll be called Beth—calms as her fussing fails to do her any good. She keens softly, testing these unwanted hands in this unwanted place. Her baby eyes struggle not just with their nerveless newness but the callous stranger who is her only parent now.
She searches for a justice that will never come.
Tish tips the infant up and forward in the crook of her arm. Usually the first submersion is only that. But. Might as well begin Beth’s lifelong dance with that which should not be seen. It’s this moment that hatches the curse that already sleeps inside, this moment that slips into the blood with something more insidious than needles. The moment to let in the darkness of the sea that isn’t and try not to disappear.
Auntie Letitia did not want a baby with every fiber of her being. She chose each step since she was nine and began to bleed to that exact purpose. No babies and no bathwater. She would be free. Nothing very exciting, not a marine biologist or the president. She’d gone to one of the small, brick institutions that young ladies were heir to. (Though by the time she reached Mount Holyoke, pretensions of propriety lay abandoned wherever cashmere sweaters went to die.) She’d become an accountant, the cosmic opposite to a servant of the unspeakable depths. She’d lived quietly under the unbreakable sky and steady grassland planes, where the vast and careless lakes seemed to her kittenish. Superior never gives up her dead. What a good and gentle thing.
When the time came? She sent her pregnant twin a selection of onesies in yellows and greens, not wanting to seem churlish.
She received the news of Constance’s improbable accident with an implacability that made her seem heartless. One could hardly explain to people a thousand miles from the not-sea that the things wrapped around her heart had claimed it long ago, and through no fault of her own, she had no use of it.
It’s Constance’s skirt that bubbles around her, too big in the hips and dragging dangerously now that it’s sodden. Constance should be here for this, and Tish could find no better way to summon the ghost of her. Their sort of people don’t leave trinkets. She has no wholesome memories of her sister to buoy her up. They didn’t play on this shore. They played very quietly, in the attic, as far above sea level as the house would bear them. They played when they dared, when the wind was down and the sky obscured by clouds. They played when they could forget what they were hiding from.
Those silent sisters never looked out over the ocean together. Once you’re old enough to toddle down the rocks without falling in, the duty is a lonely one.
Beth will have only a bitter aunt to crack her solitude. Maybe she’ll be better off.
The baby has seen enough from above the water. Probably. Tish hopes she’s not getting this wrong. She’s never attended a first submersion. She avoided all this, believing in her own escape the way people from other towns believed in things like justice or Jesus or true love.
Tish chances a glance upward. The stars over this sea do not twinkle, and the stories written in them belong to nothing so quaint as vengeful scorpions and marauding giants. One doesn’t gaze at this sky. Even when one is accustomed, just as a flu shot doesn’t mean licking doorknobs with impunity.
She lowers the baby until only Beth’s face remains above the rhythmic ripple. A pediatrician would be horrified. And this is the kindest night Beth will have with her aunt.
The shadows in the water stir hungrily. Babies have been lost in baptism, but Tish doesn’t flinch. Beth is the only infant at the moment, last of a good line, and the sole anchor on unquiet Letitia.
Hadn’t Constance been married? Tish has a faint impression of a complete nonentity met at a few Thanksgivings. Henry or Geoffrey or whoever has probably gone to the sea already. Tish’s bloodline is a prized cultivar, but males are superfluous once their purpose is served. Pruned efficiently.
She watches the fleshy darkness watch her, understanding their ways of seeing just as little as they do hers. This close she catches every twitch, their maggoty, determined squirming making the inside of her skull itch.
She feels a tug. Beth screams, that infant scream that means everything because there are no words yet. Tish speaks to her niece for the first time since she stumbled through the door of Constance’s—her—house. Her voice sounds strange to her. Echoes don’t behave properly above this sea. “You’re not alone.”
Every instinct, moral or lizard-brained, tells her to take Beth back to shore. She’s seen them. They know her. The seed that will let her swallow their poison and live has been planted and can only grow.
It doesn’t have to be now.
Tish doesn’t retreat. She was never maternal. She was never good. She was willing to leave Constance to this, trust that a spare might not be missed if she ran as far from the sea as a person can run.
The water around them splinters. Colors that sting her eyes flash and geometries fall.
College students cover their walls in Escher prints and buy dried portabellas from guys named Josh to chase this experience. That sort of person always thinks Tish is very dull.
Beth screams again. Her aunt approves.
Tish has a headache to split the firmament. Vibrations test her eardrums from the wrong directions. Her stomach flips. Something trickles, hot then cold.
The baby spits up, but babies do that all the time. Nothing Tish reckons is serious. But this was a risk. She owns that. Blood from orifices is unpleasant as an adult, catastrophic if you’re still new to the world. Beth is all she has and she is all Beth has and she’s absolutely using this child as bait.
One of the things that isn’t black and isn’t dimensional and isn’t a tentacle rises where the surface broke and remains broken, groping through the gap for the baby’s head. Tish swats testily at the waves. “Watch her soft spot.”
They don’t really grasp language. They only faintly understand the intent behind violence. It retreats. She lets it. It’s too small for her purposes.
Constance is dead, having freshly spawned. Almost certainly one of the soft twists they apply to mortal fate when they sense something getting away from them. But it might be just one of those things. You read about disgraceful maternal mortality rates.
Beth is alive.
Beth, after a few dips like this, will adapt. Neuroplasticity or something. Little children learn so much, so fluidly. She’ll grow to tolerate the things that come up from the sea, same as every poor bastard fated to this town, same as poor, dead Constance and sour Letitia and their mother before them.
Another indescribable nothingness rises. They’ll keep coming as long as Tish stands here.
And one day, Beth will descend the stone steps with her own daughter under her arm.
Tish may not be filial. She may be acting far more from spite and selfishness than any kindness. But that’s still the thought that steels her resolve.
She learned more than accounting in college. Sought out the strangest people she could, the ones most unlike her. Home has no solutions, only surrender, but the world is full of towns that touch real oceans and don’t give used up husbands back to the mocking sea.
A girl named Douggie-Jean who rolled down hills in truck wheels taught her catfish noodling. After Jeanette went on to law school, Tish practiced alone.
She chooses the third tendril that rises. Not much distinguishes them, and if she doesn’t act soon, she might lose her nerve again. She snatches with vicious, cormorant speed and twists it in her fist as cruelly as she can. The thing that isn’t a tentacle pulls, writhes, digs into her flesh like tightening wire. It feels like a cold blood clot, then an electrical shock, then the burn of dry ice. Her fingers scream with what she can only dimly parse as pain.
“Keep trying,” she says through gritted teeth, thriving on her own agony, proof that she’s hurting it, too. She shifts Beth to one arm, clear of the water. The baby wails. “Good girl,” Tish mutters, as though Beth were a dog. She’s going to be shit at this motherhood thing.
Tish yanks again on her wriggling prisoner. “We grow accustomed to the poison that’s you? You can do the same for us.” It yanks back, its strength the strength of oceans, not animals. Tish goes sputtering under the waves. This isn’t water. This is darkness unfathomable. “Fuck that,” she spits, letting the words out as bubbles in the salt-still otherworld of iron and emptiness.
She’d thought about slicing, injections, puncture wounds. Human ways of harming. The logic of it fell apart in her hands like jellyfish on the sand.
They have no blood that means anything. They aren’t alive, not like that.
So she doesn’t try to wound like a thinking, civilized thing would. She invites in her oldest ancestors and she bites, tearing the icy unrightness between blunt teeth.
Her tongue burns. A kindness. She doesn’t have to know what it tastes like.
It lets go. Vanishes with a wet, sucking sound, not a splash. She straightens and finds herself in quiet seas, a sobbing, shivering niece under one arm.
Untold generations inured themselves here, where the water is heaviest and least alive. They served as worshipers and bait and conduit. Beth would, as Tish will, as dutiful Constance had.
But when you let in the darkness, the darkness must open to you, too. When Tish climbs the rocks again, she and the baby are bone dry.
* * *
Malda Marlys teaches science outside Chicago and writes the sort of speculative fiction that requires too many qualifiers for the normal flow of conversation. An out-of-practice black belt, mediocre birdwatcher, and terrible knitter, ey spends most of eir time being bullied by housepets and adding to a monumental TBR pile.