Short Story

2024

Before the light came, we lived our small lives in darkness. Pereiopods and claws scraped against the barnacle-covered rocks, while running water caressed our backs and guided us through the shadows of our lives. We had evolved as conscious beings to understand the murk, and created a symbiosis with our world that kept us safe since before time. The water brought us food, the food made us poop, the poop fed the algae, the algae cleaned the water. The darkness of our home was comfortable, ancient, and stable. 

When the light comes, I’m next to my wife, Luciel. I can feel her antenna tickle my side as we make our way through the rocks, a gentle guide to make sure we're headed in the right direction for our dinner. The muscles we’re after live a far crawl around the bend, but it's our anniversary, so we decided the trek was well worth it. Antenna in antenna, we make our way.

I signal to her with my left claw that we should be at the muscles in the next few stones, flapping my tail against hers with excitement. She returns the flaps, her antenna curling tighter into mine. I can only think of how happy I am, and how nice she feels next to me. I am too busy being happy and hungry to notice the disruption above, but Luciel notices right away. I trip over her legs as they slam still. 

We are both too stunned to move. High above us, rippling on the water, is a being taller than our sky. Its head touches the rock, and its feet shuffle on the cave floor, right where our dinner- which we had forgotten all about- rested. On top of its head shines something white-hot and all encompassing. The beams from that thing reach down to expose the sand and pebbles that cover our cave's floor, as well as our terrified faces. 

The colossal creature stands still. If it has eyes, I can't see any, but I feel as though the beams reaching through the water are looking through us. I feel something I've never felt before, my comfort cracking under its weight.  My shell feels too small, my legs threaten to collapse beneath me, and the water that has always been comfortable, feels so heavy, like liquid turned stone. It's a feeling that screams, to stay means to die. So I take Lucile's claw in mine, turn, and use what's left of my rubbery strength to yank us away from the being before its light swallows us whole. 

As we run, I look around, and through my dust and panic-clouded vision, a new image starts to emerge, slowly, like a dream from another world being pieced together. The rocky cave, which was once all deep shadow, has transformed. There are colors. Not like how moss is slightly less dark than the rock it sits on. No, this was unbelievable. 

The cave walls are a hundred different kinds of gray, and have weaving lines of jagged brown racing through them, the bumps creating rich shadows that move with the water. The moss is bright, bright green, with tiny white worms squiggling around in the paradise. The beams illuminate the water, bright gleams catching on ripples that never stop moving. The cave floor is swirling, clouds of earth dancing with the flow of the water, which is sparkling with a shine unknown to the farthest of crustacean travelers. The pebbles on the sand are each a different color, endless blues greens browns and beiges. I cannot believe there are this many shades of anything. 

She jerked her head up, pushed her glasses back, and clasped her hands, the sweat continuing to come in waves as she moved it restlessly between her  fingers. This was an Irish Catholic funeral, and she hadn't been to church since Sunday mass day-care, when her father still cared about pretending to be Christian. But she knew the Irish Catholics didn’t play when it came to guilt and shame. She didn't make it a habit of praying in her day to day, but kneeling here, in the eyes of a now-dead man she always saw but never knew, something compelled her, pushing the thoughts that lived in the deepest parts of her not yet fully developed brain up to the surface, radiating out through her forehead. She felt a pulse between her brows as the thoughts pushed themselves out, desperate to see the light of whatever godlike presence resided under the wooden floorboard. 

“God forgive me.” she thought, while finding her gaze resting somewhere between the acoustic ceiling panels and the motionless body. The hazy memory of herself walking by his  still body on the couch all those years, and feeling the relentless wave of hot sludge guilt and confusion wash over her conscience for what felt like the hundredth time in forty five seconds. Because yes, she was here at the funeral, yes, she borrowed her mothers nice but modest black dress, yes she’d hugged the family and listened to the heartfelt outpouring of love so many had for Sean Barry. Because on the day you are supposed to get together and collectively mourn the loss, Victoria felt like this was the most alive she’d ever been able to picture him. She felt like a coward, cowering in the eyes of the all-knowing and all-judging Irish Catholic G-O-D. Her sadness was sincere, but the origins of it were unclear. 

Small Excerpt from the first chapter of my novella Golden State

The text she received at 8:26 on a Wednesday in 2005 landed wet-hot in her stomach.

 “My dad died this morning. I may be hard to reach. Love you.” 

Sean Barry was one of the only people Victoria ever knew who'd been sick from the moment she’d met him. Usually you'd have some sort of idea of who a person was before they got sick. It made you think of them as more of a whole, that the sick chipped away from, rather than a person you never really go to meet. The person before was able to fill up the uncomfortable space that being sick, really sick, slurped up. Sean Barry didn’t occupy that space for her. A body on a couch that smelled of ammonia and pants that have been worn a week too long. No noise except the sound of the air conditioner and whatever was on Cable. She couldn't wrap her brain around it, and her chest tightened whenever she tried. 

The same view greeted her every time she entered the Barry house. Through the foyer, past the couch where unfathomable amounts of medical equipment lay on a sticky coffee table by an ancient beige couch, Sean Barry laid still. Eyes open, chest rising and falling with the drum of the cicadas outside, singing for a summer day that she was suddenly itching to get back to.  She could never separate him from the couch, fully, never had another image to go off of, hardly any words to bring his soul from his body and up to her glasses so she could get a good look. No, always just the awkward  glance and attempted wave as she made her way past the open living room and up the stairs to Hunter’s room, wiping the sweat from her palms on her jeans while her legs planned escape. 

Hunter never gave more than a vague explanation of what was going on. Something-something terminal, something-something more comfortable at home, something-something let's talk about something else. She never pried further. There was always that feeling of death in his house, but Hunter never carried it with him.

So, Friday, 11:30am, 2005, Victoria's knees greeted the kneeling bench at the open casket of Sean Barry. Her glasses fell down her nose a bit as she looked down, coming dangerously close to decorating the dead man's face staring back at her. It dawned on her that this was the closest she’d ever been to him. The man she selfishly avoided her whole adolescence, because she didn't know what to say, how to act, where to stand, now lay just as motionless as he did all those years ago on that beige couch. She expected his chest to rise and fall ever so slightly, as it did back then, like he was trying to go unnoticed by the air surrounding him, so as to not disturb the wind's direction as it blew through the open window. But this time there were no cicadas, no drum of cable television, no quiet breaths. His pants had been changed to Sunday’s best and his face had been washed and polished, ready to face the eternal sunshine of the beyond, and the eternal darkness of the dirt. Her chest tightened in that same way it did all those times through all those years, and beads of sweat soaked with guilt and nerves dripped onto the worn leather of the kneeling bench that many others had christened before her.