by Fox Rivera
The metal weighed down every step towards the land’s edge. I held the thing in my sore arms, just above the rippling surface. I let go and with a quiet splash, it began to sink. I watched it. I watched it sink into the impossible dark, the impossible deep. I watched it after I could no longer see it. I watched it until I was only watching me. A murky reflection staring back. The me from the world below. We watched each other.
They tell me I was born in water, swimming before I could walk. I was never impressed by that anecdote. Everyone of my generation, the one before, and even the one before that were intimately familiar with water. The first sailors of the globe, the golden pirates, the navies of the world, none of them could have never understood water like we did. And we hated it.
Every sip was reluctant. Every bath begrudged. We needed water, but we stopped wanting it. For centuries it had been worshipped. Seas of wondrous places and mystical creatures. The joy of sliding on snow and romance of a kiss in the rain. Even in the face of its horror: floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, water was never to blame. It giveth and it taketh away, they said. Like it always had. But always had isn’t always will. Water changed its mind about our arrangement. It was tired of giving. It was time to take.
They teach us of the flood in every history class every year. Each one of us could recite the tale by heart but none of us ever did. Who would we tell it to? For as long as we exist as we are, we will remember. Whatever civilization comes after us will call it our creation myth:
One day like any other, it began to rain. That day, like any other, people responded. They went inside to read. They smiled at the boon for their gardens. They sent their kids to run out and play before dinner. The kids were the first to feel it. The rain was hot. Boiling. They screamed and ran inside as the air filled with steam.
What followed was a slow extinction. The rain didn’t stop. Scalding water poured from the clouds as if cooked by the sun itself, pulling gallons upon lakes upon oceans of water from the greater universe to rain down upon us.
The creatures of the land never stood a chance. If a structure wouldn’t yield to nature’s universal solvent, it would yield to the heat it brought with it. Boiled, drowned, crushed, lost, burned, eroded. Humanity cowered in its walls, desperately searching for answers. Those animals who knew nothing of metal work or buoyancy or insulation were cooked in the great soup pot the earth had become.
And then it stopped. The rain disappeared and the clouds parted. What dwindling representative’s homo sapiens had left climbed out of their floating panic rooms and looked out upon a world they didn’t recognize. Even the tallest structures, the greatest feats of human engineering, sat miles below where the surface of the sea now sat. The 30 percent of the globe rock and stone had once claimed was gone. Water had conquered it all.
It never rained again. To this day, I nor anyone I know or could ever know has seen rain. It’s almost childish. Petty. Cruel. If we were going to survive, we would be given no more. Every sip we drank would have to come from the warm sea. From the communal grave of the old world.
Sometimes I walked to the edge to scorn the surface. When I was young I would scream and yell, batting my fist against the liquid, vowing to never forgive it for what it took. Now, I just quietly stare.
I stare down and wonder what their final thoughts were when they stared up at day. I imagine what it must be like down there. Lost in a place so deep that the sun abandoned it. Preserved cities with sodden roads and bloated corpses for citizens. Do they still stare up? Do they peer through soggy eyes and search for a gift from the sky that will pull them from the depths?
I had never seen a fish. The creatures of the sea fared little better than their land cohorts, boiled alive by a heat they couldn’t understand. Experts say all sea life went extinct long ago. But there is no way to be sure with water, is there? Perhaps down there some strange breed of shark adapted its new environment and hunts after giant crustaceans wearing automobiles as shells.
But, despite never seeing a live one, I still decided to sculpt one for my graduation project. It felt right. The ocean was full of things never meant to live within it. Best gift it something that was.
It took a little over a month. It was born of metal and sloppy welds. I stuck dark washed-up shards of glass to its scales and stabbed rods of dry driftwood into its jaw. It was a horrible thing to look at. If it had somehow come to life it would topple by the weight of its iron tail and thrash with rusty creaks.
In its first few days of life, it gave me nightmares. As my sleepy eyes watched it in the dark corners of my room, my dreams filled with surging water and the sculpture drove its wooden teeth into my legs. I kicked and fought with the same futility of those who had drowned before me. It was taking me to the bottom and there was nothing I could do.
By its completion my nightmares had faded, giving way to dreams of the underwater world. I would swim through ruins, seeing the sunken versions of what I’d only recognize from tales of people older than I. In one dream I sunk all the way to bottom. I stood on the paved roads and stared upward, looking for the sky I couldn’t find.
When I woke up, I knew the fish’s name. And when I knew its name, I heaved it from my rocking bedroom floor and walked it to its home.
As I stared at my reflection I began to see deeper into the water. I could see myself down at the bottom, staring up. I watched and soon a glimpse of something came out of the murky black. An ugly gift of metal and glass fell from the sky and landed beside me. I closed my eyes and faded into the warm waves.
Fox Rivera is a Black & Boricua trans-woman writing fiction and critical essays. As a first
generation and chronically ill student she earned a bachelor’s in English from UNC Greensboro and has since published a handful of short stories in magazines like the Corradi or Wild Greens. She aims for her stories to provide misfit birds like her a new place to roost.
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