Twenty years before the ocean disappeared, Emmet’s father took him out to sea for the first time. Emmet was terribly anxious, knees knocking together as he boarded the ship, his father’s solid hand on his shoulder the only thing keeping him from turning tail and running the opposite direction. His father looked a hard man, face all angles under a bushy, unkempt beard, but anyone who knew him knew how kind he truly was. Emmet saw that kindness then in his father’s glittering grey eyes—eyes like a storm at sea.
“Remember what I always tell you?” he asked.
“We must always respect the ocean,” Emmet recited, his voice coming out as a squeak. But the familiar words and their rhythm calmed his frantic heart. “As much as we gain from her, it’s only because she allows us to.”
“That’s right,” his father said, beaming down at him. “She can be cruel and unpredictable, so we must be prepared at all times. But we also could not live without her, aye?”
Emmet nodded, not exactly reassured by the reminder of the danger, but finding comfort in the respect and honor of something so vast and unknowable.
That evening, far out at sea, a storm struck. It happened suddenly, the wind whipping up and pushing Emmet around with the strength of a hundred men, the rain lashing at his cheeks like thousands of knives. His father barked an endless stream of orders his way, keeping Emmet’s hands busy. Lightning struck somewhere nearby and lit up the wild, dark expanse of churning waves, and a single laugh bubbled up out of Emmet. And then a second escaped, and another, until he was cackling, drenched and afraid and horribly cold on the deck of the ship, because he had never felt so much energy and life all around him, had never felt so alive.
*****
Three months after the ocean disappeared, Emmet once again found himself at the shore. Over the past few months he often found himself there, his feet guiding him even as his mind was somewhere else. Sometimes he would walk out, past where the line of seafoam once was, but he never got far before he turned and retreated to the town.
This time he did not stop. The sand was moist from the recent rain, packed underfoot. The elevation steadily declined as he got to where the ocean would have gotten deeper and deeper, with the occasional hill. Trenches formed, which at first he could walk around, but soon he was having to jump over, until the ground opened up under him into unfathomable depths. But not even that deterred him, despite the fact that he could no longer see Harborport behind him. He simply rolled up his sleeves, discarded his shoes, and continued the trek.
The stench was unbearable. Skeletal coral and dried-out aquatic plants surrounded him like a forest of decay. He stumbled across the carcasses of fish and other sea life. Animals that had been caught on land as the ocean suddenly vanished, left to suffer until they finally died, and now abandoned to decompose in the middle of nowhere. A huge, hulking shape on the horizon turned out to be the partially decayed carcass of a blue whale, and despite the smell threatening to overwhelm Emmet’s already numbed nostrils, he sat beside it for a long while. It was huge, larger than Emmet could have imagined, and yet it no longer held any of the grace it once possessed in the water, reduced to something pathetic and lost and out of its element, decaying until it would no longer exist. Emmet placed a hand against a square of untouched skin, touching his forehead briefly against the damp and sticky flesh before moving on.
Further still, the carcasses were replaced by first small scattered bones, and then the towering figures of whale ribs piercing the sky. A strange fog encroached in, closing in more and more the further Emmet went. In his hungry and sleep-deprived delirium, the shadows of the massive bones looked like figures in the periphery of his vision—with a start, Emmet realized they were figures. Two, to be exact, that he would recognize anywhere.
To his right, his father’s hulking frame gently holds onto a tiny Emmet’s hand, walking along side by side. Young Emmet kicks the sand, and his father tells tales of legends about the sea and his own experiences until they bleed together as one, myth indistinguishable from reality. To Emmet’s left, his father teaches a teenage Emmet how to properly set up the boat for fishing, staying patient even as he messes up. But the fog continued to press closer until Emmet could no longer see any shadows at all, just his own feet continuing to step across the sand.
Rhys Hodson
Biography:Rhys is a creative writing/English major from Eugene, Oregon. They are queer and disabled, and have a passion for creating stories that reflect those experiences. He has been writing for as long as he can remember, and hopes to one day publish all the stories rattling around in their head.
Artist Statement: I have been writing stories for as long as I’ve been able to hold a pencil. Influenced by media like Studio Ghibli, I like to tell stories about messy, complicated relationships and structures where no one person is the bad guy–and in fact, where maybe the “bad guys” are actually just victims of a larger structure. My goal is to make even just one person feel as touched by my work as I have with my own favorite stories–and as a queer and disabled individual, helping bring more representation and understanding is just another bonus!
Published in Volume 144, Storyteller!
