Breadcrumb #598
LUCY ZHANG
Among the phytoplankton and kelp forests, a group of people lives in the ocean. Their hands graze the soft coral, and without calcium carbonate skeletons, the invertebrates flatten and branch and erect like fans billowing in the wind. The coral evokes a distant memory of autumn trees dressed in purple and red and yellow as the wind blows the colors down. The sea people sometimes head toward the surface of the water, where the sun best warms skin, and as they swim, they pass floating waterwheel plants that seem to glow green under light, whorls enclosing stems like ornaments untethered to the obligations of pretty small things.
It is said that these people used to live on land like the rest of us. It is said that some of them owned beta fish whose red and blue tails wilted behind their bodies like the end of a scarf hanging out a window on a more-rainy-than-windy day. It is said that some of them lived in houses with cedar slates for wall finishes, each horizontal course one continuous piece to create a boxy, minimalist form, allowing for clean window openings, clean door entrances, clean exits, so it’d be like no one ever came; no one ever left. According to legend, some of these people hid bookshelves beneath their staircases, the shelves irregularly patterned in polygonal shapes–from triangles to rectangles to scalene trapezoids. The shelves supposedly housed all sorts of titles–the kind of book you’d read for a few minutes and then look up to check for pairs of eyes gazing at your page, the kind of book that you’d open and let your eyes skim the first sentence before pausing and returning to the first capitalized letter of a word so you can reread the sentence over and over again until its meaning is backed only by Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions, the kind of book that’d house a bookmark stolen from a library no one visits anymore.
“The coral evokes a distant memory of autumn trees dressed in purple and red and yellow as the wind blows the colors down.”
The people under the sea braid strips of kelp into their hair as a tribute to the habitat. They whisper pleasantries to the fish and the sea anemone and the whales, and when they hear a response of uniquely cadenced bubbles, clicking sequences, whistles, pulses, purrs, grunts, drumming through sonic muscles, they smile to themselves. As the saltwater slips through their teeth, they forget how to tell each other about how blessed they feel–to hear a song not spoken in human language.
It is said that these people got tired of listening to the same words, their piggy banks and coin jars heavy with pennies for every mention of the word “money” and “work” and “I”. So they returned the books lying around their houses to the asymmetrical bookshelves, closed the tempered glass windows, placed their keys on the kitchen counter below a calendar marked with blue-sharpie x’s, and left their homes, shutting but not locking the door behind them. They followed the sidewalk to the shoreline, where they watched the waves chase away sandpipers only for the birds to follow back to sea as the waters retreated. The people slipped off their flip flops, stacking them on the edge of the boardwalk next to a paper sign reading “free shoes” in scribbled words connected by light lines of ink, the work of someone who couldn’t be bothered to lift their hand for spaces between letters.
It was too much for them, people will say of those who turned back and ran to shore when the water level rose to their necks. They were too scared to leave everything behind. A breaker submerged the heads of those brave enough to descend.
The sea people know the truth: they were too scared to stay.