Marine Life
Magical Realism
Marine Life
Firth had moved out of his efficiency apartment in the city and transplanted himself by the ocean more than fifteen years ago. After getting a degree in marine biology he’d considered joining a scientific team that explored coral reefs off the coast of Australia. It sounded exciting, but also seemed too much for him, a life too big for Firth to fully inhabit. Instead, he got a job at an aquarium.
Firth stayed away from the visitors, preferring to keep in the back, cleaning the tanks. He didn’t mind the smell of fish and algae; he liked how each of them was their own underwater biome of activity, a contained home for so many creatures. He liked to imagine he was in there with them, a part of their world, viewing it from close up. His sister, who raised her children with her husband farther inland, described Firth as a hermit to people who asked.
He first knew he wanted to work with aquatic animals when he was eight, standing in front of a tank with a turtle. It was enormous, scaley fins pushing the water away like great paddles. What intrigued Firth most was the shell, a mosaic of hexagons grown right out of the creature's body. Imagine that, if not for the confines of the tank, that turtle could take his home with him wherever he went. He could go anywhere he wanted, and if it was ever too much, all he had to do was retreat into his private mobile home.
Firth liked to start his mornings with a walk on the beach. No matter the weather, he’d walk. If it was overcast, he’d zip up. If the fog was so thick he could only see a few yards ahead of him, he'd still walk. He could do the whole shore in a half-hour, but on weekends, when he didn't have work, Firth walked slower, enjoying the pull of the waves, examining the seashells. He’d mapped out the tides and knew, by the progress of the moon, just how much beach would be visible on a given morning.
Firth often looked out over the water, that vast ocean, and wondered what it would be like to travel across it, knowing he never would. In his early forties, Firth was set in his ways, and moving to the beach had been the last truly big step for him. He had saved a long time, done his research, and carefully bided his time until exactly the right home had come onto the market. Then, it had been a mad dash with the agent to snap it up before someone else clawed their way in.
The house had seemed a little large for him, but after unpacking he found all his possessions fit in neatly. He would never need another home. He would probably die in this place. The thought filled him with a certain amount of sadness. No more new phases, no possible adventures.
Stones and seashells piled along the shore crunched under his feet as he thought about this. It was a Sunday, and so he meandered. True, Firth was only in his early forties, plenty of time for a new season in his life. But he knew himself, he was a private man; he didn’t like to leave himself exposed, as the uncertainty of moving always required. Thus, he knew he wouldn’t make that kind of move again. He liked the pattern of his life, even if working at the aquarium always came with a degree of social anxiety. When visitors saw him and attempted to ask him questions about the creatures, he pretended to be hard of hearing and scurried off, wondering why they didn’t just read the plaques. He was certain they, like the children from his school days, would see his awkwardness and eat him alive, the anecdotal butt of a joke in a story for their friends.
Firth knew the shoreline well enough to recognize the large stone jutting out of the sand. Except, usually the waves covered everything but the very top. It was low tide, the lowest Firth had seen yet, and the waves had retreated a few yards. Unusual. Firth remembered it was the moon’s closest perigee this year. In previous years, the closets perigee had occurred during the week, when Firth was at work during low tied. Without that black blanket, he saw now a variety of boulders, smoothed by the constant beating of the tide, overgrown with seaweed and barnacles.
Firth investigated, walking out into the seabed. One or two boulders were pointy, jutting out. Most were long and flat, their surface a swirl of black and cream and ochre. Firth stopped, wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him.
He thought at first the object was an oddly shaped rock, but it was a perfect circle. It had evenly spaced prongs jutting out of it. Because he wasn’t expecting to see it, it took him longer than usual to place a name to the apparition: a hatch door, like on submarines.
Firth dithered. Wondering if his eyes were playing tricks on him. He walked around it. Kicked one of the prongs. It gave a metallic thud more resonant than a slab of iron should be. There was a hollow space beneath. He crouched down. If there had been anyone else around, Firth would not have done what he did next.
The metal was cool beneath his hand as he tugged, and then pulled with all his might. After a metallic groan, the prongs spun easily. He heaved the hatch open. Musty salt air wafted up. Stairs bolted to the wall descended into the dark void. With eyes adjusted to the bright sky, he was blind in the face of the dark void. A note was tied to the stair rung, and he crouched over to read it.
I had no more need of it.
Firth dropped the note as if it would burn him, some instinctual part of him telling him to be wary. He slammed the hatch closed and used his whole body to spin the handwheel tight, sealing the bulkhead. He didn’t finish his walk but scurried back to his house and shut the door.
He determined to go about his day, but the more he tried to ignore the mysterious hatch, the more he thought about it. He wondered who had lived there. Then he realized it didn't matter because they had abandoned their home. Who else knew about it? He'd heard nothing in the news, and the tide had never been that low before. Now, hours later, it had risen again. So no one else knew about it. Just Firth.
He discovered a voice message from his sister inviting him to a party. Her eldest son was graduating high school. His nephew was heading to college next fall. On the fridge hung a picture of a turtle badly drawn in crayon. His nephew had made it for him as a thank you for a trip to the aquarium when he was five. That was thirteen years ago.
Firth tried to put it out of his mind, make himself dinner, put himself to bed. His thoughts drifted to the next day's agenda: working at the aquarium. Anxiety rumbled within him. All the people… How much better would it be to just work with the starfish, feed the turtles, clean the seahorse tank, without the people. And he’d have to call his sister back, his sister who had grown a family, whose children were themselves becoming adults, and now he had to go back and watch them move on when he hadn’t moved on for fifteen years.
The hatch. Again and again, his thoughts returned to the hatch. What kind of life had the previous occupant lived, buried beneath the sand? Given the brackish smell that wafted up, Firth didn’t think he had the whole story.
He broke out into a cold sweat, soaking through his pinstriped pajamas, laying on his back in a tangle of sheets. This life—it was too small. He felt it constricting him. He would never leave this house. Never be more than the hermit his sister called him. Never have more than those blessed walks on the beach, the highlight of his day. Yet they never satisfied the craving crawling through him for something more, different, bigger.
The hatch.
Firth yanked off the covers. Not bothering with socks, shoes, or coat, he stumbled out into the night. The wind blew, chilling his sweat, but he ignored it. The waves crashed, distant compared to the thudding in his ears. It was night, the black filling him with panic; exposed, he was too exposed, vulnerable to the elements in a wide-open world. But Firth had walked this path to the beach so many times that his feet guided him truly. He grasped the wet wood railing of the stairs leading down to the beach. His feet hit the sand and he ran, a faint electric current running through his skin, up through the gelatinous material of his body, into his skeleton, and making him feel more alive than ever before.
The hatch. The hatch. The tide must have covered it for good, he would never find it again. What would he do? He couldn’t go back, that life was too small for him, he needed more room. But no, he counted backward, that was twelve, almost thirteen hours ago, so maybe, just maybe, he would see it again, if someone else hadn't found it first.
He ran along the shore, ignoring the seashells and pebbles crunching beneath his feet. Firth was not an athletic man, so he was a very awkward runner, arms flailing up and down as if trying to pull the distance towards him, like he was trying to crawl instead of run. And yet, Firth had never moved quite so fast in his entire life, as though he had saved all his energy for this one sprint, this one mad dash across the shells.
The stars showed crystal bright in the sky above him, stretching out over that infinite ocean he had always, hermit or not, wanted to explore. He ran until he found the exposed boulder, a black landmark jutting out against the glossy sheen of waves. He fell to his knees in the wet sand, soaking his pajamas through, and scrabbled around for the spokes of the hatch door.
Crying out in such relief that the noise was somewhere between sobs and laughter, Firth clawed and pulled. The wheel spun; he heaved the hatch open.
A neon light filtered up to him, his eyes fully adjusted to the night. He peered down. Glowing tubular tentacles waved gently from the wall. Sea anemone. Firth knew these organisms. They stung other creatures defensively and worked symbiotically to protect hermit crabs. Their poison was usually benign to humans. Even now he felt his skin hardening to a shell, an exoskeleton he had always needed, always wanted for protection.
Firth climbed down the ladder, the sea anemones lighting his way. When he reached the bottom, he found a hollow cavern with a curve to the walls. He intuitively sensed they led to other rooms. A shield of glass curved into two separate panes at the viewport, a panel of controls spread before it. He sat down, took hold of the mechanisms, and pushed forward. Two claws, one larger than the other, reached out and leveraged themselves against the sand and bedrock it had lodged against. Other mechanical legs pushed and pulled, and then Firth was off, crawling along the ocean floor.
Dear Reader,
If you want to read any previously published stories, check out the archive section. More free reading to come later this month.
Life’s adventures are never over. We must only be willing to face the unknown.