Stephanie is a Naarm-based writer and film producer, interested in speculative fiction that pokes at the intersections between love, disability, and queerness, and laughs at political doom. She has been published in Splinter Journal, The Suburban Review, Overland, and in various zines scattered around cities and the internet.
LUNA SEA
The city was a cemetery, gravestone skyscrapers stained against a burnt orange sky. As I stepped off the watertram, I could see the first few pinpricks of space; Venus, probably, or Jupiter, untwinkling. I rarely looked up back in those days; so much more time was spent watching what was unravelling below.
An eboat hummed up to the platform, police lights flashing a blue-red disco. Aboard it, my escort in uniform had the vacant blue eyes and sharp jawline of a high school cricket captain.
“Demi?” He asked, and I nodded. I climbed aboard and we began to circle back, cutting a glassy swathe through the little peaks of current. Laughter of revellers in the warm summer night drifted over from the pontoon bars that lifted and dropped with the tides.
He studied me.
“Marine biologist, huh?” He said. “Every kid’s dream, to swim with dolphins for work!”
People always said that. I wanted to explain there was very few dolphins in my line of work, and so many more humans than you think. The impact of them. The shape of their cities. The push and pull of them and their ships and their drills. Fishing nets and oil spills and populations and temperatures.
But as usual I smiled thinly and said nothing.
As we passed the old Palais – the glimmering lettering and art deco flanks still visible – the sounds of crowds died. After the third floating tequila bar got swept away, the council finally deemed it too rough and developers were forced to keep everything behind the new Barkly St boundary they enforced. Luna Sea got an exception, because of its heritage listing, and the updates they’d done to make all access aquatic only.
My brother had called me earlier in the day. I was in the lab, alone, as usual. Slices of coral beneath the microscopes. I always found the shapes endlessly fascinating, even more so than the bubbling fungus-like calcifications they could form. Magnified by one thousand, the subtle galaxies and craters of their surface revealed, a secret world opening like a breath.
When my phone buzzed I lurched for it, my heart tightening in hopeful terror – perhaps it was Kath. But it was him. I ignored the call. He rang again, immediately. He never did that. Maybe Mum is dead, I thought.
But no. He wanted help. Another first.
The spires of Luna Sea gleamed in the dark. I remembered as a child seeing the eyes of a white-faced monster here, but that was long gone. Now there was just a golden crown and a water gate, which the boat purred through at the nod of a couple more cops up on the security platform. At a bobbing stretch of pier that ringed the floating arcade, I dismounted alone and Cricket Captain Cop departed.
Jackson was waiting for me. Even while being held upright by his stiff uniform, even with the air of gravitas that came with being the Chief Commissioner, he still looked at me with the same pained expression of deep annoyance that I’d known my entire life. I hadn’t even done anything wrong yet.
“I didn’t want to invite you.” He said as a way of greeting. “This is a waste of time.”
“Good to see you too.” I snarked back. He lifted police tape that cordoned off the dark arcade and gestured for me to follow him.
“I’ve run out of ideas. I wanted you to come by while the media were gone.”
We walked between dark lifeless machines – claws suspended over soft toys, old shoot-em-ups reskinned in whatever newest franchise was out now, a Dance Dance Revolution platform with arrows gone cold. Jackson stopped between two silent air hockey tables.
“Give me your phone.” He said.
“What? Why?”
“No photos. Can’t risk it. The Greens will be brigading in two seconds if they find out. Give me your damn phone.”
He snatched it from my offered hand, then used it to gesture ahead.
I pushed through the small gate and stepped onto the dodgem car rink. A single work light was set up illuminating the middle. The cars were scattered and still. In their midst, one much larger shape.
I approached cautiously. Its skin was grey and mottled. Beady sunken eyes stared glassily from one end of the almost shapeless body. Many giant paddled fins splayed out on the ground. It was almost melting into the rink, like a blobfish torn from the depths, a jellyfish puddled on the sand when it was made for water.
I pulled my pocket torch from my bag and studied it. Just as I didn’t swim with dolphins, I hadn’t specialised in any vertebrates since early bio. Though looking at the creature, I found myself wondering if it even had a spine. It didn’t have a dorsal fin. It had an odd number of pelvic fins – if you could classify it as that without knowing where was pelvic.
I looked into the strange beady eyes; black, but were they moving? I reached out to touch the skin; a thick coat of mucus, and under it a layer both pebbled and smooth, denticles. Like rays, or a shark, or
NO RUIN BACK (back)
I jolted away as though burned. Something had echoed in my head. Feelings that were not words nor images but simply things that I knew, vaguely, like grasping a concept in a dream, knowledge I had and could not focus on. Reverberating.
My fingertips were burning – my skin had turned lobster red and started to peel.
I returned to Jackson, furiously cleaning my hands with a hanky.
“This thing needs to get into a lab. I think it’s poisonous, mucus seems to agitate- Where did it come from?”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? This is your entire thing-“
He would never say job. Just like Mum. Cop, that was a job they understood. Plumber. Teacher, maybe, when I was lecturing they understood. But biologist that lived off research grants?
“You don’t listen, do you? This is not my thing, actually. Call me when you’ve got a problem with coral or algae bloom or, I don’t know, simbiotic bacterial-”
“Shut up. Demi? Shut up.” Jackson pinched the bridge of his nose, the adult in the room, and of course I was the child again. Easily baited. God, this dynamic bored me.
We stood in the dark arcade.
I reached out and picked up a plastic gun, pointed it at him. Click.
“Remember when I used to slaughter you in Time Crisis?”
“I need to dump it back in the ocean.” Jackson sighed. “If this gets out, if this gets reported – some endangered whale thing beached here – Luna Sea will be shut down for good and the enviro perimeter will be widened. They’re already fighting like mad for it. This would be the nail in the coffin.”
“Okay? Good.” I shrugged. “But also, this isn’t just some endangered whale thing. It’s something else. It needs to go to a lab.”
“I thought this wasn’t your thing.”
“It’s not my thing enough to tell you what it is, but I know what it isn’t.”
He looked back at me. Then held out my phone.
“So whose thing is this?”
Kath looked so damn cool gliding up on the police boat. I’d felt like some clumsy kid on a makeshift raft on school camp. For all my work, I was extremely unsteady on water.
She walked towards us warily. We hadn’t spoken since that awkward lunch, a month ago. She had been crying. She begged me to explain how I was feeling. I had found no words. I’d felt something click off. That was the end of that.
Kath nodded at me.
“Where is it?”
She had her torch too. She had given me a matching one. Said I needed to stop using my phone every time I needed more light in the lab. Now I watched, always mildly impressed, by how quick she worked, how her eyes darted in patterns indecipherable to me, processing facts I had to really strain to find.
“You’re right. No spine. Or…” She scanned the humped body, two knobbled lines apparent. “Two spines? But that’s not possible. More likely this must be rib edges. But it’s so strange.”
NOT STRANGE YOU STRANGE (strange)
That powerful echo again, so intense I staggered.
“It’s not strange, we’re strange.” I said, almost involuntarily. Kath ignored me, squatting closer, eyes aglow. She was loving this. I felt my heart pounding as Kath muttered to herself about eye shape, teeth forms.
“Did you not feel that?” I pushed. Kath just looked at me, widened her eyes in a patronizing what?
DON’T SHUT UP
I had to stop talking. I was not meant to share this. Don’t. Shut up. I looked past Kath at the swollen black eyes.
“I think it’s still alive.” I said.
“I’m calling the university.” Kath said.
“Don’t. Jackson – he doesn’t want anyone to know.”
“So? Since when do you listen to him? You know this is important. You know we can’t just sit here.”
I felt her glare on me, hot, caustic. So close to repeating a fight we’d already had. I always just sat there, I never acted, never wanted to move forward. Yada yada yada.
But this was an action. A bizarre action. For a deep sea creature that wanted me to take action.
“Please, Kath. Just trust me.”
She stared at me.
“We need to tell people.”
A familiar feeling, her walking away, me witholding a truth that I couldn’t articulate.
I sat in the dark, staring at the black eyes. Was this communication a form of echolocation; something with brainwaves? I was out of my depth. Trying to put it into terms I understood. The thing had no melon for direction, no apparantly space for a brain to hold language.
“Your bloody girlfriend emailed the university. And the Department of Environment.” Jackson’s voice startled me.
“Ex-girlfriend.” I corrected mildly. I found I missed her most when she was doing something defiant. Doing what was right. She was always better at that than me.
“By morning this place will be swarming with cameras. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“I’ll stay.”
“What?” He obviously didn’t want to come closer but he did to catch my eye.
“I just want to keep – observing. Before they take it to the lab.”
Jackson’s concerned gaze darted from me to the creature.
“Suit yourself, Dem. The boat’s leaving.”
He walked across the rink.
“Did it speak to you?” I called out. Jackson froze in his tracks. Then he picked up the pace. Refusing to look back. Refusing to answer.
Just me and it. Was it a link to a mosasaurus, something prehistoric? Had it been living so deep for years that we’d never caught sight of it? I tried to imagine, in cold black gloom, a family of them, a pod, swimming. What shape was it supposed to be, when not beached on a dodgem car rink?
How did you did it get here?
FELL (fell)
It fell here. I saw the image of the crash. I looked up.
A jagged hole torn in the roof of the arcade.
Fell from where?
FELL HOME (home)
It fell from home. I couldn’t see that, it looked like nothing, but it felt safe, and warm, and liquid, and familiar, and comforting.
Where is home?
?????
Confusion was clear. That question didn’t make sense. Home was home. For a brief second I thought the expression in my mind was the same as Jackson’s – exasperated, tired. Demi doesn’t understand again.
I’m trying. I’m trying to understand. How to picture trying to understand?
Nothing.
Two spines, perhaps. A different evolutionary thread. Elements of deep sea and reef life. Both cartilaginous and not. No gill slits. Physically possible in a different biome. With millions of years of different atmospheres. I looked up again.
Why did you come here?
LEARN YOU WEB (web)
To learn. It wanted to see the webs we formed. I saw it clear as day, clear as a reef system where coral and algae grew codependent and vibrant. Varieties of humans, symbiotic, toxic.
REPORT (report)
Somewhere, other creatures were listening. They saw me and Kath not speaking. They saw Jackson not looking at me. They gathered like a confused crowd around a plastic gun in an arcade, turned over the significance of a gifted lab torch in their minds.
Can you go back?
NO MISCALCULATED MEANT SEA (sea)
Oh. It was aiming for water. The old theme park on the edge of the ocean caught it by surprise.
Do you have much time left?
?????????
Again, that face, confusion, exasperation. Maybe the concept of life remaining, of time altogether. I didn’t know what it was that didn’t translate.
HOW MATE (mate)
It was curious about Kath and I. How we came to be, how we were. I didn’t know how to explain that we weren’t.
We met as research assistants. She cared so much. She was so quick. So firey. She put so much of what I felt into words. I felt like every moment with her I was learning, expanding, growing. I stored every word of hers, selfish, hoarding. She got nothing back. She got hungry. She left.
I tried to recall the moments in the lab, the late nights. How she tasted of saltwater and open nights. Laughing until our guts hurt in the stacks at the library. Her arms, long and wide, over my arms, over the giant coral on the Great Barrier Reef, the first and last time we dove together. Pressing into the formation. I tried to summon images where I’d never had words and feed them like kindling into the motionless creature. One after the other after the other.
I lay down, pressed on cheek to the cool wet rink. Stared into the melting grey face of elsewhere.
What else do you want to know?
Its images grew weaker. It struggled to share observations with me. The feelings were paler, drifting. By the time the sky began to turn steely milk white and haze yellow with dawn, there were no more messages.
I lay in the silence. The boats would come. The media. The government officials. Everyone in protection of something; wildlife, environment, jobs, this amusement park staying heritage-listed and standing forever, more construction in Victoria, space exploration, renewable energy. The university would fight for priority in the research. The government would get in the way. The money would be hard to find. Kath would be at the forefront. Her observations would go viral in an op ed when the grants all got stonewalled. We would learn something. And maybe they would, too.
Before all that noise began, I relished the quiet. I practiced what I would say to Kath. How would I get images into her brain like that? I had no idea.
I’m sorry. (sorry)