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DESMA’S CAVE IS A DARK, warm space.
Yet my mother insists on being dragged out to open water where sharks occasionally roam. Where even a too-clever octopus could pose a danger to my prone mother and the daughter she’s laboring to birth even now while we maneuver her out through the narrow cave opening.
“I won’t dirty the cave,” she says to me, panting as the child inside her shifts.
We drag her past the outer reaches of the kelp forest until we hit open water. I don’t have to stop staring at her to know. The shift from comfortably warm to a creeping chill is proof enough.
She screams in mind-speak. Then out loud when she forgets herself. The child shifts lower. Then lower still. Desma moves closer with each shift to help with the birth.
The plant sits uselessly in my clenched fist.
I’m too late.
I should’ve insisted the storyteller hurry. Would it have made a difference? Would one meal have eased this wretched labor?
I hold back with Aunt, a chill shivering through me from more than the cold.
There’s too much blood. In the waves, coiling through the strands of Desma’s hair, and on my mother’s scales.
The twins flinch away when it draws near. They curl into each other, hands to their mouths, but don’t leave.
The screams continue. Aunt waits with her hands clenched tight. She doesn’t flinch, not once, and I struggle to do the same.
Time passes. Minutes or hours or days—I can’t guess.
Another child tears its way out of my mother’s body.
In the past, all were lifeless and never carried long enough. There’s a glimmer of hope with this one. I muster nothing beyond a feeble whimper. The twins mirror it.
Air bubbles stream from my lips. My neck gills work fiercely to replace the air lost. The tickle of them against my skin distracts me for a moment.
The sun dips below the horizon. The Akri deepens colder, darker. Above, the blood creates a blight surging through the waves. A shark might follow its trail.
With a last heaving push, the child rips free. It’s a girl. All of them are, as they always have been.
It’s too still.
Desma severs its cord. She clears oozing liquid from unmoving gills. Pats just hard enough to snap it awake.
Nothing. No movement.
I swim closer. My pupils dilate. The settling darkness means nothing to my glowing eyes.
Blood lingers.
Blood lingers because it hasn’t stopped streaming from my mother. It winds around in rivulets and still I move closer to my panting, groaning mother. Aunt reaches for me, her hand warm against my arm, but doesn’t hold me back.
“She hasn’t stopped,” I say, wanting to scream aloud.
My thoughts tangle. There was a time when we talked with our mouths like those above. Before the sea became our prison. Now our voices become echoes of themselves. We’re forced into mind-speak.
Desma turns away from the useless cleaning of the child. Cleaning won’t bring it back. Her mouth is a grim line set in a pointed face. “She won’t.”
Another whimper. More air lost. My gills work harder. “She must.”
Shaking her head, Desma holds the child outward. Its wrinkled body hangs heavy between us. I reach out, finally letting go of the fennel. My hands quake as I pass them along its body. Complete yet dead.
Another child, my mother said, to be named Eudora. An old Titan word meaning good gift after so many children lost.
“Agathe,” my mother rasps.
I leave my mother of memory, the one with a swollen stomach and a smile to rival the dawn. She broke her own rule of naming before a live birth because of misplaced hope.
My mother of now beckons with outstretched arms and ribs poking from beneath her skin. The famine has weakened all of us but her the most.
I go. I will never not.
Slipping into my mother’s arms is easy in a way contact with others is not. She stares at the dead child, tracing its upturned nose with a single finger. She gasps and another tide of blood is caught by the waves.
“She must stop,” I yell.
Desma flinches. “I’ve done all that can be done.”
“Calm yourselves,” my mother says. Her eyes are barely open. Enough to see a sliver of her pale blue eyes. The pupils aren’t dilated as they ought to be in the darkened waters. “All of you.”
Only now do I notice the twins sobbing and Aunt’s quiet reassurances.
“It’ll be all right,” Aunt says.
For them, this memory will fade with time. But for me? Nothing will be all right.
My mother’s cold hand strokes my cheek. I flinch away. The hurt in my own heart, on her face, has me grasping her frigid hand and placing it against my cheek. I shiver against the chill of her skin.
My mother doesn’t see. Just yesterday I would’ve been grateful to keep my emotions hidden. Now the lack of her awareness guts me worse than a fisherman’s tools ever could.
“I am dying,” my mother starts.
Even within my head, her voice is pained. More groan than words.
I nuzzle closer, already starting a stream of you won’t and no.
“Listen!” she growls, pulling herself closer. Her body sags moments later when her strength wanes. “I’m dying. You must help the others. You must carry on.”
I snarl. My teeth grit together until they ache within my jaw. Grief claws at my throat. “Not without you.”
I’m afraid. Afraid of her hazy eyes and the blood swirling around us. Of the shark sure to arrive at any moment. I’m afraid of opening my mouth and grief pouring out into this horrible sea. I’m always afraid of the swell of my mother’s stomach. Always afraid of the early labors. But this fear creeps to the center of my bones and leaves me shivering with more than cold.
My mother’s gills move frantically. Her body seizes, tendons clenched tight. Then she sags. Her struggling gills stop trying at all. One last flutter. They lie still. Cold hands slip away from mine.
A warm hand grips my arm. Desma.
“A shark approaches.”
Stomach churning, I heave. Grief pours out as half-digested fish from days ago. I should be angry with myself for wasting what little food I’m given. I can’t manage anything beyond grief.
“We’ll bring her into the cave,” I say.
“You know there’s nowhere to bury her,” Desma says. Her hand on my arm tightens. “Come.”
Desma drags me away from my mother’s prone, dead body left for the sharks to consume. Even now, I glimpse shadows of a hulking body pivoting through the waves.
Aunt, her arms around each of the twins, beckons for us to follow toward the ruins.
I stare at the blood-coated infant instead of the approaching shark. Curse my sibling for the death it wrought. For leaving me without anyone to live for.
I bury Eudora among rocks sheltered by thick kelp where only tiny crabs linger. The sharks won’t get her. It’s what my mother would want.
I spend the night in the towering ruins. Hulking sharks glide toward the caves beyond. Toward Desma’s cave. I turn away from a crack in the ruin wall, hands pressed to my stomach, and close my eyes. Images of my mother’s body torn apart take over. I curl into a ball along the sand and heave.
Aunt and the twins hover nearby. Desma keeps one hand against my shoulder. They say nothing.
By morning, the sharks are gone. I speed out of the ruins. No one calls me back.
Kyma’s pebbled shoreline teems with skittering hermit crabs and smooth sea glass. I visited only yesterday. Yet I’m aged months, years, decades.
Is the consuming emptiness grief? Anger? I don’t know. I don’t care to know.
A young octopus sails across the seafloor, waving one arm as if to say chase me. I ignore it and keep moving.
I focus on grains of sand stirred by the waves. The late winter sun warms my back. The sky above is cloudless.
What was I thinking doing this, going exploring? Did I think I’d find joy here?
There’s no joy left.
I should go on land. Visit Bion and the town. I’ll stay until I wither. Would sickness or his father kill me first? At least the company of Bion and the storyteller could comfort me until I join my mother in Nekros, the realm of the dead.
My mother. I reach out with my mind like she’ll meet me halfway. “What will I do without you?”
A simple question. She can’t answer. She’s dead. And oh, how Aunt will try to whisper stories of souls lingering to watch over those they loved in life. They’re meaningless stories.
Stories won’t return her to life. Stories won’t keep me warm in our cave. Stories won’t tend to my hurts or hug me close or wipe away my tears. Stories won’t become a mother.
* * *
I SPEND DAYS TRAVELING along Kyma’s shoreline. Fishing boats come and go. Winter thaws to Spring.
Songs travel across the distance. My family calling me home. A pod of whales pass, singing their own joyful songs. I fight the strings stretched taut between us.
I don’t answer.
More days pass. More sung platitudes, more pity, more. And not enough.
The coral reef stretches in hues of yellow, sunset pink, and pale orange. The tiniest of fish linger along the rocky outcroppings created by the coral. One such fish is snatched by a lightning-quick eel. The eel undulates its mouth and throat, chomping down. Speckles along its side catch in the light, flashing purple-blue-black in quick succession.
The other fish group together in a tight knot, darting away without another thought to their fallen comrade.
I didn’t bring my spear. It sits collecting sand along one side of my mother's cave. My cousins will be looking for me. Yet the coral reef beckons. All thoughts of my hunting duties drift away like bits of sand along the seafloor.
A flash of fiery red startles me and I turn, expecting to see Desma. But no, it's only the shimmering sides of another fish.
I wander through the reef. The warmth and colorful sights—all of it calms me. The wild beating of my heart finally slows.
The fisherman with his grabbing hands can’t get me here. Even the most adventurous don't dare sail near coral for fear it’ll tear their boats apart.
At noise from above, I look up. Droplets cascade against the surface. They’re slow at first; a sprinkling of rain creating the barest of undulations against the seawater. But soon the drops become fat beads striking against the surface. The waves, once soothing, churn.
I duck lower, settling on my belly far away from the coral. To grab onto the rough material is to endure deep gouges. The fishermen aren't wrong in their assumptions; it can tear apart a boat as easily as a creature.
My eyelids blink in heavy movements. The waves roll across me, massaging sore muscles. Only a bit of sleep won't hurt after such a tumultuous day. Surely I deserve a nap...
I blink my eyes open. The sea is darker, shadows darkening the reef colors. Stomach dropping, I sit upright. Is it dark from night or the storm?
It doesn’t matter. Sharks will patrol soon enough.
I dart away from the reef to race against the fading light. Stop to breathe only when I’m sheltered in a nook on the outside of the ruins. I peek through a nearby hole. Aunt is settled in the sand with children gathered around her.
A hunting group swims inside. The twins have caught a grand tuna, heaving it between them with a spear in each end. They stop in the center of the ruins, then pose proudly at its head. Meda scrapes out one eyeball with a flourish only to pop it in Iris’ mouth.
The children and pregnant descend, ripping apart skin to reach flesh. My older aunts steadily drain the part of the fish deemed toxic: the guts. They unravel from the tuna in a wave of fresh blood.
I turn away, bile rising in the back of my throat. If they’d caught the tuna weeks earlier—no. Don’t what if. Don’t think.
Desma’s hair glistens bright among the dank ruins filled with dark heads. Beside her, Eudoxia swims with bits of tuna cradled in her palm.
If they speak to one another, I don’t catch it among the chaos. They barely look at one another. They are alone while swimming side-by-side. The oddity hooks something within me. Twisted, sharp, and coveting. Dangerous as a starved eel.
What is it like to focus on someone new? To welcome a friendship into the hole in my heart where my mother once resided?
I look away, pressing forward into the crack to better hear Aunt. Her silver hair catches on a slow wave, undulating in all directions at once. With her back to me, she can’t see me peeking in. The children are too focused to notice their own tails, let alone an interloper.
Mind-speak a whisper, she leans over the children with her wild hair. “Upon the death of his beloved wife, Orpheus became inconsolable. Oh, for what would he do without his beloved? How could he go on without her by his side? Never mind the dead find peace in their afterlives, whatever peace means to them.”
I suck in a sharp inhale. Tears claw at my throat until it aches. Blinking, I hold them inside. I need to leave. My body remains frozen.
She continues, hands gesturing with each sentence. “So it came to be that Orpheus decided he would do anything to retrieve her. And how the muses, beings who whisper in mortal ears, suggested ideas! And one, just one, stuck.”
The children lean in, breath held within their chests. I do the same, riveted stare trained on Aunt.
She pauses. When she speaks next, her mind-speak is impossibly quieter. Her hands gentle in their movements, all sweeping arcs and graceful fingers. “He would do anything. Even if it meant venturing to Hades in the realm of the dead, Nekros. For surely Hades, king of Nekros, would understand! He’d nearly lost his wife Persephone to her goddess mother Demeter.”
The children gasp as one.
Mind reeling, I lean closer until rock bites into my cheek.
“Orpheus ventured down, down, down into Nekros until he came before Hades’ throne. He made his case while the god’s gaze seemed to look into his very soul. And when Orpheus’ breath ran out and his words stopped, what could Hades say? He could see Orpheus’ love for his wife in its purest form. The dead of summer and his own wife taken away to the Olympian Palace at the beginning of spring, his cold heart warmed.”
Another pause. One of the children reaches forward, tugging at Aunt’s scales until she continues with a chuckle. “And so it came to be: Orpheus could bring his wife back to the living.”
She stops and claps. All of us startle. “But! Nothing worth having comes free. Orpheus’ bargain with Hades said he could only have his wife back if he could lead her without looking over his shoulder once on their journey out of Nekros’ depths.”
Bargains, the true currency of the gods. Anyone, mortal or creature, can have anything they want—for a price. Serving the gods for eternity or working in their fields or becoming their lover.
From the old stories, some gods rely on trickery, others on loopholes, and a small set on simple instructions. Hades seems to fall into the last sort.
Aunt twists in a circle. Her wrinkled grin freezes upon seeing me. Skin paling, she swims backward, tumbling into the group of children. They squawk her name, laughing like this is a game.
“Agathe,” she says, her voice thin.
I smile. It sits stiff upon my face. “Thank you for your story, Aunt.”
Turning, I swim free of the clustered children.
One of them giggles. “But Aunt hasn’t finished yet.”
The others shush her.
The route to the caves brings me past Desma, who’s wandered from the ruin confines. Her eyes catch on mine. I focus on the rain dripping against the surface above. The burn of her attention follows until I’m out of sight.
I sag against the slip-slide of verdant algae coating the outside of my mother’s cave.
A chance to bring my mother back. To bargain with Hades, the god of the dead, is to risk death. I have no true way to garner sympathy from him. No lover lost to death. Yet perhaps he’ll bring my mother back—for a price.
And what will the price be? It doesn’t matter. I’ll do anything, pay anything, for my mother’s return.