You know that junk drawer in your kitchen, the one packed with bread bag ties and rubber bands and the wine cork too pretty to toss? That's the Under-Ath. It's where you'll find the rest of the church that once connected to the R.E.M. Steeple, the double-barreled Civil War cannon they never fired because they couldn't control the chained-together cannonballs, and every cigarette butt chucked out the window on Lexington Road.
It's mainly litter in the Under-Ath. Infinite ash fluttered down like snow from a dim gray sky without any sun or stars. Knee-deep trash blanketed the trees and buildings like gentle kudzu heaps. The Great Athens Garbage Patch.
I sunk waist-deep into the litter and struck out westerly toward what I hoped was Broad Street, slogging along a huge gulch cut down the road like a giant dragged to her death. If Imani had left any trail, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. Pull tabs and bottle caps crunched under my heels, and a plastic fork worried a hole in my jeans. I kicked gritty cigarette ash from between my toes where my Crocs let it in.
It was hard going. All that plastic tugging at your legs, faceplanting you into stale fries and used condoms. Good thing I'd spent the summer stomping around the Okefenokee Swamp. The technique was similar: lift your feet high and tromp down firmly, and try to ignore anything wiggling down below.
After a couple hours, my calves burned something awful. I'd stopped to work a plastic six-pack ring out of my hair when some unseen critter snaked figure eights around my ankles. Its bristly warmth tickled my toes through my Crocs. I stomp-stomped to scare it off, but then all the litter around me roiled and boiled and humped and lumped, and with a surge and roar, the monster burst to the surface.
I'd never seen a critter so ugly. It had a head like an overgrown snapping turtle and a mane of gray moss, a long body, stump-fingered flippers, and a triple row of very big, flat molars. I froze, petrified, which probably saved my fingers. It chomped the plastic rings clean out of my hands and dove back below the litter's surface. The other humps and lumps and roils and boils erupted into more sinuous creatures, scaly and furred, beaked and snouted, all of them snapping and fighting for choice trashy bits.
"Hey howdy!" Far ahead on the litter-river, some folks waved at me from a raft. I waved both arms back, sucking in my belly where critters brushed against me. The raft sped right on up, coasting smoothly over crumpled wrappers and diet sodas like they were nothing but placid water. They'd jiggered the raft together from a pallet of flattened cardboard, roped with daisy-chained twistie ties. A man worked the rudder in the back, and up front, a woman turned this huge crank attached to some braided plastic ropes trailing down into the litter-river. Ahead of their raft, the trash humped and boiled even more violently.
"Keep her harness tight, Opal! She's hungry today," shouted the man working the rudder.
The woman made some adjustments to the cranks, and suddenly the monster towing the raft broke the surface. It dipped in and out of view, long and spidery in a way that reminded me of millipedes. It bayed like a lonesome hound and dove sharply down, erupting above the surface again with cans clenched in its jaws. The navigator yelled haw and the handler threw an easy lasso over the beast's front limbs, forcing its head back to a net trailing behind.
The whole raft skidded up beside me.
"Need a hand, friend?" the monster-wrangler called. "Ain't safe to cool your toes in the Oconee River, not when the Has-Beens are feeding." She pronounced Oconee funny so it came out like Oak-a-nee.
"Thanks. I'd sure appreciate the lift." I grabbed her extended hand and scrabbled up onto the cardboard. It was nice to feel wind on my legs after so long in the sweltering garbage. But I didn't know how I'd ever get my pants clean of all the grease stains.
I couldn't tell much about my rescuers on account of the handkerchiefs they'd bound around their noses to keep out the garbage-smell, but their coveralls had the faded, patchy look of thrift store finds. There wasn't much space for sitting on the raft, not with all the collection bags: one for beer cans, one for bedsheets, one for batteries, and a whole zipper-bag full of spent bullets. You just had to sit on the junk itself.
I hunkered down on a bundle of styrofoam takeout trays with my backpack between my feet and watched them work. They called themselves Dill the navigator and Opal the Has-Been wrangler, and they were working hard bringing in their haul.
"You headed to see Stephens at the New Foundry?" asked Dill.
"I don't know. Haven't heard of it," I answered honestly. "Depends if my roommate's there. You seen her? She's got the Pacific Ocean with her and lots of brine in her hair."
Opal turned the cranks and the lasso unfurled. The Has-Been crooned and dived down into the rubble again. "Might've seen an ocean passing through recently. Didn't stay long, though."
It weirded me out to hear anyone talk about Imani that way. Who knew what drinking down the ocean did to her if people saw her like that? "You mind pointing me in the right direction?"
"You don't look like you're from around here," said Opal. She twirled the ropes, concentrating hard on the river. Dill tossed a glance at her and snatched from the Oconee a large cardstock square attached to a wooden dowel.
"I'm from the Over-Ath," I explained. "Gonna collect someone. Then I'll be on my way."
Dill barked out a joyless laugh, and Opal whipped her head around. He dropped the cardstock sign lickety-split. An understanding flitted between them too fast for me to catch. I didn't like that much, not in this place. It set my stomach roiling.
"Go home, Dorothy," said Opal. "Your technicolor heart's a-bleeding. The Under-Ath don't want nothing from you but your wasted talent."
"Name's Quietly. I don't got much talent to begin with. If the Under-Ath wants it, I'll gladly trade to bring Imani home. I'm good at collecting syllabi."
"Everyone collects something in the Under-Ath," said Opal. "That's the problem, ain't it? Somebody's gotta do without."
"Amen to that," said Dill.
Opal flung out the ropes again. Dill flattened the handpainted cardstock sign. It said You Can't Arrest An Idea. He lifted up his handkerchief and took a chomp out of the corner with glittering sharp teeth that gleamed as he turned. There was something wrong with his neck. It extended too long and wobbled like it had a few extra vertebrae.
The dowel crunched between his molars.
Opal spun around. Pissed. "The hell you doing, Dill?"
Dill's neck stabilized before my eyes, settled down to its proper proportions, and his teeth looked normal and blunt. He let the handkerchief drop back into place. "Just grabbing a bite. Missed breakfast."
"Really? I'd call it theft of company property."
"It was just floating there, Opal. He'll never notice."
"He'll know, Dill."
"Not if nobody don't tell him, he won't," Dill hissed.
"He'll know."
"Then don't say nothing."
Opal dry-spat at him. "Won't need to."
I threaded both arms through my backpack frontways so the jar of Oconee River pressed against my belly. Behind me, Dill's chewing continued. "Where are y'all headed, anyway?"
"Just finishing up our shift, then back to the Foundry for our lunch break," said Dill. "You're welcome to come with. If you're looking for work, you can talk to Stephens."
"Who's Stephens?" I asked.
"The one man in the Under-Ath that pays in whatever currency you need," said Opal. "He's the reason any of us are still here." She tugged back sharply on the harnessed Has-Been. "Word of advice: mind your manners around him. He don't truck with rudeness or bad breeding." Another dagger-look at Dill. "And don't steal his product."
"I didn't!" said Dill.
"Tell him that."
I supposed it wouldn't do no harm to speak with him. I had no other leads. The raft drifted along, collecting more cans from the water. This time, I saw just how hard the Has-Been struggled to keep the smashed beer can in its teeth, writhing against the restraints. The plastic braided rope had rubbed its fur away in patches, leaving bruise-stained skin scaled in red scabs.
I'd worked up quite an appetite by the time we got to the Foundry, on account of having forgot to pack anything edible for my adventure. We docked the raft beside a thousand other cardboard rafts on a parking lot clear of litter.
Something about all of it made me sick down to the pit of my stomach: endless thirsty asphalt fingers stretching toward the Oconee, the floodlights sapping all the color from your face and arms like an inverse sun. The building squatted between the shell-shocked ghosts of failed coffee shops. Into that building all the foragers streamed, carrying their finds in shrink-wrapped bundles high on their backs like rice-paper sushi rolls. Like sandwiches at a picnic. Like leftover chocolate cake, because damn I was getting hungry, and even garbage looked good if I turned my head sideways and squinted a little.
"Y'all said something about a lunch break?" I asked Dill and Opal. We stowed all the cans into shrink-wrap cocoons on the dock while their poor harnessed Has-Been whimpered and whined and nosed the empty raft.
"After you talk with Stephens. We don't just hand out company lunch to anybody who asks," said Opal.
Together we turtled across asphalt that was somehow summer-hot even beneath that slate-gray sky. There was an old Foundry in the Over-Ath, an ancient factory-turned-restaurant, but nothing like this place. This Foundry demanded all your attention. It practically had its own gravity.
My stomach whined and needled at my gut. Opal looped behind the building to the employee entrance. "Remember: mind your manners. Stephens ain't a man to cross, not in the Under-Ath." She pointed me toward the Manager's Office.
Stephens was so small and skinny you could probably butter biscuits with him if you were short a knife. His suit swallowed him up to the neck, stopped by a slantwise bowtie just below his upturned white collar. He kept twitching and shuddering all over like his skin itched him, and when he moved, his joints squealed like a rusty icebox door. Damp tea bags hung dripping on a tiny clothesline behind his chair. He sipped iced tea from an empty tennis ball tube and read from a newspaper so old that Nixon headlined it.
I sucked on my dry teeth. That tea was the first liquid of any kind I'd seen in the Under-Ath. He glanced at me over cracked spectacles, and a smile poured across his lips like warm honey. Almost pleasant, except that smile squeaked so loud I clenched my jaw.
I thought of Imani—all brine-covered and alone, self-banished to the Under-Ath with no hope of redemption or return. I licked my cracked lips and extended a hand. "Sincere apologies for disturbing your meal," I said. "I've been told you're the man to see about an ocean."
His handshake clung wet and sticky like bubblegum on a hot sidewalk. I wiped my hands against my jeans. "Alexander H. Stephens, Foundry manager. And you are?"
"Quietly Jensen. I'm from the Over-Ath."
He waved me to an extra chair. I unslung my backpack. The Mason jar clinked against the Terrapin can. Stephens eyeballed my bag. "College student?"
"Recent grad," I corrected.
"Naturally. Looking for work? We're always hiring." He poured me some iced tea into a rusty green bean tin. It tasted thin and bitter and very salty and—suddenly spinning and spinning and sixty-two languages, most of them extinct. I let the tea trickle back into the tin unswallowed.
"Dunno," I said neutrally. "Mainly I'm looking for my roommate Imani. She passed this way recently, or so I'm told. She's in the habit of appearing as an ocean as of late."
He flashed a whole top row of ivory teeth probably made from elephants. "I recall the one. She's at the Georgia Theater. Working for me now. Perfectly fair and beneficial to all parties of course, but I'm afraid she's a private ocean now. Not open to the public."
"She'll see me. I'm her best friend." I said it with enough steel in my voice that Stephens set down his tea.
"Apologies. I haven't made myself clear." Big, creaky smile. "The Georgia Theater is private grounds. Off-limits." He took a long, slow sip of salty tea and rolled it around his mouth. "Unless..."
That asshole. I hated having to get along like this. Never could do passive-aggression, not like my mama could. "Unless what?"
"My employees have access, of course," he finished, predictably. A cricket skittered from his right nostril and back into the left one.
"I'm not really looking for work," I said. "With all due respect. I mean, I'm sure your establishment is as fine as they come. It's just not for me."
His lips screeched open again. Something buggy hopped out of his mouth, down the desk, and out the door. "Come with me, young lady. Let me show you a few somethings."
"You lost your cricket," I said.
For such a short man, Stephens stepped high and long, like his legs had an extra joint in them. I had to scramble to match his pace.
"Here at the Foundry, we harvest locally-sourced desires and store them up for those who need them." Stephens burst through double swinging doors into a warehouse with towering stacked shelves. "All those secret things you crave when nobody is watching." I jogged behind him down the aisle maze, knocking ash off my Crocs. "For example, take a look here. They say football's king in the South, but it's really Religion people crave. I've got rifles engraved with Psalms and gasoline-soaked wooden crosses in size Medium, Large, or Extra Large." His joints screeched and whistled like a bad grocery cart as he pointed things out. "Down that way you'll find homebrew meth wrapped in cellophane, tied up in pretty pink bows. Bricks from the Morton Theater. Deeds written to the Creek and the Cherokee. All the Civil War bayonets that never passed through Athens. I've got something for every appetite."
We reached an intersection. Dill was stacking cardstock signs on a pallet.
Stephens creaked to a stop. "Why you working, Dill? Isn't it lunchtime?"
"Just getting in a little overtime." Dill dropped pieces of cardstock on the floor. The one on top said, Love Is Power. "Trying to get ahead while it's quiet in here."
Stephens nabbed the castoff sign and rolled it into a pink tube. "Ain't you getting hungry, though?"
Dill waved him off. "Nah, I'm good." He tried to take the tube back, but Stephens held it to his lips. Little black crickets boiled over his teeth and down the tube, making short work of the cardstock and then skittering back into Stephens's mouth.
"Pack up, Dill," said Stephens. "You're out of work."
"But —"
"Get out. You want to forage? Go out there and keep yourself fed, if you think you can find enough out there without my help. Get."
Dill fled toward the exit, but not quick enough. Stephens unhinged his jaw, and out poured the crickets. Hundreds, thousands, bajillions—a thick black tube of wings and legs and high-pitched whining funneling down the aisles, an insectile river. I turned tail and fled the way I'd come, but there was no escaping, not with all of Stephens's insides swarming about. I stumbled backwards onto a heavy flat sack. It was Stephens's empty skin. It flopped and wiggled after me.
I twisted through the pallet maze in the warehouse. It was garbage top to bottom—stale beer and dishwater and fermented snotty tissues.
"Hey, what's the hurry?" shouted Opal. I skidded to a standstill. Opal leaned out a door, eating paint chips out of a pretzel bag.
"Dill," I gasped. "Crickets!"
She crunched up a whole handful of paint. It coated her gums with rainbow flecks. "It's what he gets, trying to steal from Stephens. Should've waited for lunch."
I didn't get it. At least with the Hypotheticals you knew why they were pissed. "Seems if a man wants to eat himself a protest sign now and then, it don't do any harm. Leastwise it shouldn't cost him his job."
"This isn't the Over-Ath," said Opal. "Nothing here is disposable."
"Except Dill, you mean."
Stephens's joints screeched and squeaked as he strolled up behind me. "Thanks for catching her, Opal. I'll take it from here." His baggy skin slapped along the concrete floor like overlarge trousers. A cricket conga line flowed up from the aisles into his ears, nostrils, eye sockets, and mouth, slowly reinflating him.
He steered me back toward his office with fingers boneless as raw hot dogs. "We all got to depend on each other here, Quincy. You try to break out of your place, and we all die. Do you understand?"
"It's Quietly," I muttered.
In his office, he plucked a damp tea bag from the clothesline. "You must understand. I take breach of contract very seriously."
"Why would I ever work for you, then?" I asked honestly. "Sounds like a lousy deal."
"Because everyone's hungry for something. What're you craving, Quincy?"
The kettle whistled, and he set a cup of tea before me. I thought over that whole warehouse of recycled junk. The religion-laced sports didn't appeal, nor did the protest signs, paint chips, styrofoam, or endlessly resteeped tea bags. It was all garbage. I wanted tacos, or at least a beer. "I just want Imani. Please and thank you."
Stephens swished that salty tea around his mouth. His cheeks pinked, and his creaking joints calmed. "She don't belong to you."
"She's a person. She don't belong to anyone but herself."
Stephens sucked on his teeth. His darting tongue was cricket-black. "Oceans aren't people, Quincy. They're places. First to find 'em gets to keep 'em." He licked brine from the teacup rim in this slow, sensual way that insulted sex and oceans and human tongues.
It made my blood boil clear out of my ears. I channelled my sainted grandmother and honey-coated my anger so it stung like bees. "Excuse me. I recall you now. Alexander Stephens. You used to be the Confederate Vice President." He wilted a snitch beneath the heat of my tone. "Nobody at the University even knows you're an alumnus anymore. They don't teach us that."
I braced for shouting, but instead there was just a slow and creaky frown as all those crickets rearranged his face from the inside. "Be that as it may," said Stephens, "you don't make the rules here, Quincy. Sign up or shut up. You don't get to see her otherwise."
Well, at this point I was fucking sick and tired of people trying to dictate my career path to me. Half demanding I sign away my soul to this man's mining operation, and a whole 'nother peanut gallery telling me I had to become the fucking Pacific Ocean because someone had to do the job, it didn't matter who. They only cared their vacancies got filled, like the sum of all human meaning amounted to finding the nearest pegless hole and pounding your own skull into it. I didn't want to be no dropout or rockstar or foreign ocean. But when given a limited set of terrible options, sometimes you have to settle for rejecting the worst instead of picking the best.
Alexander H. Stephens stuck out his wet bubblegum hand, and I noticed a tiny tattoo on his thumb, a dark whirlpool, a gyre in negative, a sucking wind that never let go of you. Evil wasn't the only thing people tried to bury. Sometimes they wanted to obliterate your goodness, too.
"Name's Quietly," I said, loudly. "I'll see you at the Georgia Theater."
"I'm very sorry to hear that," said Stephens, shaking his head. "Very sorry indeed."
My world exploded into crickets.
Stephens left me dangling above the river in a wire dog kennel swinging on a pole, counterbalanced at each corner with trash bags full of crushed cans. No lock or even a door, because below me the trash boiled with Has-Beens, probably waiting to eat me. I was too damn hungry to hold the sentiment against them. I would've filled my knotted hungry stomach with anything, even kale or decaf Starbucks or black licorice.
Terrapin and Jittery Joe's knocked on my ribcage through the backpack. My stomach begged me to invite them in. Beer and coffee would make a terrible supper, but a hell of a lot better than nothing. I turned gently in my cage and the whole apparatus swayed dangerously, sending the Has-Beens into a snapping frenzy. Slowly, I finagled my backpack to my frontside.
"You tattled on me," Dill snapped, startling the hell out of me. Turned out the cage next door wasn't so empty. "You cost me my job. Thanks a lot."
"I didn't say nothing to Stephens." I death-gripped the backpack to my chest. Precious cargo. "Can't see how it's any worse out here, though. They don't even have real food, you know."
Dill tossed an empty Diet Cherry Coke can at a Has-Been tugging a half-sunk raft several yards behind it. Its harness had slipped partway off and rubbed chunks of pelt from the beast's flank. "Just look at that critter." It wiggled like a puppy, licking the can round and round in trash-circles.
I didn't mind the Has-Beens after that first shock. They sported too many teeth, maws big enough to grind me up and leave nothing but a Quietly stain on the pavement. But they didn't seem malicious. I didn't hold their hunger against them no more than I'd blame a grizzly. Worlds better than Stephens or the Hypotheticals.
"They're not so bad," I told Dill. "Kinda cute, like this armadillo that built a nest in my recycling bin once."
The Has-Been grunted and spat out the can uneaten. Dill huffed and shifted in his cage, rummaging deeper into the bag he'd pulled open. "Opal and I can't figure out what she's really after. She rarely eats the cans she finds. Ain't you hungry yet?" I noticed his neck had regrown those extra vertebrae since I last saw him. In the swinging kennel, his head bobbled even more, all cartoony.
"Absolutely starving," I said, unzipping the backpack carefully. The whole cage swayed and bobbed, dipping closer to the snapping Has-Beens.
"That's how they get you, you know," Dill continued. "You think you're full of hunger, but that's not really it."
"Then what is it, Dill?" I snapped. I'd gone hangry and just about run out of patience.
"It's yearning. For something else. Something you left in the Over-Ath."
That gave me the all-over chills. Brought up bad memories of Imani's last days, smitten to death with a stolen ocean while those Hypotheticals gloated nearby. It seemed like everyone alive bore a yearning that didn't do them no good. I longed for nothing short of Imani herself, but I couldn't compete with an ocean for her affections. Even if I found her, I'd be no closer to what I wanted.
The truth about those forty college degrees? I never wanted to stay in school forever. I just didn't want to graduate from Imani.
"It's going to happen to you too, you know," said Dill. "You'll become just like me. Like them." He nodded down to the monsters in the river, his long bobbling head reaching past the bars now.
My eyes narrowed at him. "Wait a minute. What are you saying?"
"If you don't get fed." His voice had a hollow, stretched-out quality, slow and slurred like a bee-stung tongue. "If you don't eat down your desires. Why we all work for Stephens. Otherwise, the Has-Beens. Everyone else."
I gawped down at the swirling monsters, those warm eyes swallowed up by too much fur and scales. All my Imani-angst washed away in perfect technicolor rage. "Those are human beings you're lashing to your rafts? Those are people? Well, bless your heart."
"Used to go. To protests," Dill said, his whole face bulging and monstrous. "In the Over-Ath. Don't remember. What about. No more. Starving when. I got here. Ate garbage. Anything. Stephens saved me. The signs. I need the signs. Stephens hoards 'em."
"Everyone's hungry for something," I ventured. The Has-Beens. Desperate foragers, diving for anything that settled, yearning for the smallest taste of their desires. "If you don't eat, you turn into one of them?"
Dill's kennel pressed a wire latticework into his spiraling, monstrous bulk. Fur sprouted all over him just as quick as the wire could scrape it off. I winced and felt my neck, counted vertebrae against the growling of my own stomach.
"What about Stephens?" I asked desperately. "What is he hungry for? What keeps him human?"
Dill mushed and champed his lips together. His whole mouth had melted like a mudslide into swollen gums studded with sharp teeth. "Waaaaaa," he moaned. Not the least bit human anymore. The kennel burst from his bulk, and the creature that had been Dill fell into the litter-river and I lost him among the others.
I didn't have time to look, because Dill's fall had upset the balance of my own cage, which bucked and bobbed dangerously. I grabbed the cage's sides, but I hadn't had the chance to re-zip the backpack. To my horror, my one and only can of Terrapin beer popped from the open pocket and rolled out the cage door.
"Shit," I said to nobody in particular. So much for maintaining my current number of vertebrae. That left becoming one of Stephen's sharp-nosed litter hounds or jumping down and letting the Has-Beens chaw on me directly. Both options distinctly lacked in Benefiting Quietly.
One of the Has-Beens bellowed and flung litter in the air with its tail.
"Pipe down," I shouted back. "You'll get your taste soon enough."
It bellowed again. The Has-Been lashed to the raft—the one Dill and Opal used—had gone positively bonkers, bucking and flailing and twisting against its harness. The braided plastic ropes dug out gouges in its flesh inches deep. White bone showed through the bloody mess.
"Hey, cool it. You're hurting yourself," I said.
It bellowed louder, twisted and bucked again. The raft rocked. It was caught on something under the litter.
I rubbed my head and wondered how I would tell this story to Imani if we ever saw each other again. She'd call me a liar, probably. For someone with glacier blood, she sure could be skeptical. "Promise you won't eat me?" The Has-Been moaned and bellowed, but it piped down. I supposed it would have to do. "I'm coming down."
I slung the backpack on my shoulders and threw my weight against the kennel, first one way, then the other, so it pendulumed back and forth, back and forth, closer to the harnessed Has-Been and away from the swarm beneath. I aimed for a filthy twin mattress half-bobbing among some sacks of old molding books. Then I leapt out flying-squirrel-like and landed hard against the corner of the mattress. It smarted, but I floundered over to the Has-Been and worked at the twisted plastic.
"We've got a deal, right?" Has-Been blood greased my fingers where I dug the bonds out from its chafed flesh. "When you're free, take me with you."
I tore away the knotted plastic ropes. The monster dove down sharp into the litter. I clung to its back with the remaining tangles of plastic. Down, down, down. Litter brushed and banged me, tore at my hair and skin, smeared me with stink, and then the surface again. The Has-Been skidded along the trash, carrying me away from the Foundry, away from Stephens, away from Imani, into unknown parts of the Under-Ath.
She brought me to her nest on the shores of the Oak-a-nee in the shadow of a decayed brick factory. It had a hipster-industrial look to it that reminded me of the Normaltown neighborhood back in the real Athens.
The Has-Been had built a nest of aluminum and glass: Coke and juice bottles, lemonade and beer and energy drinks. She nestled into the clattering mess, swirling around and around so the empties rang like wind chimes and threw rainbows on the asphalt. She spat my Terrapin can at my feet, whole and undamaged.
I rolled it between my hands. It was warm and a bit sticky from her spit. "Thanks."
Cans clattered around her swirling tail. The monster nosed through her collection until she'd inched one from the heap. Some Three-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe's. She licked at the sticky residue around its rim. Deep in her throat, she crooned with the same heat that had driven her to gouge ropes into her own flesh.
"You don't want the can at all," I realized. "You want the beer."
Those huge brown eyes, those sad human eyes.
I popped open the Terrapin. It fizzed out all the shaken-up pressure. Automatically I sipped the foaming head. It tasted like flowers in faraway Athens, like hot summers tailgating with Imani and our friends, and while I still wanted a meal, it took the edge off my desire.
The Has-Been whimpered. What did it feel like to be so close to everything you needed, if only a stranger would offer you a taste?
I set the can on the dirt between us. "Cheers."
The Has-Been curled her tongue around the can and rolled the whole thing into her maw. As it went down, she sighed. She shivered all along her length, those vertebrae aching to disappear into shinbones and all that fur wanting to grow backward.
She packed her body into a human-sized bag, neat as can be and became a woman tough as bone. Her skin was so dry and rice paper-thin I thought her skeleton might walk right through it. She was six feet tall and still licking the sticky rim of the Terrapin beer can. A single drop of beer hit her tongue. I wondered how many empty cans you had to lick to build up any kind of buzz.
"Ahhh." The woman leaned toward me like it was the first day of Spring and I was the long-lost sun. "I've been waiting a long time for a beer." She extended her hand. "Thanks, friend. Name's Briar."
"I'm Quietly," I said. "Is the change going to last long?"
Briar slouched against the factory steps and wrapped her arms around her bell bottoms. "Probably not. Gotta eat every day, same as everyone else. Shame you can't get much of anything without Stephens's stash nowadays."
"It wasn't always like this?"
"Nah. Used to be there was enough to go around. Used to be most of us weren't monsters, just hungry all the time. Until Stephens showed up and 'organized' it all." Briar tossed the can away hard so it avalanched down the bank.
"Why don't y'all just go back to the Over-Ath?" I asked. "Plenty of beer there."
"Sometimes we try," she said. "But we wind up lonesome and lost in the waterways, no closer to our desire than before. The Oak-a-nee eventually washes us down to the sea, and that's oblivion for a Has-Been. Piece of advice: don't ever immerse yourself in the Atlantic, not unless you're sure of yourself."
"What's so bad about the Atlantic?" It struck me as a cuddly barrel of kittens after what the Pacific had put me through.
"The Atlantic's made of love and parting. Quaker brides and rough explorer men, and all those people ripped from their homes in Africa. They tossed their tears like bottles upon the waters and prayed them across the waves until they lapped at Florida and Haiti, where they saw such sorrows they returned again, even more tearful. Imagine trying to find your own desire in all that. You'll lose yourself if you try."
It seemed like a sad existence, pushed forever away from Athens, away from your heart. "Tell me about the ocean that passed through recently."
"I haven't seen that much water in the Under-Ath in all my time," Briar said. "It took the form of a woman and smelled of anger and ozone. Made a righteous wreck of the Oak-a-nee Grayway, carried off half the trash before rushing toward Downtown. You can see Lexington Road again. Shouldn't be hard to track her down if you follow it."
Briar pointed out the gorge that ran along the river's far side. A glacier's angry path all the way to the Foundry and beyond. "I tried down that way already. Stephens wouldn't let me near her. Said she works for him now."
"Of course he would say that. Stephens desires what he can't have. Anything new's bound to catch his interest," said Briar. "That's why he hates the Has-Beens so much. He can't stand that some of us would say no to him. So he enslaves us once we turn monster. You'd better not leave your ocean with him too long. He'll find a way to subdue her."
I tried to count up the days since finding salt in Imani's bed, but recent grief made the dates run together. "She's already been here a while. Days. Weeks."
Briar wrapped her hand around my wrist so tight it made my nerves blood-drunk. "Don't you wait. You get to her now, before he makes her forget there ever was blue skies and muscadines beside a lazy brown river."
I remembered crickets so thick they blocked out sight and sound, and still I hesitated. "He called her a private ocean. Said I had to sign a contract to see her."
"People under his employ can always leave," said Briar. "That's always been the rule. Most of them don't, but they can."
"He said he owns her."
"Well, that's something new," Briar admitted. "Trying to bend the rules in his favor. Well, convince her to leave. He can't hold her if she says no."
That was that, then. Imani needed me. I had a clear path and only Stephens to stop me. "I better get going."
Briar tossed me a smile worn soft around the edges from use. "Good luck. And thanks for the beer."
I shook ash from my Crocs and cinched up the backpack, now a little lighter without the Terrapin. My empty stomach hurt something awful, and my head spun a little on account of the alcohol. I didn't know how to stop Stephens anymore than I knew how to put back an ocean, anymore than I knew how to rein in Imani's wild, wonderful, destructive moods. But far away in space and time, a woman and a glacier had sailed around the world after a star, and had at last found each other. I could hope for that.
I struck off toward the gorge gashed through the litter, the mark left by Imani's passage. I got about five steps away before I tripped straight into California's fist.
The suckerpunch stunned me so bad I tumbled, dazed and winded, into the ankle-deep litter. A Birkenstock and a Big Foot sock landed at the edge of my peripheral vision, wafting in the odor of stale weed and stale cyclist.
"Grab her legs," said Washington, "and get her backpack."
"Watch out. There's another one," said Oregon. I heard Briar cry out, then another solid thwack from California's mean left hook, and a thunk as Briar tasted dirt. That bastard had gotten her too.
They pinned me spread-eagle to the litter. I struggled hard, but they had six hands, and I only had the two. We must've made a funny litter-angel in the trash. I didn't stand a chance, winded from that suckerpunch. I got this odd sense of calm, like when you know the car is going to hit you and all you can do is accept it. I found myself giggling uncontrollably.
"Where's Hawaii, anyway?" I asked.
They flushed a little and craned their necks upward. California glowed orange against the ever-gray sky. "We don't need to talk about them," he said. "They have nothing to do with this."
"The heck?" I giggled even harder. "If y'all are so mad, shouldn't Hawaii be out for my blood and muscle and my great-grand's bones?"
Oregon worried her lip between her teeth. "We don't always agree about changes. Hawaii doesn't want the ocean back. They like all the extra space."
"That's messed up," I said.
"Seriously," California agreed.
It was strangely companionable for an instant, except for the part where they had me pinned on my back. "Hey, let me up? I bet we can get this sorted if we just talk it over."
"I don't trust her," said Washington. "She'll run from us again."
"Let's just transform her now and be done with," said California. "Home by tomorrow morning. Sooner, if the wind blows in our favor."
"Go right ahead and make me your ocean if you'd like. I don't care," I said. "I'll probably turn into a monster anyway. Thing is, this has gotten a lot bigger than your quarrel with Imani. Wouldn't you rather have the real Pacific back instead of an East Coast knockoff?"
Oregon closed her eyes and inhaled deep. "She's right. The Pacific is here somewhere. I can smell it. I feel it surging in my bones. God, but it aches."
California let go of my arms. I sat up, elbowing him in the face totally accidentally without even a hint of grudge or malice.
"Okay. We'll hear you out, but make it quick," said Washington. "Where are you keeping the Pacific?"
"Briar?" I called out. "Briar, you okay, friend?"
Briar stirred in the litter nearby and moaned. She was outgunned in her elderly human form. "I'm alright," Briar said. "Got me twisted up in the six-pack rings again." I helped her untangle and stand up. Briar stretched her long arms up toward the ash-gray sky and rubbed her bruises.
"Now. About the Pacific," I said. I explained all about my adventures at the Foundry and about Imani's captivity. "The problem is that cricket-swarm in a suit. He seems to lay down the law around here. He claims Imani's private property now, but Briar says it's against the rules of this place." My skin crawled all over like dirty little cricket-legs marching up and down inside me. "He don't seem human to me."
"He's definitely not human," said Washington.
"He's a Hypothetical," said Oregon. "Same as us. He exists to meet some purpose, and he's not going anywhere until he fulfills it."
"And what's that?" I asked.
California placed a hand on my shoulder where a bruise had formed from one of my tumbles into the litter. I flinched, and he snatched his hand back. Maybe he finally made the connection between human bodies and frailty. I sure hoped so. "Everyone in this place is hungry for something," said California. "Stephens exists to satisfy the people here."
"There is no river in the Under-Ath," said Briar. There was weight to her voice, like heavy stones sunk down deep. "People here are endlessly thirsty. There's no satisfying the Under-Ath."
"A Hypothetical gone mad," Washington whispered. "Unable to finish his mission, unable to quit."
"Or unwilling to," I said. "What happens when y'all finish your missions?"
"We return to whoever created us," said Oregon. "Like meltwater to the lakes and rivers in Spring."
"So you cease to exist," I said.
"In a manner of speaking," Oregon said slowly, haltingly, like she had never seen it that way before. "I suppose it's no different than you humans. Where are you before you begin, and what happens when you end?"
"Even still," I told her. "Even still." My throat got all lumpy, thinking on the implications. I actually managed some pity for California. If he ever brought his ocean home, he'd dissolve into it forever for his troubles.
We all got real quiet, measuring the weight of it. I clutched my backpack close to my stomach. The Oconee River swirled against my ribcage through its jar. My one true friend left in this place. I remembered Imani's thirst in her final days, all that brine in her hair, and how she made eyes at the Pacific like a lovelorn bride. A sick tickly feeling wormed through my stomach. Only days before, she'd made those eyes at me. The same night California called himself into existence to tear us apart.
Sometimes the only cure for one desire is finding a new one.
"Tell me one thing," I asked California. "Those curses—those gifts—you wished on Imani. Yearning. Abandon. Peace. Can you give them to other people?"
"Of course," said California. "Anyone we choose. As many times as we choose, infinite as the Pacific."
"Then I know what we need to do," I said. "It's time to fix the Under-Ath."
I had Briar take us right to the thick of the Has-Beens, the deepest dark of the Oak-a-nee where the Grayway gaped open on what should've been the road to Atlanta.
Imagine if instead of Highway 316 rolling through the countryside west of Athens, an ocean of garbage spilled into a huge pit. Picture litter roaring down from the city forever, taking the last of its sins to a final grave.
I'd found the gyre at the heart of the Under-Ath.
"It's swarming with desire down there," Briar said. "All the oldest Has-Beens make their way here eventually. They can't swim up the litterfall once they slip over the edge."
The Hypotheticals hovered just behind me on the shore, smelling of all those someplaces I'd never been. Meeting them had changed me. Forever after, the scent of Douglas fir would give me displaced nostalgia.
"Take a good look," I told the Hypotheticals, waving down to the gyre. "Those folks down there need you. They've been so obsessed with climbing out of their own failure that they've forgotten about the yearning that drives them. The harder they grasp it, the quicker it runs between their fingers. Let's give them something new to yearn for. California? Point their hearts toward the Pacific."
"All of them?" asked California.
"Yes, all of them. And you," I turned to Oregon, "Give them abandon. Help them release the past. If they could learn to let go, they could leave."
"And the gift of peace?" Washington asked.
I wasn't rightly sure you could ever get peace so easy outside of a graveyard. Lose desire, and you'd just quit life. "No, not that one. Not here. Not yet."
Briar plucked an empty beer can from the river and considered the sticky rim. "Desire alone won't be enough to get 'em up the litterfall. It's too steep. They'll kill themselves trying once you point them toward the Georgia Theater."
My eyes prickled with unshed regrets. I'd bruised my heart on such a wall before. I clutched my backpack tight, blood roaring in my ears. "I know. I know. But I think I know another way."
The truth was Imani couldn't possibly be Imani anymore. No more than the Pacific was just the Pacific. They'd swallowed each other up. She'd changed, transformed, outgrown even her own glacier-blood. No glacier ever touched two continents at the same time. What swirled deep in her waters now, I didn't know. It scared me just wondering.
"We're ready when you are," said California.
I unzipped my backpack and set down the Jittery Joe's tin and Oconee River jar side by side. "Y'all better find a raft. When this is all over, make for the Foundry and do what you can about Stephens."
That left the rest to me and the Oconee.
We had a good heart to heart, the river and me. I unscrewed the jar, and the water flowed up to my lips and spoke in wet river-words that tasted like rocks and fish scales and more than a little mud.
I'm dangerous to drink, Quietly, it whispered to me. Different from the Big Waters. If you drink me down, you'll lose yourself in me, and ain't nothing going to bring you out again.
"Don't you think I know that by now," I told it. "Don't you think I know why Imani don't just bust out and wipe this whole damn town from its shadow existence." I was scared as shit we'd find her too late, that she'd become the Pacific as truly and permanently as she was part glacier on her mother's side.
But I knew one surefire way to transform water. I crushed a few coffee beans and threw them into the Oconee's jar, where they bobbed on the surface and tinged the water browner. It wasn't what I'd call a proper cup of joe, but at least it was a distinction. A demarcation between Oconee and Quietly.
The Oconee reached a wave up toward me, an unspoken invitation.
"You don't mind?" I asked the Oconee. It was a sin to drink oceans, so this had to be at least a personal failing.
I love you, it said.
I held the jar up to my lips. It bubbled up like a flood and gave itself to me. I drank it down to the last drop, coffee beans and mud and water all.
What's it like to drink a whole river? About like drowning in one, I reckon. I thought I was losing all my oxygen as the water filled up my blood. It pumped into my heart. I fell smitten with river things: long-legged skating insects, little torpedo-headed otters, surly catfish crawling through sand and rounded stones. I lounged long in lazy summer sunshine. I dwindled to a trickle in the heat. I opened my mouth and sucked down the rain until I swelled up and broke my boundaries—the bankline, the skin of the creature called Quietly.
The river reached my brain, and I knew secret river-thoughts. A wily dinosaur crawled beneath the delta where the Oconee met the Altamaha River. I numbered drowned bears, and I named the bacteria. I reached further out, past the Altamaha, to a place where my waters turned to salt, a place that tasted of love and infinite sadness. I glutted myself on all the sorrows I found there, savoring their bouquets, getting drunk on them, until at last I drank the tears of a woman called Quietly.
I was once a woman, I thought to myself, and the thought tasted like coffee.
I opened my eyes.
As the Oconee, I'd washed away the litterfall entirely and rushed fast down the gouge Imani left toward the Foundry, taking all the Has-Beens with me. They took to the water like they were born to it, all their spidery long legs oaring toward their heart's desire, toward the Pacific.
Then I was Quietly—but also more-than-Quietly—standing on asphalt before the Foundry, my fists wet and dripping and my shoes full of pebbles. The Oconee swirled around and around inside me, holding to the bounds of my skin, restless, waiting, hungry.
I held the taste of coffee beans in my mouth and let the river flood.
Water erupted from my shoes like a burst pipe. It wet the thirsty ash-choked asphalt. Plastic bottles floated around my ankles, rose to my knees, and then to my chest. The whole parking lot vanished beneath the spreading, roaring river. The water formed a wall, then a fist. I reached toward the Foundry and picked off its corners, rolling the cheap plaster between watery fingers. I grabbed the whole building front and pulled it down.
The Has-Beens rode my flood into the warehouse and gobbled all that stockpiled desire. Centuries of Stephens's hoarding, consumed in moments. I reached under all the doors and tall shelves, groping for crickets in a man-suit, but I couldn't find him. Imani wasn't there.
I pushed the water forward, overwhelming the building and reaching the streets of downtown beyond, driving the Has-Beens before me. They'd devoured the Foundry down to its screws but stayed monsters because they chased another yearning. Broad Street to Jackson, Jackson to Clayton Street, and still the water rose.
My surface tickled and itched. A tiny fleet of amateur boats paddled up from the Foundry, dipping my waters with oars made from vintage guitars. The old employees, freed of their contracts. They landed on the rooftops, grouped up, and began to jam and improvise lyrics. It sounded a bit like R.E.M.
That's when I remembered Imani. She used to be our roommate, I told the other voice, the part of me that was the Oconee. Then she died and became the Pacific and forgot to be herself.
We'll remind her, the Oconee assured me.
Our waters rushed around and around the streets in ever-tightening circles—Lumpkin, Washington, Hull, Clayton—until the Georgia Theater sat dead center in the whirlpool.
Imani was on the roof, the highest point in all of Downtown, surrounded by a rave. A band jammed at her head, and dancers took turns chucking recycled glowsticks off the roof. They'd contained her infinite, pulsing shores in a cheap inflatable pool, the kind you stick in the backyard for your little cousins on the 4th of July. Two clubgoers paddled around her in their skivvies. Imani just tolerated it.
"God. What did he do to you?" I muttered, but I was the Oconee, and my words turned into a roar that threaded all throughout the Under-Ath.
That's when I saw the crickets. Thousands and millions of the critters, skittering from gutters and dancing light across my waters, and climbing up, up, up the old brick buildings. Some of them ran, and others pelted down from the sky like screaming black raindrops.
The bugs spun together in a cricket-cyclone with Imani's pool at its center. Something thick and sludgy tickled my waters outside the Georgia Theater. Far below, the flattened, soaking skin of Stephens oozed its way from the flood onto the steps and climbed roofward. I pushed against the cyclone with all my waters, but the crickets shattered me into millions of droplets.
This is my city, screamed the creaking swarm. I make the rules.
"What's the point of you?" I asked him. "What state of need called you into existence? You've been trying for so long."
The crickets fiddled me an answer. We are as old as the Under-Ath. We are the bones beneath the floorboards. This city consigned all their castoffs to this place and then had the gall to name itself for the Goddess of Wisdom. The hunger of the Under-Ath called us into existence.
There was so much of him. He went on forever, and still it rained more crickets. Those weren't really clouds blotting out the sun.
"You're only making it worse," I pointed out. "You've mined out the Under-Ath and put the goods under lock and key. Only your employees get fed. Everyone else starves."
We desire their desire, hummed the crickets. We don't want to die. We are not ready to die. We feed those who sign their contracts, and that is enough.
"That may very well be true. But you don't make that right by keeping Imani," I said. "She don't belong to you. She don't have anything to do with this mess."
So much water, said Stephens. Such abundance. Seaweed, fish, krill, whales, life and life and life. Hasn't been genuine water in the Under-Ath in a very long time. I'll drink her forever, sip by sip.
"So that's your angle, then? Salty tea for eons in your little office?"
Trade yourself, then. Take her place. You are also full of good things. One is as good as the other. We could live on you for eons.
I shuddered a miles-long river-shiver. Those weak, oversteeped tea bags dipped into me, sweetened with a little aspartame so I'd slide quicker past Stephen's horrible little moustache into that oozing skin-sack.
But he'd already done just that to Imani.
Take the deal. You have nothing to trade me but your whole self.
Fuck that shit, right? I tossed along my watery length, hunting for the right raft. "Washington!" I called out in all my river-voices. "California! Oregon! Now, now! Do it now!"
Because he was wrong about one thing: trade isn't ever your only option. You can also give away. Capitalists always forget that.
What does it look like when you give the gift of peace to a malevolent whirlwind of insects and hatred? Like a storm dissolving after a rainy bleak night. Like when the sun rises and drives back the memory of thunder. As Stephens winked from existence, his desire snuffed and his purpose fulfilled, the crickets parted like a beaded curtain. I brushed them aside.
I reached out two hands and scooped Imani from her pool into my endless rivery arms, and here I lost myself again, because I was the Oconee, and in joining it I'd touched and tasted the faraway Atlantic. In my waters the Pacific and Atlantic met and mingled and became inseparable.
Oh, there you are, Imani. I missed you.
You shouldn't’ve come for me, Quietly.
I reckon you're right, but I'm here now. I couldn't leave you trapped here forever.
I'm not trapped. I exiled myself. Nobody here is strong enough to stop an ocean from going where it will. But I have to suffer for what I did.
That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Let's go home.
You can't rush redemption.
Sure you can. Poof. There, I washed your guilt away with all the other garbage.
It's still there, at the bottom of the sea.
So? Some things we'll never be rid of, but that don’t mean we can't move on. Oregon calls it "upcycling."
I did a bad thing, Quietly, and I can't take it back. I wanted to, but the yearning. I couldn't fight that yearning forever. I thought I was going to die from it. I had to drink it all down. But it wasn't mine. The Pacific didn't want to be drunk like that. I think it was afraid of me, afraid to become part of me this way.
Not your fault. Not entirely. The Hypotheticals fucked you up. They've got to take their share of the blame.
I don't know how to give it back. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm all dolphins and redwoods and muscadine wine, and I don't remember which of them belongs to me.
You're a glacier. You're Imani. You're a vengeful environmentalist with too much magic and too much temper. And you're about to be a college dropout if you don't get back to school soon.
I don't deserve to go home.
It's not about deserving, Imani. It's about belonging. Now here, take this. I've brought you some coffee.
—
We woke up together on the Georgia Theater rooftop when the waters began receding. We kissed for a long time, waves lapping and retreating until they'd covered the whole beach.
All around downtown, the water had begun to settle in the huge gouges Imani had cut in the ground on her way into the Under-Ath. We were thoroughly soaked. The water had washed most of the salt from Imani's hair. I checked the Mason jar for the Oconee River, but it hadn't come back to me when we'd separated from it.
"You think they're still joined together?" Imani asked. "The Oconee and the Pacific, I mean. They didn't have any coffee beans to separate out again."
"I think the Oconee's gone now, at least the part I brought with me." I got all choked up because the Oconee had been my friend, and it struck me as an unfair cost to pay.
But Imani, wonderful wise Imani, held me against the hollow of her neck. "Rivers understand change, Quietly. You mix with an ocean like that and something new has to be born from it. That's not the Oconee River or the Pacific Ocean out there."
"Then what is it?"
Imani combed back my damp hair with long fingers. "We could call it the Oconee Ocean."
So much for the water beside the land beside the water. But the Georgia red clay hadn't completely gone from my blood, nor the brine from my saliva. For the rest of my life my kisses would taste of the surf. We had all traded parts of each other, me and Imani, the Oconee and the Pacific. Nothing could fully sort that out again, not even great coffee.
The Hypotheticals rowed to our rooftop on a pontoon made from chapel doors that floated over netted plastic bottles. I refilled my empty Mason jar with water from the new ocean, then filled up a second bottle and handed it to Oregon.
"There you go. One sample of your ocean, more or less. That should be enough to return it to full force. The rest belongs to the Under-Ath now." A fair repayment to Briar and the rest. All those Has-Beens, quenched for good. They would have no more need for Stephens.
"Looks good to me," said Oregon.
"Hold up," Imani said sharply. She snatched the water bottle back from Oregon. "Don't you think I've forgotten about the garbage patch. No one's going home until you've done something about it." She got right in their faces, backing them all the way up to the roof's edge.
California held up his hands. "Okay, chill out. Our people are already on it."
"All of them?" asked Imani.
"All of them," Washington affirmed. "They've been traversing the ocean floor for days now, cleaning up the mess and taking it back to shore. We won't return the water until they're done."
Imani sized them up like she was weighing their character on a scale. "Do you trust them, Quietly?"
It was a good question. When it came to their nature, we had no word to go by but what the Hypotheticals told us. "I trust them to be true to their mission," I said. "I don't rightly know if we could call them friends. But I think they mean well."
"Then come visit us sometime when you get the chance," Oregon said. "Our gifts are yours to keep, after all."
Imani got this look halfway between despair and acceptance. "I'm never going to stop longing for it, am I?"
"We never do," said Washington. "The Pacific is part of you now."
I thought I understood. Living will always mean hurting a little and wishing for things absent from our arms—just like the Has-Beens knew. Even oceans couldn't be everywhere at once. They picked a bed to lie in, and sometimes they settled too far off for your heart's comfort.
But sometimes your ocean stays.
Imani and I returned home to an apartment draped with the trappings of absence and old grief. A bed full of salt, diplomas carpeting the floor, and a door tilted shut on broken hinges.
I shooed out a stray cat parked on the couch and set the Mason jar of Oconee Ocean water—unhexed, of course—on the coffee table. Imani rolled up the diplomas and wedged the door shut with a Birkenstock too large to be one of ours. Together we gathered up the sheet corners from Imani’s bed and shook the salt into the parking lot, enough to keep the sidewalks clear for a Southern winter.
"What now?" asked Imani.
I knew what she meant. You can't just come home from an adventure like that, tidy up, and call it done. I needed to get a job soon, and Imani still had to socially and legally resurrect herself. We'd melded with oceans, had our hearts broke, and lived to tell the tale, but it left a mark. Murky river-thoughts and heavy ocean-cares plucked and pulled at my attention. It felt like drowning in too many identities.
I looked out the living room window, down toward the thicket that marked the Oconee Greenway, and beyond that the sinking sun. Imani crept up behind me and slipped her fingers into mine, both of us lost in a westward pull we couldn't evict.
Maybe we'd follow the call. Maybe we'd leave Athens, buy a boat, circumnavigate South America, and make our way at last to the Pacific. Or maybe we'd just pick ourselves a new star and go after it as far as we could, until we sailed right into the tale of how an ocean, a river, and a little glacier entered my family tree.
But you have to hold some space for yourself. A place to stop being bodies of water, and just be bodies for a while. I marvelled at the miracle of Imani's hand in mine and wondered if I dared kiss her again. The Big Waters rolled ice-cold in my veins, but this time I held firm to the bounds of my skin. Not here. Not now. I shushed the oceans asleep, wrapped myself in brine-washed sheets, and let my glacier warm me.
END