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His hand’s just below the water surface, leaned over the artificial rocks, reaching for one of the stingrays. The noise of the aquarium leans against the back of his head, pressing it toward the water — families taking videos, shouting at each other to get in frame, parents calling to the back of the gift store to find their kids. A spotted ray swoops by him, just out of reach. Another’s coming straight toward him but pivots at the last second. Then it’s a manta ray. Swimming with a wing up on the perimeter, coasting on the slick of the concrete. He readies his hand. The rough flesh on his. It vibrates up his limb to his brain. Then it’s black.
It’s a memory. Only touch at first. Tendrils wrapping around his body. The touch is gentle but firm, preparatory. It contrasts with the emptiness around him. Fluid nothing. Tendril reality. And the real begins to pull.
He’s squeezed through something gelatinous and it only gets darker, wonders if his eyes are open or closed. Wonders if he could even open them if they were closed. What’s autonomy in a memory?
Then it’s salt and shadow, but lighter now. The tendrils loosen a little as he opens his eyes. He takes in the shadow at first. His pupils grow and he sees the source of the darkness. His mother. The jellyfish. She’s iridescent and terrible. Large enough to have something like a gravitational force. That must be what brings the others.
There’s an angler fish with tangles of wasted coral hanging from its jaws — its tongue flicking around what’s caught in its teeth as if to revel in the taste. A scuba diver in a once-bright wetsuit, faded from years of searching the waters. They’re pointing a video camera at the spectacle. Spasming with excitement.
The jellyfish reaches out with her tendrils. The newcomers twist and welcome her touch. The angler fish twirls its coral. The diver hits the zoom button until the shot can’t be anything but iridescence — more spasms as they stare down the camera’s viewfinder. The tendrils stroke their chins. A scream breaks through.
He turns his head to a turtle with a cracked shell and the face of a sorrowful woman. She’s screaming with a mouth that threatens to split open. It’s the pain of birth, but there’s nothing within her. The jellyfish ignores her presence, no tendrils, no touch. He wonders if the turtle woman is a surrogate of pain. Still reeling from the labor that birthed him.
She grows closer and he can feel in the water that the sound of her cries doesn’t come from her mouth, a dark silent gape. But, the screams are splitting through the cracks in her shell, growing from the emptiness inside.
He tries to speak, tell her he’s sorry. But he has the same nothingness inside of him.
That’s when he feels a manta ray beneath his body. It’s rough, strong. Untouched by the scene drifting around them. He stretches his arms across the wings of the ray and holds on, hoping it will bring him closer to the screaming woman. He could at least touch her face.
That’s where the memory ends.
The aquarium staff aren’t trained for this. Two teenagers in purple uniforms stand at the edge of the stingray tank, shrieking for help, their feet planted on the artificial rocks. Parents drag their children away from the sight and into the giftshop.
The man with the memory is in the water, a stingray’s barbed tail pierced clean through his tongue, lodged in the meat of his throat. Dark fluid floats from his mouth as the ray struggles to free itself. Flailing, like it’s hooked into the throat of death itself.
One of the teens in purple uniform reaches out, extending her hand like a question — asking if it’s okay to break where the two have joined.
No answer. Just the flesh.
