“Say it,” said the Sea Witch.
I said nothing.
“Say it.”
“I wish you’d stayed dead,” I said, finally. “Life was easier when you were dead. I didn’t have to try and fight for you anymore. I didn’t have to pretend it was possible to fight for you.” I wondered, briefly, if this was how George felt. If this was the reason he left the home he was born in. The reason he hadn’t tried harder to make me stay in the home we’d made together.
“And now you can’t pretend you have to think,” mocked the Sea Witch. Her mouth was a small, mean moue, and she reached for one of the licorice pieces I kept in a bowl on my desk, her tongue twining about it. “And choose. How’s George, by the way?” Her smirk told me she already knew, but I answered anyway.
“Fine. We signed the divorce papers this morning.” Afterwards I’d driven him to the airport, slipped licorice into his pocket, and waved goodbye as he flew back to New Zealand. I hoped it was to visit his family. I hoped it so hard I didn’t ask for confirmation. It was no longer my business.
“No distractions, then.”
“Not for you.” This was a conversation we’d both been waiting for. Even not knowing if she was still alive, and not knowing if she’d show up if she were, I’d still been waiting for it.
“Or for him,” she said. “I wonder what he’s open to doing now, your no-longer husband?” She smiled again. “All the pieces of your old life, just washed away. All the structure gone out of it. All the structure that meant something anyway. Home. Work. You’ve not gone near a jellyfish since you got back from New Zealand. Not written a single word about them.”
“You’ve been watching me.” Of course she had. For all her disgust with medusae, I’d begun to see that the Sea Witch had tentacles in everything. I shouldn’t have found it surprising. All organisms found their niche eventually.
“I’ve seen what happens when structure fades away,” she said. “When the skeleton bleaches white and all the coral dies. Something needs to take its place.”
“What is it you’re trying to build?” I asked the Sea Witch. The sanest of them all, Granny had called her, but this wasn’t sanity. It was opportunism. It was adaptation to environment — the jellyfish way, to flourish in a warmer ocean. Perhaps to survive in this new world that climate had made, opportunism, for some, was the clearest path to sanity.
“I don’t want to build anything,” said the Sea Witch. “I want the old world back.”
“It’s not coming back. We killed it. We watched it die and we let it die. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all along?”
The Sea Witch waved a hand, indifferent. “You knew that. I gave you motivation to admit it. I’m more interested in aftermaths. Have you never wondered? The proficiency we showed. The indifference. When we saw how good we were at killing, when we made it part of us. Did you think it would just go away?”
I didn’t think of it at all. But now that I did, the inevitability was plain.
“All the creatures that died when the Reef did. The venomous, the camouflaged, the predators. All those empty spaces. What did we expect to fill them with, if not ourselves?”
That was the genesis of Grief, laid open. Come not from what we’d done to the other, but what we’d done to ourselves. No wonder it all ended in suicide. Self-knowledge was the clearest thing in the world. It was also the unkindest.
“At least it never left me voiceless,” said the Sea Witch, when I told her so. “I looked into a mirror, and saw something die, and I let her die, because she had to. She’d earned it. That’s what I told her. And when I let her go, that woman in the mirror, all that was left was knowledge. I could watch something die and let it die, and I could do it over and over.
“Suicide,” she said, leaning over my desk, her breath smelling of salt, “is not the only way.”
Grief ended in death, always. “You want me to take up murder.”
“I want you to be what you are,” said the Sea Witch. “Someone who loved the glory and wonder of the world.” Golden jellyfish, migrating through lake water. “Someone who loves it still.” Not looking down to the layers beneath, the dark waters, and dangerous. “Grief was never about the loss. It was about the killing, the sheer culpable scale of it. You’re selfish enough to survive the knowledge, that’s all. And once you know what you are,” she said, “you know what you can do.”
No more sharks in the Reef. No more sea snakes, no more stonefish. Just the things that killed them.
“Don’t you want to pay them back?” said the Sea Witch.
I wondered how many of them there were. How many had taken their Grief and forged it into weaponry, made marvels come from anger and given their hearts to the dead instead of the living. How many could no longer look in the mirror, knowing what they had done, and how they had thereby impoverished both the world around them and themselves.
“When I go out to the Reef now, it’s all dead but for the jellyfish,” said the Sea Witch.
I loved jellyfish. I did. Sometimes, with George gone, they felt like the only things I loved.
“It’s so lonely there,” mourned the Sea Witch.
I would not cry. I wouldn’t.
Acknowledgments
This novella was written in the first half of 2020, during my time as a visiting artist at Massey University and the Square Edge Arts Centre in Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand. It was my first writing residency, although not my last, and is likely to remain the strangest. Only a few days after I arrived, the country went into strict lockdown in order to tackle the global COVID-19 pandemic. I was confined to
