The Sea Witch was scrunching papers, crushing them in her fists to make them small, unreadable, the words blurring into each other. Wanting to help, to connect with the shell of someone I’d once known as well as myself, I tore a paper for her, made the page compact and wrinkled, handed it over.
“Not that one,” she said, and how could she know, barely ever looking up as she did?
“One’s much the same as the other, isn’t it?” It was a flippant response. Deliberately so. There had to be some way to break through to her, to get her to talk about more than plastic, more than absence, the great sucking whirlpool that Grief had made of her mind. She talked so little now. Barely more than she looked, and that was not at all. I tore the next page slowly, loudly, trying to get her attention.
“Not that one either,” she said, and sighed. “Don’t you even see what it’s about? Don’t you even notice?”
I smoothed out the crumpled page and looked for keywords. “Something to do with transport stations and school districts. The effective placements of city planning, at a guess.”
The Sea Witch didn’t look at me, but her hands stilled in her lap. She sat there, silent as stone, until it became clear I didn’t understand, and then she sighed again, a small, sad sound. “Table of contents,” she said.
I flipped to the beginning of the journal, started reading titles aloud. When I read one that described future-proofing coastal infrastructure against climate, her hands began to move again. “That one,” she said, and I could see her shoulders soften a little at the sound of tearing.
In summer, I persuaded Marjorie to take the Sea Witch out to marvel at the blooms of box jellyfish. They were far more attractive afloat than washed up on beaches. Even if I couldn’t swim in every swarm — the stings were unpleasant and, in box species like Chironex fleckeri, could be fatal — I still found them a wonder, and reassuring. They were more tolerant of climate change than many organisms, able to adapt to warming waters and lower oxygen content, and if the once-warnings of jellyfish seas had not entirely eventuated, there were certainly more of them than before, and their populations were spreading.
Stretched flat on the deck with my head over the side, I stared down at the ocean, my arms crossed beneath my chin. It was an awkward position, but one that allowed me to get close enough for a good view of the jellies that floated below. Their bodies brushed against the side of the hull. They looked so delicate, and so innocent. “Not everything is gone,” I said.
“They’re a sign that a lot is, though,” Marjorie replied — for her, the warmth that brought the jellies also brought the hungry, migrating starfish, and made the Reef a more vulnerable place. The increased presence of predators, combined with the slow bleaching of the coral due to rising temperatures, undermined the entire ecology.
“They’re part of your Reef too,” I said, but the look on her face told me that the Reef was more to her than the success of a single organism. It was an ecosystem, and one past balance or return. No wonder she didn’t see the jellies as marvelous, a reminder of the wonder of our time at Jellyfish Lake. That experience was far behind her, the memory lost in the hazard of the present.
“Some of them can get bigger than humans,” I reminded her. “Bells over two metres wide and tentacles over thirty metres long.” It was the greatest day of my life, the day George and I saw a lion’s mane swimming off the coast of New Zealand, on an early trip taken to visit his family. I’ve heard stories of similar-sized creatures in the waters of Japan, where I’ve never been — Nomura’s jellyfish. It made me happy knowing they existed, still, that they were thriving in a world where so much no longer was.
The ones below us were considerably smaller. One of them looked strange, not like the others. I was close enough that I could reach down and snag it, but before my fingers touched the water Marjorie grabbed at my arm. “It’ll sting you,” she said, and it was true that swimming in this particular swarm would see me hospitalized or worse. Beaches were closed regularly over summer, when a swarm like this moved close to the coast.
“Not this one,” I said, and what I brought up wasn’t a jellyfish at all. It was a plastic bag, somehow twisted and swollen so that when floating it could pass for jelly.
“Horrible things,” I said, scowling, and got up to stuff the bag somewhere safe, until we could get back to shore and dispose of it properly.
“Yes,” said Marjorie, absently, still staring down. “Horrible.”
I’d never swum in the saltwater pool. For me, it had always been a wreck that kids sneaked into at night on dares. The pipes that used to fill it, that came from the ocean, were capped. It seemed a difficult task, in retrospect — having to filter all the things that could have come in. Those filters were long since gone. Perhaps they were looted, perhaps recycled, but if the pipes were opened back up now, salt water would fill the pool and with it would come the jellyfish. Not the golden jellyfish of Palau either, but the ones with powerful stings. Ocean swimming was more hazardous now, though for people like me it
