The Sea Witch, in her empty pool, created jellyfish of her own. She made them out of plastic bags, forming pieces of floating trash into the mimicry of movement. If I’d known this was what she wanted them for I’d never have brought the bags to her. I didn’t care how limp they were, stranded on the dry bottom of the pool. No one made something like this without expecting them — without wanting them — to float.
“You know what plastic does!” I told her. “You know how dangerous it is to sea life.” The remnants of populations that would get caught in it, that would swallow it and starve.
The Sea Witch shrugged. “So?” she said. “We kill everything anyway. It’s what we do.” The Grief was speaking through her, but I’d never heard of it manifesting as an active agent of further destruction. She held out a plastic jelly she’d finished wrenching into shape. “Look,” she said.
Inside the bell was paper. A page, well insulated, and ripping through the plastic I found old warnings. Of what would happen if we didn’t change, of what would happen if we didn’t stop it, the shifting consequences of climate. I knew these papers. I’d written some of them myself. None of them were ever listened to. Certainly few of the recommendations were ever followed.
“Nothing we said made a difference. We might as well have said nothing at all,” said the Sea Witch, disconsolate, a plastic comb in her hands. She turned it over and over. I remembered her refusing a hairbrush when I brought it to her, though it had been plastic as well. The comb hadn’t been used on her hair. Even from a distance I could see the handle had been sharpened into a blade. “We might as well have been voiceless,” she said. “We might as well have given up our tongues.” And then she cut hers out, swiftly, brutally, with the comb edge of sharpened plastic, the comb I never knew she had, and her blood and my vomit spattered over the pool floor.
The Sea Witch, red-chinned, red-throated, recovered before I did. By the time I looked up from bile she had opened the pipe that connected the pool to the ocean. Saltwater streamed in, and brought the ocean with it. With the filters long gone, the currents brought fragments of kelp and floating algae. I saw a small fish sucked through, an ice-cream wrapper, a crab. A beer can. And between them all the jellyfish: the real, and the imagined.
At first I couldn’t tell them apart. The Sea Witch hated jellyfish, but her mimicries moved as if they were flesh not flotsam. The plastic jellies rose with the waters, and the papers within their silent bells were accusation and consequence, the cost of looking away. The real jellyfish, the ones sucked in from the outside, swarmed between them, their tentacles caught in eddies and plastic. There were so many of them. I managed to get myself to the edge of the pool and out, but the Sea Witch was weakened by Grief and blood loss, and she was not fast enough. The jellyfish wrapped her in their gossamer tentacles, a beautiful angry bloom, and kept her there until her screams and Grief were silent.
2
The package arrived three days after a memorial service that hardly anyone attended. I didn’t know what I expected — part of me, feeling the shape and heft of it, hoped for a book of fairy tales. The Andersen, which was by now sodden and disintegrating at the bottom of the pool, would have been a touching present, one left behind by a woman who could no longer bear what she had made of the world.
Instead, it was letters. A packet of them, tied together, all from the Sea Witch, and all to someone I didn’t know. I tried to read them, but they were misery and running ink, the decompensation of a once-brilliant mind into madness. There was no apology, no explanation. Many of the pages made no sense. The writing was more scrawl than recognizable letters, and the lines crossed each other in different directions, as if the writer overlaid new understandings on top of old, and couldn’t see that the earliest expressions of comprehension obscured the later. The notation at the top of one of them, made in a different hand and with precision in the ink, was equally unclear. “The sanest of them all,” it said. The writing was the same as that on the front of the package, the same as that on the return address.
“If this is an invitation,” said George, “I suggest you don’t accept.” We were divorcing, the dissolution of our marriage regretted on both our parts. He wanted children, and I didn’t. The change of heart was mine. He pored over the letters with all the attention he gave to the divorce agreement — an attention born of scrupulous fairness and careful consideration. He peered at me through glasses. “We both know it’s an invitation.”
“There’s nothing that says I have to accept.”
“Good. Don’t. You’ve always been able to turn away, and I’ve always liked that about you.” That he could say this even when he was one of the things I’d turned away from was almost enough to make me reconsider leaving him. If I’d cared for him less I would have stayed, but he’d been my best friend for over ten years, and I couldn’t bring myself to compromise his happiness by insisting on a sterility that suited only one of us. “For all we know it was getting involved with people like this that made
