Night ebbed like the tide. Slow and clasping. Unwilling to give up its grip. The power was out, Doe could tell because when she walked past the microwave and stove their digital faces were vacant. There was no hum of refrigerator or gust of vent, the streetlight invisible through the window.
• • •
The most common was half a spider monkey stitched to two thirds an eel, a taxidermy chimera Doe had seen once at a flea market when she was six, before shielding her eyes and running to hide under a table covered in depression glass. Her father had bought her a piece, as a shiny distraction. A little marigold candy dish with magpies and azaleas. It looked good enough to eat even empty. That treasure was gone now, with every other treasure Doe had nested with, but the memory of the grotesque mermaid remained.
Storms of wind and storms of water, suns hot enough to boil the ocean, they all came to Doe in her sleep and stayed behind her eyelids while the real world raced to catch up. Weather forecasts came to match the spirit of her dreams, if not the intensity. Striking hail, drought, tremors, and fire. The Whisper first appeared after the fire, had followed Doe from hell on earth. That was the past though, and this house was their present.
• • •
“You’re beautiful.” The Whisper’s voice sailed in on a flood of light, but Doe felt only oily. The last of the tepid water sluiced from the faucet, there would be just icy from here. A layer of skin came off with her filth and Doe’s reflection moved featureless and bland this time. Good. She hated bodies; the Whisper’s many, the pits and bulges of her own in the pre-dawn sheen.
• • •
This was the price of lines cheaply unburied. They could shove them deep underground in a safe quiet grave full of worms, history’s racist massacres, landfill waste, and coprolites. Halfway to hell would be better than heralding it. Out of sight, out of mind went the saying. Out of sight, out of trouble was more accurate. Doe’s mind operated the same way, burying what it wouldn’t confront. She ignored the Whisper’s many visits that morning.
• • •
• • •
There was an unread text from them. It warned of a public safety power outage, reaching into the next day or more. Learn how to get through it if you use necessary medical devices, we’ll send a team to your door. Is your generator going to kill you? Fill up your gas tank either way. Forty-eight hours or more. Or less. One or the other, to be sure.
• • •
Eighteen hours ago she switched to flipping burgers, after scraping a lifetime of breakfasts off the grill. Ashes flew everywhere until a clean mirror shone through. Doe meditated to the clockwork sizzle and scrape. Ten hours ago she headed home, covered in her ritual crust of grease and dust. Two hours ago she rocked in her sleep with the Whisper.
Before she woke on this day, this tabula rasa she faced could be many things. The only sounds present were seagulls, crows, the occasional weaponized buzz of a hummingbird. Every appliance and circuit and fan had taken the day off. She would too.
• • •
“Let’s run away,” the pirate mermaid called, over and over again until its paint flaked away. “Turn it all off,” it gasped.
The phone buzzed in Doe’s hand before she could act or not act. A text from her boss. ShSSSh is closed today. do to the outage. Short and unsweet, sent to each employee, pasted to Facebook and Instagram in all its inscrutable glory. Doe had no reason to reply with empty confirmations that would never be opened.
She pictured the lights, the vegetable oil slick cursed mirror of the electric grill. The power that usually moved, today stilled. No electricity coursing through the credit card reader, nor through the tangled rat nest of cords, nor through their daisy-chained power strips. One of many messes magically tidied before health inspector visits.
Instead today was dark. No one got an early breakfast before ‘gone fishing’. They waited in line at the gas station with the solar array. No one puttered their boat up the canal behind the joint to order a burger. They were home, out on their patios, cleaning their grills, waiting through the nothing.
Everyone, except maybe Doe. And the bus drivers. She rustled up $1.50 in coins from the dryer. She took the bus to the real sea shore, not the slough or the bay.
She couldn’t see it, but the mermaid swung on the restroom door of She Sells. The Whisper smiled. Doe pictured the caterpillar highway of fleeing vehicles. The tangerine sky and the smell of photographs alight. The hammers and guitars and greenhouses and whimpers that she couldn’t take with her.
• • •
Water unspooled out the dim bus window, taunting her from her polyester seat, through the grubby glass. And so too the Whisper played games in the empty spaces. Doe’s vision reached long ghost arms to the beach and trailed them through the surf. Then, after teasing glimpses of the thick blue body, there it was all at once in a terrifying ribbon. It read like the story of a woman with a green bow holding her head on her shoulders. If this blue-green stripe were ever snipped, half the world would fall away.
• • •
Today it was empty. Because last time the power was off, people had already eaten the freezer food they could grill and thrown the rest away. They had used their sick days. They hadn’t enough gas in their tanks for long coastal drives. So this time they played it safe. Maybe a few would pedal bicycles along the bay, a few would knock back beers with their neighbors, but Doe was alone in the surf.
Away from the minor bustle of town, defunct power lines rose up in the distance like dated megafauna. Today the air was more conductive, the sounds more distinct. The pebbles under Doe’s encroaching feet were more soothing than the scratchy limestone of the parking lot. After a time, agates winked at her from a garden of beach glass and mussel shells. The garden waited to be combed.
But better treasure than the flotsam was the company of seals. They composed an unbelievable mass of flesh and life. They were oil-slick but clean at once, shining brown and gray in the sun. From them emerged a thunder of sound. Skin slapped and limbs splashed, swimming in the mouth or rocking back and forth on land in their blubbery banana poses. They were comical and terrifying, and they were the reason Doe rode the long lonely bus to the end of the line. She loved watching them do nothing with incredible purpose before they scattered north or south with the seasons.
The Whisper was sometimes a seal, forever extinguishing the heat of her, forever splashing in the cold Pacific while she steamed and hissed like a thing perpetually on fire. Like a thing burned to ash, leaving a glowing hole in the world that would never go out.
Doe too would have lived in a sphere where she could be a seal and spend her days underwater, where the sounds were muted and only the vital ones came through. She would slip her body through the wet world that reformed behind her, leave no trace.
As she crept closer to the colony, her phone startled them with a strangled buzz. Several beasts slide-galloped into the wide slow water.
The calling number was the harbinger of electricity. It was the landline from She Sells. She let it ring and ring. There was an audible change in the air as the power returned, Doe felt a prickle on her skin and a surge in her veins.
The last shut-off had been five days long. For four of them Doe had eaten cans of cold tuna fish in the dark and quiet, a cautious reversal of the parties around her block. No one believed the promise that the next one would be shorter, and Doe intended to enjoy it. But the thrumming world forced itself back on her reality while the seals splintered away.
An invisible wire prepared to snap. The tension bobbed and swayed under a terrible weight. Lines were breaking, were broken, should have never been. This wire could not support the world balanced on top of it. Doe shouldn’t answer; she did anyway.
“Hey! What’s happening. This is the diner.” Greg was incapable of asking questions. “Now that business is back we’re going to need you. Get here in twenty minutes.” No hello, no names.
“Heya boss, I’m out at the beach. There’s just the one bus back today and it’s not til five. I could still help with the dinner rush and close.” She blew a kiss to the pod of seals.
“That’s not going to be good enough, Doe. I can give you an hour. Get here in an hour or don’t get here. Alright.”
Doe needed the job. She thought about all the things she didn’t have, and all the broken and smokey things she did have. All the chipped dishes from free piles, all that came due next week. The hungry machines at the laundromat. The electric bill.
“Could you come get me?” she asked. She often tried to copy him, his short sentences and definite periods. But this was an authentic question, a plea. She pictured him sitting in the small sunny office that rattled in the wind while he smoked a cigarette and ‘analyzed business.’
“Not with this rush. It sounds like you just don’t care about this job very much.”
Doe dug her foot into the sand, gripped it with her toes, shoes in one hand and phone in the other. She sought water, water sought level. “I just can’t.”
“Well neither can I, Doe. We need a team that shows up. I’ll call you in the morning so we can wrap this up.” And he hung up. She dug further into the sand.
Sand composed its own universe, as brightly colored as any galaxy or aurora. When it got the light, it filtered life like a sieve. Little crabs hustled alongside worms and bugs that bit bright red constellations onto skin. Tiny plants, some alive and some dead, mixed in that soup. Beside them lay inert glass and festive microplastics.
But Doe’s favorite small residents of the sands were the clams. They came and went at will through the sludge like seals in the water, leaving small bubbles to show their buried path. They were lively, volcanic, delicious. Today saw her without bucket and shovel, still she watched their signs appear.
A few times she stabbed her hand into the wet sand — not fast enough to catch but fast enough to feel it. The sand suctioned below her finger tips. She envied the bivalve nimbleness.
Except there was one bubble, one weird gurgling noise with no agility. She sunk her hand and her fingers contacted something hard. It didn’t move, it didn’t open or close with outrage, it stayed solid and silent in a humming world.
Instead of a clam, Doe pulled out a small box. It could have been filled with music or snuff, makeup, or money. It was a generic shape she could never describe later, somehow round but also square with gold trim or silver trim and one small gold hinge. The top was studded with glass beads in the shape of waves, but they rolled in red instead of blue, green, or wine-dark.
• • •
Until she closed it again and each sound resumed like before. “—found it,” gushed the Whisper.
There was a small group of godwits nearby as she flicked it open once more. They had been cresting and retreating with fluid motions of their own in the waves. Small stick legs, long graceful beaks, they moved like a hive mind. They moved like faceless customers bringing buns and pint glasses to their mouths. In and out, they moved like the tide, with the tide.
Doe had wondered before how they kept so much unity, and now she knew they found it in sound. Whatever they say, whatever they felt beneath their tripod toes on the gelatin sands, they used their pinprick ears to sense the waves. When they couldn’t do that, the wave surged over them silently.
They didn’t suffer much for that, only indignity. They swam well and were robust for such tiny things. But they’d survive.
The seagulls had a harder time in the bubble of silence that surged out of the box. Their endless squawking was the static of the sea. Something that usually lulled Doe to sleep.
What would have been settled with vocalization now relied on lashing wings and stabbing beaks. They postured, became larger like their reptile ancestors, and ferocious. They separated into tyrants and victims.
One sat on a sea stack while another loomed above, then dropped in a furious attack. They wrestled with two great wingspans blocking kicks and stabs, and the box blocked their sounds. Doe could have closed it at any time, but she was fascinated by the silent opera accompanied by inter-titles of red spray.
Finally, one fell dead into the sea, while the wounded victor flew away. From the box, Doe rushed with surf and white wings beating against the sky. Silence, not words, was the great instigator. Somewhere in the distance, the seals bayed their agreement.
• • •
At night she left it cracked open on the plastic bedside table. It was the best sleep she’d known in years. Doe slept the sleep of vaguely remembered childhood that everyone stalked for the rest of their lives. Through forests of blankets, new mattresses and white noise machines and black curtains.
A mouth opened in the silent sky of her dreams, each tooth a lightning bolt that wouldn’t fade away. The sky yawned and something curved and high surged through the night. Even Doe’s dreams were silent, but she had two good eyes. She saw what was coming.
• • •
The rusted warning siren tower looked out over a sandy grassy bight. The Whisper wrapped around it like the red on a barbershop pole, still a snake. From there, Doe could see the town, the bay, the sloughs, and above all she could see She Sells Sea Shells.
The earth trembled beneath her. A different woman might worry she was about to be sucked into hell. Doe had already been. She could imagine what was happening just out of sight. Some glasses fell off a table. Some drinks were comped. Diners shoved each other to crouch in the doorway, then laughed about it in the quiet moments after.
Sitting on the dune, she opened the box while the sky deepened then disappeared in the world of water. There was no siren to warn, as it moved like a great leviathan from the ocean to the bay. She brought the binoculars to her face.
It was more like a god than a storm, crushing She Sells. Like the doom of Atlantis, like the burial of Pompeii. Mouths opened wide in silent screams. The wooden pillars of the patio snapped, then dozens of legs and arms. The jagged bones tumbled smooth in the crashing soundless water.
The sludgy wave became a flowing mass of dock and boat and debris. People struggled in its filthy crest before going under. Two of them clung to each other. The rest were gone much sooner. Like them, Doe was never seen again.
• • •
