Seashell Voicemails by Julia Raye
900 words, ~4 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)
Six
All is topside until Kai is six. You’re at dinner with your parents, celebrating your return to Michigan. In the restaurant bathroom, she washes her hands. The faucet stream flows over her fingers for a small eternity. Through the pond cupped in her palms, light glances off an iridescent patch of scales.
You hold her hand all the way to the table.
Mercifully, your parents say nothing on the ride home. But your father, a quiet man who has taken up sailing post-retirement, whispers in your ear as he hugs you goodbye.
“Don’t panic. Just keep her dry.”
Eleven
Kai’s eyes get bluer by the day. She sprinkles table salt in her water when she thinks you aren’t looking. She approaches wishing wells with holy reverence. She can’t sleep without an eerily honeyed melody spilling from her lips, flooding the house. A habit, a prayer, an incantation.
A handkerchief in her backpack for drying small spills to the skin isn’t enough. You knew motherhood would be your greatest challenge, but this is unprecedented. Unprovoked. Unnatural. You should be reading parenting books, not ancient texts with no modern guidance to offer. But you would dig to the ends of the earth to get to the bottom of this.
Did you crave too much shrimp during pregnancy? Was the babymoon in the Keys a mistake? Damn her father, a Florida Man in every sense of the term. Yet you were born on a peninsula, too. Does Kai live by the currents of both? The internet blames the doctors and their yachts, sending innocent kids to sea. Some believe children are just born like this sometimes, and that’s the most outlandish of all.
She comes home one day from school, shivering. The kaleidoscope of her damp face pulses in a scarlet/teal/indigo scattershot. First caught in the crosshairs of a snowball fight, then directly targeted. Sharks go for the face every time.
You remove her layers, then hold her on the couch. Her stick legs are jello from running away, thighs aching to forge together.
You declare it: She won’t be scared off land by run-of-the-mill bullies.
You toss all saltshakers in the trash. Desperation warps into ritual. You tape her mouth shut overnight. You replace the handkerchief with a bath towel. And in the spring, you sign her up for track, to keep her legs strong.
She wants none of this. She wants choir and summertime tanktops and showers longer than ten minutes. She calls it punishment; you call it survival. This is how you love: prepare her for the world she was born into.
Sixteen
One business trip away, and all progress is erased. Her friend calls you from the beach.
“Kai said she could swim...” she sobs. “The police can’t find her body...”
You book the first flight home. It’s midnight when you finally make it to your father’s door. The two of you tow his sailboat to shore, and launch it from the docks. You’ve never joined him on the boat before, but he’s a natural, as if he’s been doing this all his life.
You sail until land is a memory, until a freshwater ocean surrounds you on all sides. Wind carries a sound that doesn’t belong to air, while charcoal clouds curtain the waxing moon.
You dump her favorite snacks in the rowdy waves; it only attracts minnows. Her hairbrush, her pjs, her songwriting diary. Anything to remind her who she is. Anything to break this curse.
“Curse?” Your father pauses in his rowing. “Is that what you think?” His voice isn’t mocking, only tired. A grief that sounds like recognition.
Before you can respond, thunder claps overhead. He hates storms, you remember. More than three clouds in the sky, and he doesn’t leave his armchair. Tonight, there’s nowhere to run.
Trembling, he removes his sailor’s cap. Rainfall hisses against the lake’s surface and the top of his balding head.
A glow wakes beneath his skin: ancient, patient, inevitable. Cerulean wrinkles, cobalt liver spots.
He is nothing short of bioluminescent.
All this time?
A wave taller than La Grande Vittesse hovers above, before all you know is muffled stormscapes and burning lungs. Your luminous father finds you in the waves, but his legs aren’t strong enough to guide you both to the surface.
A melody soothes your convulsing chest. Your muscles relax as it warms your limbs, like a bonfire across the yard.
Oxygen extinguishes the panic in your chest. Her song is louder, clearer now. You catch sight of a magnificent fin perched atop the buoy. She’s a vision, her scales glimmering like seaglass, a wonder against the dark. She sings the storm clouds away, spilling moonlight across the lake.
It’s not easy being wrong, until you quit thrashing. Her world will not accommodate you. Sink or swim; it’s your choice.
Twenty-One
It’s far from an ordinary mother-daughter relationship. She finds her legs for brief visits; you get your scuba license. Calling proves difficult, as the water is too dense for your voice to travel. But you make it work; she leaves you voicemails.
Like you have during every full moon for the past five years, you press the blush interior of the conch shell to your ear. Sand sings across the shoreline. Rolling waves tumble through each other. Colorful fish flutter past spotted stones and timeworn shipwrecks.
Kai harmonizes with her ecosystem: pure, unalloyed, bona fide nature. The lake muffles nothing, only emboldens closer listening.
