Snow, Stars, Stone by Ariel Marken Jack
1000 words, ~5 minutes reading time
Issue 9 (Winter 2025)
She asks me to come over and watch the snow. I’d been thinking about visiting her anyway. She can’t survive up here anymore, so I make my way down there every time the itch whispers deep inside the secret spaces my ears didn’t even know they had. In the place I keep empty just in case, the soundless echo of what remains of her voice–a gift of sorts, something better than the absoluteness of irretrievable loss–is easy to hear. Her words aren’t words anymore, her language not mine, and still I understand every word she says. I’m always listening in case the silence is her. I slick my skin with the soap-bubble suit, slip on the leaden boots. It’s time to sink.
The balance between the bubble and the boots controls my descent so I don’t drop down too fast. The pressure in my bubble, in my body, adjusts as the pressure of the water around and above me increases, atmosphere by atmosphere, and the light from the sky decreases until my blood runs slow. I sink for hours, or days, or years–the waiting cannot measure the truth of time–until my slow blood has gone cold and all I can see is the nothing of unceasing dark.
“It’s you,” she says, without words, like she always does. Like there was any chance I wouldn’t come. I wonder if she really feels the surprise she expresses each time I arrive.
“It always will be,” I promise. I mean it, too. There is nothing in this world, or any other, that could stop me coming back as long as she keeps asking me to be here.
The bubble has a way of making light, but I never use it down here. Not in front of her. I haven’t seen her face since she left the surface. We don’t do much seeing anymore. Not together, at least. I know, by feel, that the shape of her has gone through some changes. I know, too, that she does not want me to see what that means. The sight of her is no longer a thing for me, not now that her body belongs to the deeps.
“Look,” she says, pointing my gaze away from whatever she has become. “It’s snowing!”
My eyes, unused to the dark, see only the faintest trace of the—let’s call it a limb—that she points with, moving slowly through the silty water. She wants me to see the snow. She forgets—or pretends to forget, at least—that down here, I am blind. I do not remind her. I can hear her smile in my head. My memory of what that smile used to look like is potent enough to keep me from doing anything that might remove whatever the smile looks like now from whatever passes for her face these days.
We used to watch the snow together, back when that meant looking up at the sky to see the feathery frozen water float down. Snow, for her, now means a shower of organic particles falling from the brighter waters above. I wish I knew if she could remember—benthic thing that she has become—what the snow still might be like in the world up there that is still–and now, only–mine. I do not ask. I cannot. I know myself well enough to know I can’t handle the truth. And anyway, this abyssal plain is all she has left. I would die before I made her feel bad about that.
“I’ve lost my manners,” she says at last. “Come in!”
She tugs me into the home—her home, only, as the house above now only belongs to me—that she has made for herself down here in the dark. She tells me her new home is lovely. Perhaps I am grateful that I cannot see what it is like.
“You’ve done some remodelling,” I say anyway. I don’t know what she’s done to this place, but I know how she used to enjoy redecorating our home. “It’s so cozy in here!”
She tows and tucks me into what my hands identify as some sort of clever basketlike chair that I think must be woven from baleen. Her new home–her new life–is built from cetacean death. Eyes closed against the dark, I can picture the great gaping ribs that curve up from the plain to form walls around and above us. Once, her house—like her—used to swim in the sunny waters that now pass for her sky. Everything falls in the end, whales and women alike. Everything ends. I chose the air. She chose the abyss.
She sits in the water beside me and touches my cheek, through the bubble, with something I do not need to see to know that it no longer resembles a hand.
“You could stay,” she says, as she always does.
I don’t think she means it, but it’s part of how we are. I lay my bubble-slick hand over whatever her hand is now. We never lie to each other—never back then, never now—and so I don’t let myself say “I could.”
She sighs, inside my head. I still miss the sound of her voice. The way we talk now, inside, without speech, is a gift beyond measure—without it, there would be no maintaining even this sorry shred of what we used to have—but it will never be enough for me.
Something pings in the suit. My air. The bubble suit is a miracle, much as her speech in my inner ears, but it too has limits. She hears the sound. A warning. For a moment, her not-hand tightens against my face. She sighs, again, and then she lets me go. We both know she could make me stay, but her gods are not my gods. I could not pronounce their names, just as she can no longer speak mine. My stars are above, and hers far below even here.
“From underneath,” she says, as she tows me out of her gruesome house, “The suit reflects everything around it. From here it looks like snow falling back up into the sky.”
She bends and adjusts the pressure settings on my boots with her too-flexible appendages. She squeezes my ankle, so tightly it almost hurts. I miss the pressure when she drifts away. I should feel lighter as I start my ascent, but inside my bubble I feel more like stone than like snow.
