Kohiko’s father drowned in the morning.

In the afternoon, I found Kohiko by the edge of the largest tidepool. She watched the limpets crawl on the red gums of the shore. Eels squished between the black teeth of cooled lava. Kohiko flinched when I arrived, but I said nothing.

“Where did it happen?” she finally asked.

“The deep one.”

“He went back?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?” she asked, pulling her knees in tight.

“He only went alone twice,” I told Kohiko. “When he was very young and today.”

Kohiko scoffed.

“That was enough.”

Kohiko turned to the sea, and I watched it with her. The water roared and foamed. Turtles flicked in the turmoil. Farther from shore, the waves eased and rolled. A cloud turned the blueness black, and I could smell the wash of decay. 

In the evening, Kohiko entered the sea. I swam to the reef with her. But I was too old to venture below. I floated with the old milk-jug buoy and helped Kohiko time her breathing. Her face relaxed above the tented waves.

“You cannot dive it all on one breath,” I said. “For your first dive, just look at the deep.”

Kohiko did not speak; she focused on her breath. Her thin chest filled and shrunk, and at times it looked as if her bones would snap with the flexes.

“Slow,” I told her, and Kohiko slowed. With each intake, she filled herself entirely, and with each exhalation, she emptied. Her ribs bent and her eyes shone above the waves. After the fifth breath, she dove.

The water was sharp and clear underneath Kohiko’s glass mask. She looked back at my wrinkled toes, and the spears that hung from the milk-jug. Then she kicked hard and dipped.

The reef rose from the deep like a molar of the sea. As the girl swam towards the great coral, a heavy ache pressed her chest. Even as the green bulbs and algae took shape, she could feel her breath urging. Kohiko swam on, clamping her chest, and then fish appeared. Red grunters and yellow dancers scrambled over the crags and cracks, flickering like living jewels amid the blue and green. The girl soon reached the roof.

The water was cold, the rock was old, and the Kohiko could see the heavy eyes of the fish that lived in the wrinkles and the shadows. She worried those fish would be easy to take. Kohiko rested above the rock. She swam to the edge. It dropped fast beside the deep one, and the girl shivered above the dark water. Remembering my warning, she glanced at the surface. But it was dim and far and she swam on down the drop.

The coral on the vertical slab was older. Larger fish lurked in the crevices. The water went from navy to indigo, and still the girl swam. Her chest beat against the quiet like a drum at night, and soon the girl glimpsed ink.

The slash of black was first a wisp, a gasp of darkness, utterly unlike the land. The girl felt the impossible press of water on her chest, on her mask, on her head, and yet she saw the gash in the deep. She saw the bottom of reef, and then she turned. Kohiko fled the darkness for the surface. Flexing her small form against the water, against the screaming in her chest, against the slimy-thick fish that laughed at the small girl who swam next to the deep one.

When the girl passed the top of the reef she relaxed into her struggle. Even as her mind scratched her lungs, Kohiko sighed into calm. As the surfaced loomed, Kohiko felt the sky pulling at her chest, arms, and legs, and she hungered for air. She remembered the gasp of sound, the sting of salt, the shine of day. The goodness of the land approached, and Kohiko had seen the deep one. She found the depths and the hidden parts below.

“It is deep,” Kohiko said, after she regained her breath.

I nodded at the shivering girl with kelp-green eyes.

“I should take a spear.”

I unclipped one of the dark metal prongs with the elastic band. Kohiko had seen men take guns to the dark places, but the spear was better for her. The spear was more dependable.

As twilight wind kissed the ocean, I tapped the milk-jug. Kohiko inhaled again. The dizziness came faster this time. It filled Kohiko’s chest, danced on her neck, and spun in her head. I warned Kohiko about the light, the faintness, but my words shrunk beneath the glow. Kohiko worked her lungs in a cycle. She pumped the long heaves, fought the sharp gasps, and leaned back into the deep sighs. Then she dove again.

Kohiko descended faster to the shrouded reef. She reached it without an ache. The small, kicking girl swum over the edge, and the cold water pressed around her. Kohiko felt the slimy wet of the cave before she saw it. She yearned for the depths far above the black maw. And still she kicked down, down to the blue lips.

Here the great reef rested on a deep purple field of rock, where light fell like a memory. An ugly cave slashed along the edge between the decomposing coral and the sandy bottom. The girl looked at the heavy grey fish that swum between the boulders around her, and she felt the darkness of the slit as a black terror, a beckoning horror that pulled her inwards.

The girl’s chest ached with fear and hunger for air, and yet it pushed her inwards. She followed the tip of her spear through the seam, and in the beginning all was still. In the beginning the black water was not water, it was night and quiet, an impossibly sealed glass that the girl could not escape. Then the outlines appeared.

The girl dared not ruin her eyes on the daylit entrance, for once she saw the moving outlines—thick, wet, and fast—she remembered the deep fish. Kohiko felt the scaled giants that spun around her. They danced in a world of blind hunger. Kohiko touched them, and her chest shriveled inwards, and the spear band tightened, and then the girl saw white.

Kohiko glimpsed bleached bones on the rocky bottom, the bones of old fish and men. Her bubbles screamed into the dimness, and Kohiko groped to escape the pressure and weight. Thick fish scrabbled with her. They feared the sound and turbulence; they sensed the sharp spear, and the water churned with skin, scales, arms, and fins.

Kohiko burst from the dark and the heavy fish surged with her. The great gray giants rose with Kohiko, wide as a canoe, heavy as a pig. The oldest beasts with dull heads and dying scales swung their tales and battered Kohiko with currents, even as she fought for the surface. As the purple turned to blue, the fish thinned, and the water stilled. Kohiko heeded only the rough pangs of her chest. The mirror cold surface dragged Kohiko upwards. The trailing bubbles rose impossibly fast around her. The black fins on her feet flexed. But the water parted slowly, yawning, sluggishly—the deep pulled Kohiko back like blooming death.

The air kissed life. Kohiko breathed again in my arms. She grasped the sun-warmed milk-jug to float and balance. The sea surface of night greeted her again.

“That was too long,” Kohiko said, and I shrugged. “Why do you let me go so deep?”

“Some go deep.”

Kohiko searched my gray hair and my deep shadowed wrinkles for worry.

“Will you stop me next time?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I am too old.”

“Then tell me to stop. You only need to say it.”

“It would not last.”

“How do you know?” Kohiko said, and suddenly she felt again the horror of the cave. Suddenly she felt lonely on the sloshing ocean, with the slimy wetness below, and deeper something unfound, below the depths of water and coral.

“I stopped one before,” I said, and I was already tapping on the jug for breath. “I stopped your father, and he went back.”

Kohiko felt a sadness in her cheeks, and she bent in sobbing heaves. The gasps came with her breaths, and soon Kohiko pushed the sorrow beneath them. She shivered each exhalation, and she felt a lightness thundering in her last cycle. In Kohiko’s final breath, a furious excitement ignited her lungs, her throat, and her salty sinuses, and then she dipped.

On the third dive the green water parted bright as morning. Kohiko opened her mouth on the way down. She let the salty current slip between her lips, until it filled her mouth. The coolness stopped at her throat, but Kohiko dreamed that she could breathe the brine.

The girl reached the cave quickly. She only paused at the purple teeth to tighten her spear. Then she let the metal hum below the taught rubber, she tensed her goose-bumped skin, and she brushed through the rough, calcified death, squeezing into the darkness.

Under the rock and water, Kohiko sensed the fish and the bones around her. The space was big and quiet. Kohiko imagined the sharpness of her being focused on her spear point. The power of the weapon pulled her forward. It also pushed the fish away. The dark shapes hid from Kohiko and her intention, and so she pressed deeper into the cave.

Kohiko cooked terror in her stomach, now. She endured the final dive nerves like spider crabs in her insides. A horror and a hunger for air drove Kohiko down into the black, and still the fish backed away. The thick shapes slunk further then bones beneath the coral, the outlines disappeared, all light faded, and then the reef shifted. The deep one moved.

Kohiko felt the water tremble and reverberate, and all was hidden. No light showed beneath the reef, but the vibrations shook Kohiko until, almost by accident, her air broke out. The water became alive, and Kohiko lost her bubbles, and rocks pummeled around her and then Kohiko glimpsed the fish. It appeared from inside of her: a vision of the reef alive. Kohiko touched the movement all around, rippling, tasting, smelling, all of the parts she thought dead. Kohiko’s eyes saw blackness, but beneath it, she remembered the knurled coral heads, and the great waving sea fans, and the red rock, and they formed into mighty eyes, and feathered fins, and ancient gills, a rock fish eating, eating, and ever growing in the forgotten sea. 

The ancient being rose above Kohiko like a black mountain before the sun. Kohiko knew the earth then, and as the lightness rose in her chest, she remembered what had always haunted beneath. Kohiko recognized why she swam deeper. She reveled in her longer breath. She thrilled in her greatest hunt, greater than her father, but she paused.

Kohiko waited, even though her lungs pulsed like burning lanterns, and her mind ached for breath. Kohiko held back her spear, even as she swept around the flailing fish. It swung fins and currents, desperate to kill any eye that saw it. The ageless one muddled with the bottom to snuff the girl out. Yet beneath the fury, Kohiko balanced. She listened to the vibrations of the fish’s heart. She forced herself to see the scarred flanks, one last time, for after the thrust it would die. Kohiko knew the fish would perish on her spear. It would float to the surface, and I would see it. Her elders, and the village, and even Kohiko’s father: they would all see the hulking, slouching hunger of the land, but it would be dead. The great hoary stomach of the sea would be bloodless when others saw it, and it would be up to Kohiko to tell its life.

The fish rose again, groping for Kohiko, and she felt a love for it. The eternal weight of the ocean clawed and bit at crevices where Kohiko scurried. She wished to flee it forever. Kohiko wished to watch and battle the ancient spines and barnacles beyond her day and into the next, seething and ripping, devouring eons of life inside its jaws. Kohiko dreamed of staying beneath the reef for all time, but her breath was failing. Her lungs yanked at her throat, and the air in her nose liquified, and she lunged with the spear. Kohiko burst forward. The shaft ripped through soft scales, rubber skin, and then the water heated with blood. The salty depths thickened with pumping heat, and Kohiko could taste the life in the water, and yet she was already swimming. Even as the mighty groaning in the deep one rent the water, Kohiko twisted and surged, pulling at the darkness, grasping at the rocks, and she saw light. She saw the last sunset orange ahead, but it was far. The rock fish thrashed. The water murked with life. And soon Kohiko realized the murk was also death. She saw the dim tendrils in the water as an ever stillness, a wonder lost, and as she struggled to regain the light, it was a falseness. The sun sunk towards its own horizon above, and Kohiko closed her eyes to kick, stifled by the closeness, the great fish dead and dying in quivers all around her, here in the water of her home. Kohiko’s slick skin rubbed hard against the caves rough throat, and the rocks grasped her still form, and only the red current pulled the body on through the deep.

Kohiko awakened on the surface. I bent over her, and when she woke in surprise, I fought Kohiko like a landed fish. The sea boiled. Wind rippled. And my voice was just wailing on the waves. Kohiko gulped emptiness and tasted water. Her chest seared like palm lashings and she clawed and scratched until she could feel air inside again. The fighting slowed. The wrinkles in my face smoothed, rinsed into the smoothness of the evening water, and soon Kohiko stared at an empty ocean. She was alone. The sea cleared, deep and cool, and memories of a fish lurked, but they lacked life. The memories salted like rocks and shells, even as Kohiko wished for blood. She swam towards the lights of her village, yearning for tales of devouring fish, bending spear, and beating water, but the pieces went cold in her. A loneliness murmured through the waves, a chill of something lost or ever unfound, a question that slowed Kohiko. Before the shore, she stopped. Kohiko rolled to question the stars, a body alone and adrift, without the illusions of light and darkness, fear and fury, asking as I have asked for many years, her and her father:

“Who among the dead float?”

Originally published in The Bitter Oleander:
Vol. 27, Number 2 ($10).

eBook ($1)