Sea Life
Elizabeth Hansen (Oakland, California, USA)
I thought I was turning into a whale when the first barnacle appeared. After pulling on my swimsuit, I turned in the mirror to discover one of the crustaceans growing on the back of my left shoulder. I reached around to touch its small shell encrusted on my skin like a spiny scab. It was the day after my fortieth birthday, and I didn’t feel ready to begin my slow transformation into sea life. There was still so much life I had to live. Esme had just turned thirteen. Zane was preparing to take his long-awaited sabbatical. I finally thought I’d have time to work on my book.
Wrapping a towel around my waist, I decided one barnacle wasn’t enough to worry about, so I walked to the kitchen, kissed Zane on the cheek and Esme on the forehead, closed the front door behind me, and started down the road in my sandals. It was a short walk to the shaded cove and the long flight of wooden stairs down to the beach. At the edge of the water, the wind pricked my skin and I felt the barnacle rise like a goosebump. The sky was cloudless and the water reflecting the sun gleamed bottle green. The horizon was straight and absolute in the clear light, and I could understand why early cartographers believed venturing to its edge meant falling off the side of the earth. On hazy days, I swore I could see their ships rise in the swell of waves like ghosts against the sky.
I tossed my towel on the sand, drew my goggles down over my eyes, and waded in. This early in the season the water was so cold it stung my skin, and as I dove under, the cold took my breath, the shock of it tightening muscle to bone. It was this feeling that I craved, that I thought about when I fell asleep at night—the sudden numbing and contraction, the cold plunge into darkness. The sea was a rush and a calling, a beckon underwater where I felt suddenly alive, part of a whole different landscape with different rules. I imagined myself a whale, all breath in my lungs and blood in my heart, the barnacle on my shoulder tugging at my skin like a crust of hardened blood on a wound. When I surfaced, I turned to face the shoreline to see how far out I’d gone.
On the shore, time was passing quickly. The sun had risen above the tops of the houses on the bluffs. The beach house was nearly hidden behind an overgrowth of shrubbery—a shingled two-story saltbox that belonged to my grandparents and that I had visited nearly every summer of my life. I’d been swimming in these waters since I was born. Zane started coming with me to the beach house when we were dating, and Esme first swam in these waters inside my belly. When she was little, she would play in the tidepools with the starfish, periwinkles, minnows, and barnacles that grew everywhere along the rocks.
I floated in the cold water, waited for a wave to come along and swell beneath me, carrying me up up up as I sailed on its crest, higher, buoyant, for a moment. Then the cold started to seep into my bones. I didn’t have enough blubber yet to keep warm, and so I prepared to dive under again, to hold my breath and kick my feet toward the shallower, warmer waters. When I got back to shore and wrapped my shivering body in my towel, I turned back to look out toward the quiet deep. I could do it, easily. Slip into the sea and join the schools of fish that passed below, calling to me, Come on, down you go! But I wasn’t ready yet. I still had so much to do.
//
Later that summer, another barnacle appeared. The two sat side by side, a pair of eyes looking out behind me. I ran my fingers along their rough surfaces and picked at the edges of their shells. It was as if they’d bloomed from the deepest layers of my skin. The more time passed, the more barnacles grew.
The year my father died, three more barnacles grew across my back. We had a funeral at the house and tossed his ashes to the sea. Zane spent the first month of his sabbatical helping me clean my parent’s stuff from their apartment. We moved my mom to a retirement home. The winter was long and cold and gray. I got sick and spent most of January in bed. I didn’t get started on my book. More barnacles grew.
When Esme left for college, I woke up days later with a mound of barnacles the size of a walnut under my arm. I tried everything to get rid of them: balms, salves, creams, scrubs, and tonics. Nothing worked. Soon my skin was the subject of family conversation: “Were they alive?” Esme wanted to know. “Did they latch onto me when I was swimming?”
Zane was concerned about my mental health: “Were the barnacles a symptom of anxiety? Depression? Was I overstressed?” He feverishly googled every issue but found no answers.
The doctors did not understand.
I studied the creatures, observed the way their shells cemented together and overlapped, how they grew in a pattern that branched across my skin like veins. They clung to things along the waterfront like rocks, docks, and piers, attaching themselves so tightly that they would often destroy the things they called home, cracking the hulls of ships and rotting the pillars that supported piers. Sometimes they’d attach themselves to whales, who had the burden of carrying the creatures thousands of miles across the sea.
The older I got, the more the weight of all that shell started slowing me down. My body became a material record of time that refused to escape my notice.
//
The year Esme got married, the barnacles grew in the creases of my eyes.
When my mother died, they grew in clusters beneath my heels.
When Zane was diagnosed with cancer, they grew along the edges of my mouth and in my nostrils, making it hard to breathe.
The year I turned seventy-five, Esme suggested we go whale-watching, so we drove to the tip of the peninsula and boarded a boat. By then the barnacles had grown between my toes, which made balance difficult, so I had to hold onto the railing as we braced against the open ocean.
The sun was high and bright that day, the horizon just a hazy line that made it hard to tell where the ocean ended and the sky began. We had our sights on the distant north, and after about twenty-five minutes of the breeze whipping my hair in my face, our guide spotted a pod. It was a group of humpbacks. Passengers crowded on the deck taking pictures with their phones. There were cries of delight as one of the humpbacks expelled through its blowhole, spouting water into the sky. I kept looking for the horizon. My sea legs were weak, and I was feeling a bit queasy on the gallop of the waves.
Pretty soon the humpbacks were close enough that we could see the slick of their skin, and that’s when my hearing went blank. Esme turned to me with her eyes lit up, her face full of awe, and all I could do was nod as if I understood. It was like the world went silent and all I could hear was the swish of sea in my ears and a low, distant groan.
Then the largest of the creatures passed beside our boat, its silver skin glistening with the sun on its back. The reflection of light on the water fractured into prisms and suddenly my vision went blurry. I was staring straight into the white sun as the great whale breached, a silhouette against the sky, the giant, smooth rolling of its arched back like a wheel turning in water. The barnacles rose along my ribs and spine. I opened my mouth, but no words came. I felt the impact as I hit the water and then I blacked out.
A blur of faces came into focus as I came to. We were back onshore, and Esme and several strangers were leaning over me, blocking out the sun. The paramedics said I had fainted, hit my head on a railing. They checked my vitals, shined a light in my eyes to watch my pupils dilate. They gave me an ice pack for the welt on my forehead, then Esme and I drove back to the beach house where my son-in-law and grandkids waited.
//
During the last days of August, I passed much of my time in the wicker chair on the porch overlooking the harbor. That view was so familiar to me, so unchanging, that the only real variation was in the light. One muggy evening when I couldn’t sleep, I went out to the porch to get some air. The moon was full and cast a watery reflection on the surface of the waves. That’s when I thought I saw several dark spots appear in the moonlight on the water. I tried not to blink so I wouldn’t lose them, but my eyes weren’t so reliable anymore, so I walked to the end of the porch where we kept the telescope. I scanned the waters with the telescope’s eye, but didn’t see anything. I waited a while, then sure enough, after some time I saw them. A pod roving along as if they owned the sea. In a way, they did. They’d been wielding the earth’s waters for fifty million years since the harbor was still a great ice sheet and supercontinents collided creating the birth and death of oceans.
I waited. I stood on the edge of the porch all night. The barnacles rose on my skin with the tide beneath the moon. I waited for the whales to emerge from the lightless depths, if only for a breath. I kept my eyes steady on the telescope but felt compelled to turn back. I wanted to turn back to the walls of the house and the windows that looked in, where a single lamp cast a warm glow in the quiet of the living room, where upstairs my family slept and where I lumbered to ascend the stairs with the weight of the barnacles. I wanted to turn back so I could stay among them, but I knew it was time. I’d have to watch my grandchildren grow old from the sea. I kept my eyes trained on the pod. I stood with my toes on the edge of the porch. I watched the whales, waiting for the moment, the breach, then lifted my nose to the bright cloudless sky and dove, joining them in their momentary flight, until I felt that cold, rippling plunge into the deep ancient alien void.
Elizabeth Hansen lives in Oakland, California. She writes fiction and personal essays that explore the blurred lines between self and story, and how what we believe about ourselves informs our relationships—with those we love, strangers, our environment, and our pasts. Her work has been published in Smoky Mountain Arts and Literary Magazine, Mamalode, and elsewhere.
