From the Mothers That Swam Before

To the woman who braids kelp at the bottom of the sea:

I hear you singing every night. Songs you learned from the whales, passed down through waves—generations diving, seeking the darkest places to fill with sound.

I see you crowned in urchins, kelp encasing your arms and pooling in your lap. I see your iridescence: aquamarine and crimson and that scar just below your left gill. You were attacked by a sailfish while swimming alone. You swim nowhere now.

Your eyes are pale; they’ve forgotten how sunlight feels.

I see the shard of propeller, too, still embedded in your tail. Whorls of scales flash as you float, as you sink. Under all the waves the sea still moves you with its pulse. You let it, buried in kelp and shadow.

Most of all, I see the blanket you are braiding. It fills the water around you, fills the cave that must be something like the place you hatched, when you swam your first strokes in lighter waves. Brown and green and black, your work eddies like a life apart, your only company in the depths.

I wonder why you dove, leaving coral and light behind. You spent the best years of your life with dolphins, yet they do not visit you in your cave at the foot of the world. Did you lose them in clouded currents? Were they beside you when the propeller struck, left you limping down to the personless depths? I have seldom known a pod to abandon one of its own. Had you been among seals, things could have been different.

Yet we never dive as deep as your cave.

You alone produce no light, eels bioluminescing between the loose white strands of your hair. I see them, too—lighting your work. Though after years you have learned to braid without sight, your hardened fingers finding their way.

Alone with your craft, you hum the tunes of the whales.

Once a sperm whale found you, drawn to your keening, absent-minded song. She loved your curious accent, the lilting melody she recalled from her calfhood. At the mouth of your cave, she brought you news of stars and seagulls. She told you of shapes she saw in the clouds and gossip she shared with orcas.

She urged you, politely, to rejoin the lighter sea. She feared for the future you’d find, isolated in darkness as no mermaid should live.

You declined. Kelp in your hands, white in your hair, you stayed in aloneness.

She honored your decision, though she worried when she left. As a parting gesture, she brought you a colossal squid to eat. You might yet have some left, each meal a practice of groping sensation in the lightless depths.

I wonder—what will you do when the squid runs out? What will you do when your hands fumble for kelp, and there is none more to braid? Will you be content to remain as you are, in those coldest waves?

Or will you raise your face at last, and sing?

†

In my mind’s eye, you rest on a carpet of kelp, braiding with webbed and wrinkled hands. Your arms trail jellyfish tentacles and your hair glimmers with treasures brought to you by crabs. In my mind you are beautiful and gray.

You do not see or hear me, in your cave at the bottom of the sea. You do not wonder how I wear my hair, or what wrought the wrinkles under my eyes.

I wear my hair in a braid when I am on land. In the sea, though, I let it loose. The wrinkles I harvested from the wind, from salt and cold. I wonder if yours were carved by waves.

You do not know me at all. You do not know that I, too, learned to sing from the whales. Into their music I weave my own seal songs, inherited from my mother and her mother and the mothers that swam before.

I like to imagine that we were singing the same song, when the sperm whale found us. You in your cave, me in the bay—diving as rain turned the waves rough.

She rose from the dark, humming music we both know. Music we both sing with accents borne from the waters that birthed us.

Circling a school of hake, she told me about you.

Alone at the bottom of the sea, you think no one can see you. No one can hear you. But I can. In my mind you braid and sing and drift. Before I shed my coat and came ashore, rain washing the salt from my skin, I asked her to follow your song a second time.

I gave her a message. I know she will not forget a single word.

†

If you ever tire of the depths, if your fingertips grow cold and numb between kelp leaves—sing the song of the sperm whale.

She will find you. Take her tail in your rough hands, and hold tight.

I will be waiting in the bay, my hair loose and my voice thrown to the waves. Where our songs meet, let go. You won’t sink; the seals will catch you.

When our hands intertwine, I will see you at last outside of my mind. You will hear me outside of her voice. Between waves and rocks, neither of us need drift alone.

My coat can keep us both warm.

© 2022 Marisca Pichette

About the Author

Marisca Pichette is an author of speculative fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. More of her work can be found in Strange Horizons, Fireside Magazine, Fusion Fragment, Apparition Lit, PseudoPod, and PodCastle, among others. Her speculative poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, is forthcoming from Android Press in Spring 2023. Find her on Twitter as @MariscaPichette and Instagram as @marisca_write.