Herring

The Abyss

Follow— follow the bubbles. Follow those damned bubbles.

A faint memory she recollected from all her time spent online, upon which she had stumbled upon a survival guide for this exact situation at 2am one random night years ago. It's almost as if someone's writing her story.

Where are those damned bubbles?

She exhaled—a tiny, precious stream of silver—and watched it rise. That way. That way was life. She kicked toward it—

~

I'm taking the story back! No f*****g arguments!

~

I KICKED.

My legs were dead meat. The boots—those stupid, comfortable, practical boots I'd worn to my shitty warehouse job—were pulling me down like concrete shoes. I kicked harder. My lungs were already screaming. That special kind of scream that starts in your chest and radiates outward, turning every cell into a tiny panic alarm.

Air air air air air—

Shut up. I'm working on it.

The surface was up there somewhere. I couldn't see it. The water was black-green, a bruise in every direction, lit only by the faintest glow from—somewhere. The city maybe. The dying headlights of the truck sinking beneath me. I didn't look down. I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see the depth. I didn't want to know how far I had to go.

Just swim. Just f*****g swim. One arm. Then the other. You've done harder things. You survived Hargrove. You survived the fish. You survived—

And then I saw her.

Varietta.

She was below me. Maybe ten feet. Maybe less. Suspended in the water like a broken doll. Her long black hair fanned out in a slow-motion halo. Her arms drifting at her sides. Her face—what I could see of it—was slack. Empty. A gash on her forehead leaked a thin, lazy ribbon of black into the water. Blood looks wrong underwater. It doesn't spread like it should. It just... oozes. A slow, obscene unwinding.

She was sinking.

Good. Good. Let her sink. She drove us off a bridge. She did this. She can f*****g drown, the cunt.

My legs kept kicking upward.

She's unconscious. She's dying. She's—

Not your problem. NOT YOUR f*****g PROBLEM.

My body turned. Not my brain. My brain was screaming UP, GO UP, YOU STUPID CUNT, SAVE YOURSELF. But my body—the part of me that still remembered being human, the part that hadn't been chewed up by nineteen years of petty cruelties, isolation, loneliness, fish rumors and bosses who looked at me like I was garbage—that part turned around. That part dove down.

I reached her in three strokes. My lungs were a furnace now. White-hot. Consuming. I grabbed her jacket. Tried to haul her upward. She was dead weight. A sack of wet bones. I pulled. Nothing. Pulled harder. My shoulders shrieked. My vision was spotting, narrowing, a tunnel closing in from the edges.

Come on. Come ON. You owe me nothing but I'm here anyway, I'm f*****g here, the least you can do is—

Her eyes opened.

Not groggy. Not confused. Not the slow, bleary return of a near-drowned woman clawing back to consciousness.

Present.

Alive.

Calculating.

And then her hands were on my shoulders and she pushed.

Not a shove born of panic. A deliberate, two-handed launch. She used me. Used my body as a goddamn springboard, driving herself upward while shoving me deeper into the black. I went under—no, I was already under, I went further—the water closing over my head like a second lid on a coffin I hadn't agreed to climb into.

WHAT THE f**k—

I flailed. Grabbed for her. Caught her arm. Her bicep. Felt the muscle tense beneath my numb fingers. She twisted. Wrenched. Her arm slid through my grip like a greased snake. I grabbed again. Her wrist.

Got you! You f*****g—

She pulled back. Harder. More violent. A person fighting for the surface and entirely willing to drown whoever was beneath her to reach it. And why wouldn't she be. I was nothing to her. A passenger. A witness. A convenient step on the ladder out of this wet grave.

My fingers slipped. Caught on something solid. Not flesh. Metal.

A ring. On her finger. I hooked my index finger around it and pulled—not to save her, not anymore, just pure animal reflex, grab something, hold something, don't let her win, don't let her—

She yanked her hand free.

The ring came with me.

I watched her go. Up. Toward the light I couldn't see. Her legs kicking with strong, efficient strokes. The strokes of a woman who had never been unconscious. Never been drowning. Never been anything but escaping.

And I was sinking.

The ring was in my fist. I hadn't realized I'd clenched it. My fingers were locked around it so tight that I couldn't have opened them if I tried. And I wasn't trying. I was just—falling. Slowly. The water pressing in from all sides. The cold no longer cold but something beyond cold, something absolute, something that had stopped being a sensation and had become a state of being.

The dread came not as a thought but as a flood.

My grandmother's hands. Wrinkled. Warm. Holding a teacup with a chip in the rim that she refused to replace because it still works, doesn't it. Gone. She was gone. I was going where she went. Maybe I'd see her. Maybe there was nothing. Maybe the nothing was the point.

Aldy on the windowsill. The streetlight catching his leaves in silver.

Who will water you. Who will even know you're there. You'll die slow and brown and no one will notice. Just like me.

The fish. The rumor. The tin of sardines on the staircase. The girl with the decorative face and the laugh designed to be heard. None of it mattered. None of it. I spent my last days on earth being humiliated over a FISH. A f*****g FISH. And now I'm drowning and that's my legacy. That's what they'll remember. Fish Girl. v****a Fish. Dead in a river.

How f*****g poetic.

The marker on the brick wall. I WAS HERE AND IT DIDN'T MATTER. I wrote my own epitaph in a dirty alley with a frayed marker and I didn't even know I was doing it. I was just angry. Just tired. Just trying to prove I existed. And now I was proving the opposite. I was proving the words right. I was here. It didn't matter. It never mattered. I never—

Nineteen years.

That's all I got.

Nineteen years of waking up early and dreading the day. Of burnt coffee and wet bike seats and broken elastic bands with plastic daisies from seventh grade. Of sticky notes on fridges that I never looked at. Of errands I never ran. Of a grave I visited but couldn't climb into. Of wanting so badly to be something and never once figuring out what.

That's the whole thing. That's the whole f*****g thing.

I was here. I WAS HERE.

My fist clenched harder. The ring bit. I felt it—a distant, muffled pressure—as the metal edge sliced into my palm. The skin split. Blood bloomed into the water, black in the dying light, a small dark cloud expanding from my closed hand. I didn't feel the pain. Not really. I felt the fact of it. The fact that I was still capable of bleeding. Still capable of being wounded. Still, in some technical sense, alive.

Not for long.

Not for f*****g long.

I reached upward. One last time. My arm extending toward a surface I couldn't see. Toward a sky that didn't care. Toward a woman who had used me as a step and was now gone. My fingers spread. Reaching. Please. I didn't know who I was asking. God. The universe. My dead grandmother under the hawthorn tree. Anyone. Anything.

Please. Please. I don't want to—

Fuck that.

FUCK. THAT.

I am NOT going out like this. I am not going to be a f*****g footnote. A sad little f*****g sob story?

I'm not f*****g finished!

The water pressed in. My lungs were on fire. My vision was a pinhole. My body was done. It had quit. It had signed the papers and clocked out. But I hadn't. I hadn't. The thing behind my eyes, the thing that was ME—that thing was still screaming.

I decide! I decide how this ends! Not the water. Not Varietta. Not the universe. ME. I DECIDE!

My fist clenched around the ring. The metal split my palm to the bone. I didn't care. I wanted it. I wanted the pain. Pain meant I was still here. Pain meant I hadn't surrendered. Pain was PROOF.

You don't get to kill me. You don't get to write my ending. I'll write my ending. I'll write the whole f*****g BOOK.

AND I'LL KILL ANYONE WHO GETS IN MY f*****g WAY!

The darkness ate my vision. My thoughts fractured. Splintered. Became less than words. Became pure, white-hot, undiluted FURY.

I WILL NOT—

Nothing.

The abyss took her.

True to her resolve, her fist remained clenched, even in… death.