fiction by krista beucler

The Water Will Come Back for You

“Don’t stay out too late. A big storm is coming.” Micah’s mom twisted the screwdriver as she tightened the shutters.

A big storm was always coming, so Micah wasn’t worried. He would go out to the beach and look in the rock pools and maybe find something for them to eat. Then he would come home, and his mom would close all the shutters. They’d run the generator and the pumps to keep the house from flooding. 

“Someday we’ll move away from here,” she’d say as the rain pounded against the house. 

But Micah knew they never would. Everyone who could move inland already had, crowding into already overcrowded cities like rabbits in hutches. Once, people moved to Florida to retire. Bought vacation homes on beachfront property. Now, it was almost all underwater. Micah and his mom had it better than most of their neighbors. Their house had stilts—though everyone had thought Micah’s father crazy for building a stilted house so far inland, when they still were inland—and the generator still worked. For now.

Micah grabbed his pail and fishing pole and raced from the house. He went down the stairs and headed for the beach. His mother had told him about the time when the land their house stood on was far from the ocean, but Micah had always known the waves’ eternal crashing in the soundtrack of his life.

The sky was tumultuous with clouds, great whipped shapes fading from pearly to sooty along the horizon. Wind mussed his hair and brought the salt spray of the ocean to mist his cheeks. It would soon bring the storm in, too.

Micah followed a road of cracked asphalt past the shanty houses where the Beekmans and the Davises and the Fergusons lived. It had at one time been an apartment building, Micah thought, or maybe it had been a resort. It had begun crumbling in on itself, the residents fortifying it with driftwood and corrugated metal.

Old cars sat abandoned on the road, and Micah thought about how every time they ran the generator, his mom looked at him with a wry smile and said, “This might be the last time. When we run out of gas, that’s it. No more. We best enjoy it.” 

Micah knew he shouldn’t love the storms. But he liked the sound of the rain against the house and the wind as it shook the trees and rattled the shutters. He liked the dim light and how he and his mom would make a fort in the living room and read all night.

*

Micah followed the road until it dead-ended into the waves. Once, you could keep driving on and on toward white sand beaches, boardwalks, and hotels overlooking the ocean. Now, the waves lapped farther and farther inland, taking bites of the land with their hungry mouths. The beach by Micah’s house had once been a golf course.

The tide was out, and Micah climbed nimbly among rocks that had formerly bordered the golf course and gazed into the tide pools. At first glance they always looked empty, but Micah’s dad had shown him how to see the constellation of life in tide pools.

Tiny silver fish darted in the shallow water. Crabs blended into the rocks until they startled away from Micah’s approach. Sea stars and mollusks and sea urchins looked as if they weren’t alive, but they were. Bubbles gathered in foamy mounds against the rocks shaped like crumpled twists of paper.

Micah picked a long shred of a plastic bag from the pool, a few barnacles stuck to it. Micah’s dad had always said that if you saw litter on the ground, you picked it up. That you should leave a place better than you found it. But every day there was more and more trash. It had begun to feel like part of the landscape. Micah dug his hands into the loose gravel on the floor of the pool and lifted out a handful. There were rocks and sand, but also sea glass and tiny flecks of plastic. He sandwiched his hands together and rubbed back and forth, feeling the smoothness of the sea glass and the pebbles and the plastic and the roughness of the sand as they rolled between his palms. He liked the feel of the earth in his hands.

Micah let the water wash the sea floor from his skin. He set his pail down between the rocks and began to thread his fishing pole and bait the hook. They had started harvesting from the tide pools when the last local store closed after weeks of empty shelves. 

Micah’s dad brought him to the new tide pools—created as the ocean flowed over cracked asphalt and sidewalks and decorative rocks and away again—and showed him what they could eat. It used to be illegal most places, his dad had said, to take the creatures from tide pools. Maybe it still was. Micah supposed that people were too hungry to care. Besides, the oysters, mussels, sea urchins, and starfish were almost all gone now. The ones that remained had exoskeletons that had gone mushy. Micah’s mom said to stay away from them. Like the constellations in the sky dimmed behind a blanket of pollution, so too was ocean life dimming.

Lowering his hook into a likely looking crevice in the rocks, Micah waited. As he sat still, the crabs—which had frozen at his presence—began to move again. He watched one amble sideways along the edge of the pool, clicking its large left claw. If he didn’t catch anything on his line, he’d catch a few crabs. Their shells were so hard that they were difficult to eat, but they were better than nothing. 

Micah’s mom would cook whatever Micah brought back in a big seafood stew. At first, gathering with his dad was fun. Micah’s dad made it a game, a treasure hunt where they ate the spoils of the hunt at the end. But, when they did it every day, it didn’t seem so like a game anymore. 

There was a tug on his line, and Micah reeled it in. An eel squirmed at the end of the line, and Micah pulled the slippery creature from the hook and put it in his pail. It was long and spotted, and it writhed, gills pumping ineffectually. 

This was the part Micah hated. He couldn’t bring himself to kill any of his catch. His dad had always done it for him. Now, his mother killed anything that was still alive by the time he brought it home. Micah knew he should kill it. He knew it would probably be kinder to kill the eel before it suffocated, but he couldn’t. He looked away. 

He saw another crab bustling along the rocks. It looked like it was holding a plastic spork in one of its claws. Micah reached out to pinch the spork out of its grasp, but the whole crab came into the air. The crab wasn’t holding the spork in its claw; the spork was its claw.

Micah examined the place where the creature’s hard shell became plastic. He could not tell if the spork was some kind of prosthesis, picked up to replace a lost claw—perhaps it was like when a tree grows around a metal fence post, incorporating the plastic into its body. Or maybe, Micah thought, this was the next stage of evolution. He looked at his own hands and arms, imagining a brittle exoskeleton of plastic that would grow over him. He thought about the pictures he’d seen of birds and fish cut open, their intestines all full of plastic waste.

If you cut me open, Micah thought a little wildly, would my insides all be plastic too? 

He shivered and set the crab down gently among the rocks. 

*

Micah moved out of the tide pools and onto the beach. That was when he saw it. For a moment, it looked like a large rock, but it was slick and smooth and shiny. His breath caught in his chest, and he ran closer, stopping short just before it.

He had thought they were all extinct. Micah’s father had shown him pictures in old encyclopedias—whales and cephalopods and manatees. 

“Gentle sea cows they called manatees. See how funny they are? The water around Florida used to be full of them.” Micah’s dad pointed out the odd creatures. 

Micah had dreamt of cephalopods, of megalodons, of blue whales, and behemoths of the deep gone one after another. Spouts and tentacles. Great mouths with sharp teeth, round swishing tails. The truth was no one really knew what was extinct, but no one had seen a manatee within Micah’s lifetime. 

The ocean had once been full of life. Now, it was full of the detritus of human lives washed off the coasts and dumped down drains, creating new islands, new continents in the rising water. 

The manatee moved lethargically, straining feebly to get back to the retreating tide, but Micah could tell it was getting tired. The waves no longer reached it; the tides had become more dramatic in recent years. Micah knew high tide wouldn’t be for hours. 

Abandoning his pail on the beach, Micah ran back to his house. He grabbed armfuls of towels from a chest on the porch and returned to the manatee. He wetted the towels in the surf and ran back up to drape them over the slick round shape of the manatee. 

When he reached the creature’s tail, he realized it had been mangled somehow—perhaps by a boat propeller—the wide, flat spade of it crushed and bleeding. As gently as he could, Micah wrapped the tail tightly in a towel. 

When that was done, Micah didn’t know what else to do. The manatee was too big to push back to the water. He sat down beside its head, patting it gently. The manatee made a soft huffing sound. 

“It’s okay,” Micah said. “When the tide comes back up, you’ll be able to swim away.” He thought about the manatee’s tail but decided not to say anything about that. The manatee was probably scared. 

“One time,” he said, “my dad and me, we went out far into the rocks during low tide. We were looking for oysters—back when their shells were still hard—and we weren’t paying attention. The tide came up fast before we realized. We were stranded on a big rock with water all around us. 

“So, I know how you must be feeling.” Micah stroked a hand over the manatee’s head. He didn’t know if the manatee could hear him. Did manatees have ears? It didn’t look like it, just round, dark eyes over a whiskered muzzle pressed into the sand.

“I was really scared, too,” he told the manatee. “I thought the water would just keep coming up and up and crashing and crashing until it swallowed the whole world. But my dad was with me, and he said everything was going to be all right. The sun went down, and he pointed out the constellations to me. He told me stories, and he talked about the tide pools.

“He always loved tide pools, my dad. He liked how they are in between. Not ocean, not land, you know. 

“He told stories the whole time. And finally, after a long time, the water went down, and we walked home. 

“So, if you’re scared, just know that the water will come back for you. I know it feels like it’s gone down and down so far it can’t be coming back, but I promise you it will.”

Micah patted the manatee again on its rounded brow. Wind whipped Micah’s hair back from his face. The wind was picking up as the storm moved in.

“Where’ve you been all this time anyway? I thought all the manatees were extinct like the megalodons and the whales and the cephalopods. Are you the last of your kind? Or do you have a big colony somewhere secret from the humans? I bet you want to get back to them. They must be worried about you, like my mom was worried about me and my dad.” 

The manatee huffed a little sound through its whiskered snout that Micah took to be an assent.

“I wish I’d been alive when my parents were kids. Or their parents. You know, when there were manatees everywhere. That’s what my dad used to say. That when he was a kid there were manatees absolutely everywhere, and mom said there weren’t so many storms. The weather was nice, and the houses didn’t have to be on stilts. Lots of people used to live here, you know, but they all moved away inland. Everyone who could anyway.

“You can still see some of the flooded cities on the coast, great big, tall buildings half underwater—hey, is that where all the manatees live now? In the abandoned skyscrapers in Miami and Tampa? People used to look for treasure in sunken pirate ships, but now, I guess they can look in sunken vacation homes.” 

Micah was quiet for a long moment. “My dad was in Tampa. When it sank. Mom said he shouldn’t go. That the flood waters were rising more and more every time there was a storm, and people were leaving because it wasn’t safe. But my uncle and cousins live there.” 

There was a long silence, and rain started to fall softly. The dark clouds crept up from the horizon. 

“Lived there,” Micah amended. 

The flooding of Tampa had been slow at first, insidious. But the storms didn’t stop and more and more of the infrastructure vanished beneath the waves. Most people evacuated before the tsunami. 

“Anyway, if you and your family live in Tampa, maybe you could look for them? I read about the great city of Atlantis, and how there were tales that somehow everyone survived, and they were living on the bottom of the ocean. No one has said that about the cities that have sunk recently. Sometimes, I like to think they’re all just fine, living with the fish on the bottom of the ocean.” 

Micah let the thought fill him for a moment: scuba divers living in underwater cities, fish darting in and out of open windows. But then the thought that always stopped this fantasy arrived: Micah’s father would have come back if he could. 

Micah looked down at the manatee. It closed its round, black eyes, and Micah felt a cold dread seeping down his neck like the rainwater. 

“No, don’t go to sleep. You just have to hang on a little longer. The water will come back. I promise. I—”

But a shout down the beach made Micah sit up. Several boys hurried up to Micah, grinning excitedly.

“Whatcha got there?” 

It was Joren Beekman, the ringleader of the gang of boys whose families lived in the resort shanty. He was stretched wiry and lean, hungry eyes in a thin face. His hands hung at his sides, but not limply; they hung there full of a potential energy, an itching to be reaching for something, snatching. 

“It’s nothing,” Micah said in a small voice. “Leave him alone.” 

But the boys were already peeling back the towels and shouting gleefully. Micah reached to stop them, but one of the boys pushed Micah aside and he landed hard in the wet sand. They were a lot bigger than him.

“Trying to save it all for yourself?” sneered the boy who had pushed him.

“Look how much meat there is on here,” one of the boys crowed. 

“Stop,” shouted Micah, but no one was listening. 

The boys circled the manatee like vultures, and it moved its flippers feebly. 

“Get a knife,” Joren said to one of the younger boys, who took off back toward their house. 

Micah pulled himself up. “You—you probably can’t eat it anyway,” he said, trying to sound persuasive and logical, though his voice trembled.

“Oh yeah?” Joren said carelessly. “And why’s that?”

Micah thought of the crab he’d seen earlier. “The meat’s probably not good. Full of plastic.” 

One of the boys laughed meanly at Micah. “You just don’t want to share.” 

The younger boy had come back with the knife. Joren took the long hunting knife in his hands, his fingers curling around the handle as if they knew it intimately.

“No,” Micah cried. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he couldn’t let them kill the manatee. He grabbed his pail, dumping out the eel, and ran at Joren.

Micah swung the pail fiercely. It connected with the boy’s shoulder, but the cheap plastic splintered. Joren knocked the broken bucket from Micah’s hands. He punched Micah on the side of his head, and black starbursts like sea urchins danced across Micah’s vision. He stumbled. 

“Hold him back,” Joren said when Micah struggled to get up.

The boy who had laughed grabbed him roughly and held his arms behind his back. Micah struggled but couldn’t move.

“Turn it over,” Joren said. 

It took six of them to turn the manatee on its side, one flipper crushed beneath it, the other pointed toward the sky. Micah held his breath, straining to get free. The grip of the boy holding him never wavered. 

Joren drew the knife efficiently down the manatee’s belly in a long, practiced motion, and Micah howled. The skin split apart like a zipper, and mangled organs tumbled out. Its stomach was cut clean open. 

There was a long silence as all the boys on the beach stared at the insides of the manatee glistening in the rain. Joren growled in frustration. 

“Shit,” the boy holding Micah said in disgust. 

The manatee was full of plastic, just as Micah had predicted. Muscles striated with strips of shopping bags, blubber pocked with bottle caps, threaded with plastic netting, intestines filled with slivers like the slivers of Micah’s plastic pail, and tiny pellets of plastic like fish eggs.

The boy who was holding Micah dropped him in the sand. One of the boys snatched up Micah’s eel. The boys ran off back toward their house hooting and crowing. Seagulls exploded out of their path into the sky.

Micah crawled over to the manatee’s head. The rain fell on them both. Micah was crying. He stroked the manatee’s nose. 

“See, see?” he hiccuped through his tears. “Here comes the water. It’s come up, just like I said it would.” 

The waves crashed on wildly, closer and closer as the tide came in, until they washed around Micah and the manatee.  

Originally from Colorado, Krista Beucler received a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing at the University of Mary Washington in Virginia. She was the Editor-in-Chief for Issue 7.2 of the Rappahannock Review, and is currently a reader for Under the Sun. Krista is a winner of the Julia Peterkin award, and her creative work has been published in Kelp Journal, The Bangalore Review, and South 85 Journal.