Brine and Possibility, by Devan Barlow

Familiar shouts echoed behind her as she raced through thick patches of yellow gorse, heading for the sea.

Experience had taught her these were the best moments for running away, when her brothers were too obsessed with out-shouting one another to notice her. If only these moments ever lasted longer.

When she finally reached the shore, she tried to sit. Her limbs were so unsteady it became more of a fall, but so intense was her anguish she barely felt the impact of herself upon the sand.

Her brothers were sending her away. To another house, so far from the sea she would never hear the gulls’ sweet song again. Sending her away in exchange for the bagfuls of gold she was worth, for roof repairs and replenishing the claret and her brothers’ continuing refusal to recognize the world steadily decomposing around them.

Never again would she escape to the shore, and pick a rock rose to secret in her sleeves. A little piece of the sea she could carrying inside with her in the days to come, after her brothers caught her and refused to let her out of the manor for days. Long enough for the rock rose to shrivel, and lose its scent.

As she would shrivel, she knew, if they took her from the sea.

Her left hand brushed against something that rippled back against her skin. Before she could take in what it was, instinct jerked her backward, and she realized she had touched a jellyfish.

The creature was a clear, faintly-wobbling shape on the sand, of a kind she had seen before, but never so close. Within it floated small lilac shapes that fascinated her, enough she leaned closer despite her better judgement. She only stopped when a new smell, thick with brine and possibility, overpowered the familiar perfume of the nearby sea kale.

Like all raised near the sea, she had heard tales enough of the jellyfish who took folk into the water, plucking them from shore and boat alike.

During stolen moments in the library her brothers neither appreciated nor deserved, she had looked at books of natural history. Marveling at words — rhopalia, cnidarian, nematocyst — that were strangely comforting as they played along her tongue and soft palate. She always watched for the jellyfish, in her time on the shore, but never before had she touched one.

The craving to touch the creatures had lived within her for years, but always before this she had been poisoned by the strands of obligation and history that tied her to the family’s house, and to her brothers’ control. Barbs, under her skin, releasing a venom that killed oh-so-slowly, and kept her afraid.

Jellyfish had no hearts, she recalled from the pages of one particular volume, its covers bruised violet and ochre.

Heartlessness was a state that now called to her, as violently as this creature must long to return to the sea. For what good had hearts ever done her? Her own caused her to yearn, and long, and yet buckle under the strength of her family’s pressures.

All of her brothers had hearts, beating within their human chests, yet when had those organs ever inclined them to generosity, to understanding, to any kind of fellow feeling that might incline them to care about the feelings of a sister who tried to explain why she needed to stay, yet was always ignored.

Beyond the gorse bushes, where bees buzzed in enviable purpose, the voices of her brothers split the air, their tenor changed. They had noticed her missing.

Yet, another call reached her, a sensation beginning in the fingers that had touched the jellyfish, passing through the bones of her left hand, up to her shoulder, her heart…

At first she feared poison, until she recognized the sudden change was not venom, but instead…

It was possibility, offered by the jellyfish still bobbing beside her. Offered with more generosity than any heart could hold.

With both hands, she scooped up the jellyfish, and quickly drew them both deeper into the sea.

Her brothers’ futile cries drowned under the sound of waves.

Bright, bewildering, bombastic sensation coursed through her body. Human flesh, heart, and pain gave way to tentacles, mesoglea, and triumph.

Devan Barlow

Devan Barlow is the author of the Curses & Curtains series of fairy tales-meet-musicals fantasy novels. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in several anthologies and magazines. She reads voraciously, and can often be found hanging out with her dog, drinking tea, and thinking about sea monsters.

• Website: https://devanbarlow.com
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