Excerpts from “Dark, Twisty Things.”

“Make the most of every situation,” Jay often reminded himself. “Every minute. The good and the bad.”

His mother once told him that “sand burned when the wind blew.” It was a lesson he had learned several times; first, at the beach, then again in the desert. The interesting thing is not that the sand burns or where it burns; of course it burns, and of course it burns everywhere. The difference is that in the desert we are aware of its harshness, and we prepare for it. At the beach we wholly ignore the possibility, and freely accept the consequences.

Jay had tried to make the most of his predicament now but when he looked out the window he saw a cold, blue, desolate landscape. It looked frigid to him, like a chilled heart pulsating to its own gaunt placidity. The sand outside his window would blow in the occasional currents, lifting the grains and casting them down again, the same as the beach, the same as the desert.

It was the water shifting the grains about so restlessly now, not the wind. The submarine’s interior was designed to look like a cruise ship but Jay felt as though he were caught in a cave, breathing in the cool, stale air. He placed his fingertips to the window and wondered if the outside was as suffocating as the inside. It was because he felt so stuck that he often turned his attention to the windows, and for now, glancing at the sand shifting endlessly on the currents was his sole reprieve.

The grains were becoming brighter, easier to track as they swirled about the ocean floor; the submersible was reaching shallower waters. He smiled as he felt a sense of drifting familiarity, and this sense of familiarity pervaded his senses – as if he were slipping into a warm bath – and as the cavalcade of porcelain surrounded him he closed his eyes and focused on his heartbeat, the pulse bursting from his chest, along his arm, to the farthest reach of his fingertips. It retrieved the scene; he breathed in the chill, then exhaled, a fog emanating from his lips.

“Is it cold in here?”

Jay yelped and opened his eyes, his fingers breaking contact with the glass. A girl stood before him, roughly his own age; she was young, a kid, with blonde hair and bright eyes, her smile barely standing out against the white background. She was slightly bowed over him, watching curiously. He clambered to his feet.

“Sorry I didn’t help. Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m alright. Who are you? Where did you come from? I didn’t even hear you.” Jay was bewildered. He knew he had seen all the kids on the ship by now.

“I’m Kaira. I was just passing by. Who are you? I’ve never seen you around here before.”

“I was gonna ask the same thing. My name’s Jay,” he said, holding out his hand. Kaira looked at it.

She wasn’t offended, nor was she confused, but she had scrunched her nose as though she were debating whether she should accept or not. Jay held it out for a second longer, then thrust both hands in his pockets, not wanting to force her to decide.

“So why haven’t I ever seen you?” Jay said, brushing aside the handshake.

“Oh… I’m not allowed around the ship much. I can’t shake your hand either. I’m sorry… They keep me in the sick bay most of the time.”

He nodded, unsure of what to say. He let her statement hang in the air a moment, practically watching it develop into smoke around them. The wisps of her words lingered, and he mulled them over in his head. She was sick, and sick enough that she needed to be quarantined. However, sick or not, she was an adventurer not unlike himself, and here she was halfway to the bottom of the sub, a quarter of the way to the bottom of the ocean. Jay looked through the fog at her piercing features, and though he could hardly claim to know much about her, he felt that she was significant.

“Are you going to be okay walking around down here?” Jay thought back to where the sick bay was. He himself was only five levels from his home, but she must have been at least thirty away from hers; thus, while he was a casual explorer, she was unequivocally adventurous.

“Yes, I can walk around. They won’t know I’m missing until they come to give me my medicine.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“You sure worry a lot about someone you don’t know,” she stated. “I made it this far.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just… don’t talk to a lot of people here. I only have my mom and sister. I guess I don’t know what it’s like not to worry about everyone else.”

“Sounds tiring. But you don’t need to worry about me.” She smiled, as friendly a smile as she could muster. “Where were you going? Before I found you.”

“I don’t know. Back to the dancehall I guess. The one in the–”

“The heart of the ship?” she interjected. “I like it there. Let me walk with you.”

***

Sometimes when the blank, blue ocean beat against the windows, Jay would stare out and wonder why he was so lonely, so dissatisfied. This was a cruise, a way for people to see the ocean depths with their family. It was meant to be a 4-month trip around the world but Jay had logged and tracked and logged some more, and he figured they had been at sea for at least 9 months by the time he ran into Kaira.

Certainly his stay here had been unnerving because of the apparent time dilation, but his mother often feared that his greater issue was his desire to be alone. Jay knew she was worried about this, too; she often brought up these concerns in the mornings, before Jay left to sit in the library, or to wander the ship, or to stare out the windows. He knew it wasn’t healthy.

He took his medicine in the morning, and that was fine, and he ate his food, and that was fine too, but he never connected with anyone in the same way that they seemed to connect with each other. To some extent, he was always the odd one out, and while he was sometimes comfortable with this distance, Jay usually felt uneasy.

He watched out the window of his room as the last shreds of light were torn to pieces by the waves. The sun was undoubtedly dipping below the horizon, and as it did Jay watched the lights in his room shift from bright, fluorescent beams to low lights softly illuminating the room so that only the faintest silhouettes were visible.

Outside the porthole a few stars were likely attempting to press their light below the waves. Try as they might, Jay knew they would never succeed; the stars were too far away, and the waves around were too deep, too dark. Jay closed his eyes, thinking of these stars and their great distance, and their soft light, and the water that swallowed it whole, and he felt a wave of kinship wash over him yet again, then die in his own depths.

***

“Hey Jared?” his mother said from outside the door. “You getting up today, son?”

Jay had been awake for nearly two hours already. He stared at the ceiling of his room. It was blank. White. Impassable. Another barrier between him and the outside world. The sky was infinite, but the ceiling was definite.

“Yeah mom. I’m getting up.” He lowered himself out of his bunk, setting one foot on his desk before dropping down.

His room was like everyone else’s: small bed, small desk, one chair, one dresser, one closet built into the wall, one window. The desk had magnets everywhere to keep items from shifting about. Most of the bookshelves used this same property on their books, which had metal covers inserted into their bindings. His cabinet was bolted to the wall. His chair had a rubber grip. His window was fixed as far as he knew, though to be fair he couldn’t attest to its location without watching it. The bed, having nearly run out of creative means of staying in place, was fixed to the wall by steel beams.

There was only one time his mattress fell off its base. There had been a storm brewing off the Floridian coast, and as they cut through the Caribbean, the ship had been caught broadsided by a particularly large wave. These instances were entirely rare, though.

Most of the ship’s problems came from the ocean life around it. One time they had to cut their speed in half as a bale of sea turtles drifted by. Jay later heard one of the captains suggest this instance would’ve been “like Alabama’s summer bugs against a windshield.” He asked them how they knew when animals were approaching, and the crew had explained to him that they use radar to find the large animals, and they had spotters at the front of the ship on every one of the 89 floors for the smaller ones. The spotters called out the animals; their captains relayed the information to the head captain; the head captain steered the ship clear.

Of course, even a hierarchy couldn’t prevent the unexpected from happening. When they were touring the seas near the Great Barrier Reef, for example, the ship managed to bear its razor front directly into a humpback whale. The whale had been going far too fast for its own good, but Jay didn’t think that it had ever even considered being cut in half as a possibility. Jay heard the captains from floors seven to fourteen complaining about the sudden need for window cleaners, and while the submarine had surfaced to allow divers to scrub the front glass, he watched sharks come and go, obviously drawn to the scent, and the whole time he wondered if the whale really deserved to die merely because it was speeding, or if this really was just an accident, a situation taken one step too far, too quickly.

Then there was the incident with the dolphins and the dancehall. Near Hawai‘i a pod of dolphins were swimming towards the ship. They must have seen the ocean through both glass panels and assumed it was safe, or even a challenge – another ring to jump through, perhaps – because the dolphins steered themselves directly towards this “opening” and… well, Jay thought it was very much like the birds that would try to fly through his house in the spring, only to discover what a window was. And these dolphins learned what a window was that day, and all twenty of them turned out the exact same way as the birds in the spring, except the dolphins were larger and looked much more miserable when they began to sink to the ocean floor.

This is what Jay was thinking about that morning, for two hours, before his mother asked if he would like to wake up at all. The whale that was one day cut in half, and the dolphins that saw a challenge and broke their necks trying to accomplish something. Today, Jay was the whale, and Kaira had cut him in half with little more than a smile and a nod; and today, Jay was also the dolphins, but the accomplishment was him trying to form a real human connection for once, and he wasn’t sure if he’d swim or sink. And so, when his mother asked him if he would like to wake up, Jay thought, I don’t know, I don’t know. But “maybe” wasn’t an appropriate answer to give her, so Jay stood up, rubbed his eyes, and stepped out of his room.