Thrust: A Novel

In the ocean, bubbles rise like a second skin around my body. The water goes from dark green, to indigo blue, to midnight. The deeper I go, the more I enter a realm between light and dark. When I reach the floor of sand, tiny flickers of color blink and glide around me. Silver and blue fish make their undulations in huge schools. Underwater hills and valleys rise and fall. A glorious aquamarine and green octopus with hot-pink suckers on her tentacles slithers around coral and disappears into a rock cave. Neon-green anemones and red-stained starfish clutch geoformations, looking like decorations. Purple urchins and tube coral the color of rose blush dot rocks. The bell shapes of orange and blue giant jellyfish dangle their tentacles and oral arms like fluid lace as they pass by me.

What if home is this?

Why wasn’t I born to it? Why was I made to leave the lifewaters? Couldn’t I have been left like a creature from a fairy tale to inhabit a story?

My own hair sways before my face, black seaweed. Something is coming. A shape as big as a man. I part my own hair like a curtain. “Hello, Aster.”

“Hello, my beloved,” my father responds.

Aster does not look drowned. He looks as he did in life, weighted with grief, handsome but lost. The water between us brings him in and out of focus.

“May I bring you back to life?” I ask my father, although I can tell he is already in an afterdrowned place. I don’t know if I can revive him on any surface.

“I want to show you something,” Aster says, and he holds out his hand.

I take his hand underwater, there on the sea floor. We walk slowly. It is not possible for humans to do anything underwater quickly. We’ve lost our tails and skill. Our bipedalism keeps putting us upright. We walk some distance. Two seals tease a playful visit in my periphery, circling each other. Something looms ahead of us. At first, I think it’s a whale, but it is not.

As we approach, I make out the shape: some enormous sunken shipwreck.

“This is the SS Oregon,” Aster says, his voice reverberating. “In March of 1886, just fifteen miles from landing, the ship crashed into a schooner. There were only enough lifeboats for half of its 852 passengers. Another ship arrived shortly after the crash, so the passengers were saved, but the ship sank here. Until that moment, she was the fastest liner on the Atlantic.”