Witnesses

hannah hindley

High near the surface: topsmelt, with tiny forked teeth, with bodies swirling against silver bodies in a shifty murmuration. And among the swishing blades of seaweed: giant kelpfish, pulsing different colors like the Horse of a Different Color in The Wizard of Oz. And cabezon—froggy-mouthed, fins like ribbed corduroy, eggs that are gelatinous, bubble-wrap-plump: a single taste can kill a man. Bluebanded gobies with highlighter-bright bodies, hanging upside down from rocky ledges like lanterns. Black rockfish and blue rockfish and olive rockfish and kelp rockfish. Garibaldi, cheddar orange. Morays, their unhinged snaggletooth mouths open like a grin, or like a grimace, though really they’re just trying to breathe—and weren’t you, too?

All these watched, as your diving companions surfaced. As you did not. As your body sifted through the fog of plankton, through rubbery curtains of kelp. Eyes among the seaweed, eyes among the rocks.

And when night arrived, bat rays winged over you, their sets of teeth generating, regenerating inside their mouths like endless necklaces of pearls. Close by in the kelp forest, horn sharks squeezed out dark, spiral shaped egg cases that glowed under the strobing searchlights. The unborn bodies inside of them, backlit, pumped slowly in silhouette, the way that a heart pumps. Splotchy swell sharks with eyes like oil slicks glanced at you, glided past.

Your body knocked and settled in the deep current, ploughing patterns into the sand. Helicopters sent light swimming through the taut tops of waves. And when you’d been dragged up—waterlogged, unbreathing; when you and your gear had been cut open like fruit though no bad seeds could be found; when they brought you, stiff, back to our hometown crematorium in the brittle height of July; I could not bear to look. Still, by the time the rescue divers found you, a thousand other eyes had witnessed your cool and emptying body. A lidless fish has no choice but to see, to see, to see.

“The Opposite of Hallelujah” originally appeared in The Rumpus. hannah hindley is a wilderness guide and essayist who writes about creatures, calamity, sex, evolutionary biology, and our relationships with each other and with a changing planet. Her writing has appeared in journals, anthologies, and magazines including the Harvard Review, River Teeth, Terrain, and Hakai. She is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism, the New Conrads Prize in fiction, the Bill Waller Award for Nonfiction, and an honorable mention for the AWP Intro Journals. She was a 2018 Carson Scholar in science communication.Hannah is an alumnus of Harvard University, the Williams-Mystic Maritime Studies Program, and the University of Arizona. She is currently at work on a book-length collection of personal essays called Love and Other Fish, as well as a longform piece about the weird ecologies of urban desert rivers. Find her at hannahhindley.com or follow her @hannah_the_bold.