Pearl

Fiction by Joseph Brown First Place

A fish outta water. That’s how she was known. Raised on the coast and taught how to swim before she could walk. Her grandfather called her his little kumu due to how she looked the moment she was born. Red, slimy, and squirming like a fish with a hook in its mouth.

“It took everything the doctors had just to getcha to breathe,” he would remind her. “Your gills just weren’t used to suckin’ air yet!” She believed his story longer than she believed in Santa Clause.

The only daughter of an avid surfer and champion freediver, the ocean was her home. She loved the feeling of the Pacific sun on her back, and liked the way her skin tingles when ripples of wind tore across the surface of the ocean and sprayed her with a salty mist. Just adjacent to the ocean was a freshwater faucet where sea goers would rinse after a day at the beach. Only a few paces from the main spigot was a small bubbling fountain, the porous outer edges of its granite bowl eaten by years of billowing sand. Within the crystal waters was a crowd of coins that tourists had contributed, along with shell fragments, bottlecaps, and shimmering shards of sea glass. Unable to see over the wall of the fountain, her father would hoist her up, where her eyes leaped on the hoard of trinkets and abandoned treasures. Her little hands would grope vainly in the air, and occasionally splash stubbornly in the water, her fortune just out of reach.

“Kumu listen,” her father would intervene. “They’re in the fountain already. They belong to the water now.”

Her fondest childhood memories were of chasing sandcrabs, blowing rings of ascending bubbles, and sleeping on sunset kissed beaches between her parents as the tide played its steady and comforting rhythm.

It was that same ocean melody that lured her into the ocean year after year. Her head was buried just beneath the surface, the faint whistle of her breathing echoed through her snorkel tube. The sparkling, bitter taste of saltwater was familiar to her, as was the steady swell of the waves. Her chest rose once more, this time inflating like the beach balls which lined the shore, before she pivoted at the waist, and dove effortlessly underwater.

Suspended in the blue horizon, she felt as if she was flying. She was the most alive when she couldn't breathe. Here, she was limitless. Here, her arms and legs combined with the current, and she danced to the tune of crashing waves. Here, she felt free. There was a deep and distant rumble rising from the unexplored depths of the volcanic trenches. It blended together with the prickly sound of sediment being swept over the reef, which sounded almost like tv static. The choir of oceanic voices was music to her, and she found that the bellowing rumble of the water drove any remnant of the outside world from her mind. Everything seemed to slow down, the earth itself hovering on its axle. She retreated inward, allowing her thoughts to settle like calm water, and her soul to rest like an anchor. She let her eyes slowly roll backwards, feeling the deep and dark embrace of the ocean.

But there!

Her eyes shot open, captivated instantly by a flash of white light.

There!

Through a small crack in the reef below, a single ray of sunlight illuminated a single pearl, glimmering with temptation. Immediately, without thought or hesitation, she dove out of her meditation deeper towards the pearl. She felt a building pressure in her ears and behind her eyes as she inched closer. Finding the crack too small to fit so much as her finger, her hands gripped the coarse, prehistoric clumps of reef as she crawled along the ocean floor, her head swiveling left and right like a lighthouse. Wrenched from her inner sanctuary, her body began to protest her movements, each one sapping her of precious oxygen. The steady tension in her chest had begun to feel heavy, and a primal voice from somewhere within her frame pleaded for air. Her brow furrowed, her grip on the rocks tightened, and she shook the voice away.

Creeping along the bottom, she came to a cliff which sank another 15 feet into a pacific plain of white sand, which spanned for as far as she could see. Peering along the edge, she found what she was looking for. Not any bigger than herself was a crevice which split from the lip of the rock. Shrugging off another petition to breathe, she poured her head into the crack, and saw that it yielded a cave in the same direction of the pearl.

She paused, peering once to the blinding light of the sky above her. At this point she reckoned she was 30 feet below the surface, and she knew she was approaching her limit. The charming rumble had transformed into an ominous cathedral chant, and her heartbeat rang in her ears like the merciless pounding of war drums. She felt something almost pulling her into the cave, as if the pearl itself had a gravitational field. Lowering her head and fluttering her legs, she resolutely disappeared into the jaws of the coral cave. She used her hands to propel herself deeper into the dark, only barely perceiving the black silhouettes of fish lurking beneath the structure. They looked at her with large and indifferent eyes, void of sympathy, concern, or malignance. Drifting forward, she placed her right hand against the wall, her fingertips sweeping for any sort of opening that would lead her to her objective. The wall withdrew from her hand and retreated into a crooked and narrow crack which she could see opened into a thin horizontal cavern. Through the gnarled vent she could see weak beams of light falling from holes in the ceiling, one of which rested upon her coveted pearl. Already, she had been underwater longer than she ever had before. Her sides ached intensely, and her lungs felt as if they were about to burst. The water in the cave felt ice cold, and her arms felt like they had weights chained to them. The ancient voice within her head was screaming now, wailing inconsolably like an infant temper tantrum, begging desperately for air. Unable to ignore the voice any longer, she twisted and contorted her body, wriggling vigorously to reach the cavern. The beating in her ears quickened and intensified with every moment. The graceful water dance she had performed only minutes earlier had been replaced by reckless abandon, and she raced deeper, feeling the crushing weight of the pacific ocean behind her sternum. Her fingers wrapped around the pearl and snatched it from its resting place, before whipping around, hitting the crown of her skull against an unforgiving rock ledge. Blinking rapidly in recovery, she craned her head forward scanning for the fissure.

But it had disappeared. Her rapid movements had sent pillars of mud and sediment into the water column, flooding the cave with a thick and impenetrable cloud of murk. It would only take a minute or two for it to settle down. But that was more time than she had. A dismal grunt of terror escaped her mouth, and an instant wave of panic swept over her. Dropping her prize, she plunged blindly into the smoke, waving her hands wildly through the water. Feeling. Hoping. Praying. Clutching. Her legs swung frantically, filling the entire cave with sediment. The deafening hammering of the drums made her head feel light, and she felt the roaring thunder of the deep swallowing her whole. There was a blinding pressure in the back of her head. She had lost control of the inner voice, which shrieked and clawed and gnashed its teeth with the vengeance of a damned soul. She sucked in any dead air from the nose pocket of her mask, and felt it grip her face like a wet cat clings to a log. Everywhere she looked now she saw nothing. Disoriented, defeated, and drowning, she pawed aimlessly at the walls of the tomb. Her diaphragm contracted violently, beating against the walls of her chest cavity with the poison and ferocity of a bucking horse. Stars mingled themselves among the floating particles of sand, and she felt herself helplessly sinking into a narrow chasm, the dark walls closing her field of vision while the sound of booming drums cudgeled her between the eyes. And then.

Slowly.

She began to settle…the same way the disturbed sand gradually sank back to the ocean floor. The drums receded like a falling tide, and the pressure leaked like a deflating balloon. The ocean pulled her deeper into its arms with its lullaby, and her body rested lifelessly on the snowy white bottom of her coral coffin. On a clear day, one could see her golden hair glimmering on the ocean floor through a slit in the reef, like a nickel in a fountain.