by Johnny Benet
A trace of the sadness remained, but not where it could be seen. As the great turtle had taken it in and held it close and heard its story, releasing it to the deep, some of its heaviness had seeped into her heart, there to remain forever. But the waters were cleared. The misty veil was gone. The fish, the whales, the dolphins, the near surface dwellers, all felt the weight lift from their hearts and the veil lift from their eyes.
But only for a while. The work was not finished.
Rain still fell, snow still melted, rivers still flowed to the sea. And they still brought something new. A stream of sadness and grief. Already more of it drifted down into the water, reforming that misty dark veil.
The great turtle held memories of other times, times of great changing and ending. She knew that the veil would grow, heavier and heavier, until its heaviness became so great that even mother earth herself could not hold it up.
So she started to swim, wide and far, taking in the sadness wherever she went. And when she came across others of her kind she told them. And they swam too.
And so the great sea turtle swam down there, listening to the sadness of the world and carrying its burden. But the turtles heart was also open to the sea's beauty. The beauty sustained her, and she lived a long life.
The old ones say it is because of what the great sea turtles carry in their hearts that the beautiful things of this world always carry sadness within them.
The great turtle did not die from growing old, her kind do not die that way. No, they pass from the world when the sadness finally overtakes them, finally merging with the sadness of the world, falling down down down through the ocean, to the peace that they have earned so well, the peace that lies at the bottom of the bottomless sea.
But before they fall into peace the great turtles did one more sacred thing. They undertook one last great journey to the beach where their lives had started, and they laid their eggs there. They left them there safely buried under the sand, small gifts to the world, gifts that would in time find their way to the deep sea and grow into their destiny, the destiny of taking on the unheard sadness of the world.
FEATHERS WOKE TO A low gray sky over an endless silver sea, his dream already half forgotten. The sun hung halfway down the sky. The world was a huge flat bowl of water. The air smelled of ocean and rain. Where was he? Where was his flock?
Feathers lifted and flew in a wide circle, scanning for any glimpse of brown or green in the distance. He saw nothing but water. He breathed in the wind hoping for a hint of earth smell. But all he could smell was a salt tang in the air.
He remembered now. Leaving the flock. The initial elation he had felt, followed by becoming so lost to himself he could do nothing but keep flying. Flying here.
To this world of endless water and endless sky.
His wings quickly grew heavy. His mind felt dull. Why had he done it? Why had he left the flock? And where was land? His whole life land had always been near. But not now. How could that be?
Feathers glided back down to the waves. This world was so vast. So empty. Somehow a night wind had blown him farther out than a bird had ever gone. He rose and fell with the waves. At the top of each crest he saw an endless vista. A big empty forever. A big empty alone forever.
It was too much to take in. This empty world made his heart ache. Feathers tucked his face back into his breast to sleep.
He awoke during the night, his stomach aching for food. He needed to eat. But he had let the day pass by without eating, without caring. He was alone now and he had to do the things he needed to do to survive. He would find fish as soon as morning came. Now he would sleep. Maybe the sea would take him back in towards shore.
But it never did.
Feathers drifted through empty days and black nights. Later he would not remember how long he had spent there, or what he had done. It all merged together into an empty daze. He was lost in the world and lost to himself. Most of the time he was as empty as the world around him, with no volition, no will. Something old and deep in him made him fish for food. But it was just an empty gesture of meaningless survival.
Then, all at once, he would seem to come back to himself, ejecting off the sea in a quest to leave this empty bowl of water.
But no matter how long and hard he flew, Feathers could never reach that far off place where sea met sky. There was no end to it. No boundary. In time he came to realize that he could not even be sure if he flew straight at the horizon as he imagined, or if he might be flying in long arcs, back and forth, over the same featureless sea. He was so lost he could not even tell if he was lost.
If he knew where the center of this ocean was he could fly out from it and then around, in ever widening circles around that center, until he sighted land. He knew that this world had land somewhere! But there was no marker, no way of knowing center, there was nothing to base a circle on.
There was no boundary and no reference. No straight line anywhere. The sun, moon and stars constantly moved across the sky. The water constantly heaved below. And there was something wrong with his head. He still could not think or make decisions. His mental center had been emptied out.
Perhaps he could not survive without the flock.
It all brought him back down to the sea. Each burst of energy was overcome by emptiness. Each burst of energy was followed by exhausted surrender.
Feathers missed land so much. That beautiful shoreline. It was a line that he could follow. It gave the world direction, it gave the sea a boundary. And it was solid and fixed. He tried to remember sleeping with the beautiful earth beneath him, so still and stable.
His attempts to get out became less and less frequent. His fishing did too. He seemed to have no appetite. He slept, he floated, his wings grew heavier with each day.
Then one night as he floated alone under a darkening sky it finally occurred to him. His failure to find his way. His weakness. He had been denying all of it. But no longer. The thought came to him suddenly and fully formed, as if he were receiving a message.
He was dying.
Before Feathers slept he called out to his only companions, the sea and sky, in a weak voice.
Help me.
THAT NIGHT FEATHERS dreamed of strange sounds that reminded him of singing. Far off. Tch tch tch tch! Short staccato notes trilled up and down in some unknown melody. There were longer softer notes too, that seemed to be in answer.
Pheep! Bareep! Pheep!
The sounds came from all around him, one after another. Were they singing to each other? Or talking? No, it was something else. Were they laughing? Whichever one it was, they were getting closer.
He awoke to a sky of purple twilight just starting to lighten. Sunbeams flashed over the horizon. The long slow swell that had rocked him gently all night was still rolling across the sea. There were occasional splashes out there in the darkness. And there was something else too. Feather's heart lifted in his breast. Tch tch tch! Bareep! The sounds from his dream were real!
But where were they coming from? Feathers looked hard into the darkness around him, but it was still too dark to see very far. The sounds were foreign, but Feathers did not sense danger in them. In fact, he felt an urge to screech in laughter. They were such happy sounds. But Feathers stayed silent, and hopefully invisible, and waited.
Peering into the darkness. Waiting for more morning light and whatever it would bring.
At first he saw dark shapes erupting out of the water nearby, turning in the air, and diving back down to disappear beneath the waves. They were sleek and moved with an elegance and a playfulness that reminded him of a starling just learning to fly, so excited and surprised that it could move so easily through the air, invisible air that nonetheless held it in its caress, keeping it safe, not allowing it to fall from the sky.
As the light came on Feathers was able to see the things more clearly. They were great fish, bigger than any he had ever seen. Hints of purple and green glistened off their shiny gray skin. They had funny faces that did not l
ook like fish faces at all. Their noses were round, and their mouths - well, their mouths seemed to smile.
Fish were jumping far off into the distance all around him. There were so many of them! At least as many as the birds in his flock. As far as Feathers could tell they had not noticed him at all. Some erupted right out of the sea so that they seemed to fly, making beautiful balanced arcs through the air before they sliced back into the water. Some just came straight up and flipped their tail fins back and forth so powerfully that they seemed to stand on the ocean's surface before they slipped back down. All the while calling and laughing to each other.
Feathers became lost in it. He did not know how long he floated quietly, watching them. He did not know what he was seeing exactly. But he felt that it was something that should not be interrupted.
As the morning came on fewer and fewer of the fish came up, until finally they all vanished under the sea as if they had never been.
Feathers just floated. What had he just seen? They had been so beautiful - as beautiful as his own flock had been the last time he had seen them. And there was something so happy about them!
The joy of them rose up in Feathers breast and he suddenly screeched in laughter.
As if in answer, a single fish rose up out of the water in front of him, flipping his tail, walking across the water towards Feathers. This close Feathers could see the fish's eyes. They looked straight into his.
Feathers floated in shocked silence. This fish was not playing with his flock. This fish was looking at him.
The fish spoke. "Tch tch tch!" Then again, in five short bursts: "tch tch tch tch tch!"
It stared into Feather's eyes for another long moment. Then the great fish sank straight down, tail first, to vanish into the sea.
Feathers had no idea what that fish was trying to say. But it made him want to fly. He lifted off the sea without thinking, and as he flew he felt the darkness that had lain like a pitch-black night in the great void he felt inside his breast lift.
And it occurred to Feathers, then, that there was a third ocean in addition to sea and sky - an ocean inside him, down deep in his breast. He may be unable to find the center of the sea, or the center of the sky. But he could find his center - the center of his inner ocean. He could fly around that center.
He might not know where he was. But that did not mean he had to be lost.
This world had seemed so barren and empty. He looked out across the waves. Somewhere out there beneath them the great fish swam and played. This world was not as empty as it seemed. What other surprises were out there under the waves?
Feathers suddenly wanted to know.
So he flew.
He felt weightless as he rose up in a great spiral, his wings cutting the air in long powerful strokes, higher and higher. The waves below became smaller until they vanished entirely and the sea became perfectly flat. Deep green against a cobalt sky. Glistening in the sun. The whole world seemed to shine. Feathers went higher still. The sea changed again. It looked like a flat bowl of water when you were on it. But from this height the horizon seemed to dip low, and the sea beneath him bulged upward like the rounded back of some great living thing. He could not see the waves from up here. But the sea seemed to slowly rise and fall below him as if it were lifted by a single great wave, as if there was a beating heart down in its depths. As if even the sea, that he had thought was so empty, was alive.
The air became fresh and cold without any scent of sea or land. Just pure and fresh and cold. Like snow. Feathers flew higher.
He felt a sudden jolt, an acceleration. He stilled his wings, setting them firm and steady. Gliding. He had flown up into a great wind that flowed like a river of cold air. It took him with it, and he glided effortlessly. Up here he had nothing to gauge his speed against, there was no marker or reference point in that clear sky and flat sea.
But it felt fast. It felt as though he was covering distances that would take weeks of normal flying. With no effort at all. Just gliding. Letting the wind take him far into who knows where.
Feathers let the cold river take him where it wanted. In all this time alone the ocean had not swallowed him. It had fed him. The sky had been there for him, a great road that he could always fly.
He trusted it now. He trusted it all.
And he rode the high wind all day, gazing down over the distant sea.
It would not be long before he found that his notion was right. There was more to the sea than he had ever imagined. More, even, than the strange fish that sang.
FEATHERS LIKED TO BE in the air when the sky pinched the last vestige of the sun into the sea. At that time of day, some days, he saw something strange. Or at least he thought he did. It was always over in an instant, and always just in the corner of his eye. And it hardly ever happened. He would see it, and then look for it again, day after day. Wanting to see it again. Wanting to be sure it was real. But after days and days of looking for it and it not appearing, Feathers would know it had not been real after all. Probably he had imagined it. Or it had been some trick of the light.
And then, once he was sure it did not exist, there it would be again, for less than an instant, out in the corner of his eye. A green flash, like a last glint of sunlight flashing across the sea. But it was a strange green color unlike sunlight. And somehow, it seemed to come from within the sea itself. As if, as the sun's rays took their last glance across the world, the sea, for a single magical instant, looked back. With a brilliant green flash. As if the sea winked back to the sun!
And so it was that when Feathers saw something in the corner of his eye one morning's daybreak, he immediately turned his eyes towards it. That brilliant green flash. But it was already gone.
He flew towards where he had seen it. Nothing there but ocean. He flew around the spot, gazing down. Why did the sun reflect green in just one place?
Then Feathers saw something. A faint green shimmer down in the depths. He peered down trying to make out its shape and what it was, but it was down too deep. It could be a large green rock on a shallow bottom. But the bottom was not shallow here. It could not be a rock. And there was something else too.
The green shape was moving. Slowly, but moving all the same.
Feathers remembered the fish that had jumped from the sea. But they had been many. This was one. They had moved quickly without effort. This thing seemed to move slowly. Ponderously. They had been creatures of the surface, laughing in the sun. This thing was of the deep. And Feathers did not get a laughing feeling from it. No, it was something different. Something large and green. Something large and ponderous. Something that moved. That was all he knew, and he wanted to know more.
What was this creature that the sea had pointed out to him? It must be a fish. Some great slow swimming fish. But the fish that Feathers ate and glimpsed when he dove had silver scales and white bellies. Never green. So what was this green fish?
Feathers promised himself that he would find out.
Feathers learned that gliding low over the waves in slow overlapping circles moved him slowly forward, allowing him to match the fish's speed. It swam slow, but it swam steady and straight, which made things easier, because Feathers had to guess its direction most of the time, checking to see if he was on course each time he passed over it.
And each time he passed over the green fish he looked down, trying to see exactly what kind of fish the green shape was. Feathers followed it until it vanished under the cover of night's darkness, yet for all his watching, he knew no more about it than he had that morning.
He settled down for the night. Tucked his face deep into the down of his chest. The waves rocked him gently. He smelled fish nearby. Maybe tomorrow the green shape will come up to the surface to feed. Or at least swim up closer. And if he did Feathers would be watching.
But how would he find him? Down deep where the green fish swam there was probably little difference between day and night. It would not need to stop swimming at night, and by morning it would hav
e moved on and be gone.
NEXT MORNING THE SUN came shining across a cloud dappled sky. A warm breeze thick with moisture blew gently over a smooth rolling sea. Feathers lifted off the water thinking of breakfast. He flew in a long slow circle gazing across the waves, looking for fish sign.
It did not take long. Feathers shot straight down in a dive that took him right down into a school of fish. Dark silver shapes scattered all around him, but not fast enough. He grabbed one with open beak and bit down into the delicious taste of salt, blood, and meat.
Just before Feathers turned up to take his breakfast to the surface he saw something to one side, down deeper in the water. A stationary green shape hovered down there. And as Feathers watched, it started moving.
Almost as if it had been waiting for him.
Feathers swam to the surface, took his breakfast fish in a single gulp, and lifted into flight. He quickly spotted the green shape.
He followed it all that day, and the next morning it was there again. Waiting.
And so it went, with Feathers tracking the green fish day after day, trying to discover more about it, but always failing. As the days passed Feathers started to think of the green fish as a companion. He had never even really seen her, and she was fish and he was bird. But still. The feeling was of a companion. Of some connection. And in Feather's mind, the creature went from being green fish to Green Fish.
Green Fish, his great companion down under the sea.
He did notice one thing. Green Fish seemed to know where she was going: Feathers felt sure that she was swimming towards some destination. How did she find her way across the featureless sea? That was a real puzzle.