Every River Runs to Salt
a novella by Rachael K. Jones
Copyright © 2018 Rachael K. Jones
All rights reserved.
Edited by Brian J. White
Copyedited by Caitlin Vestal
Cover illustration by Anna Zee
Book design by Pablo Defendini
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
Published by Fireside Fiction Company
Brooklyn, NYC
Fireside has two goals: to find and publish great stories regardless of genre, and to pay creators well.
firesidefiction.com
ISBN: 978-0-9987783-4-1
Fireside Books
Check out the other titles Fireside is publishing in 2018:
Gunsmoke & Glamour
a novel by Hillary Monahan
Marshall Clayton Jensen’s job is to fix things for the people too weird for the government to touch--witches, fairies, monsters. When Clay finds himself on the receiving end of a witch’s curse following a breakup from the love of his life, a fairy named Cora, Clay enlists the help of his best friend Doc Irene and his ex-girlfriend’s promiscuous sister Adelaide to search for a cure before time runs out.
Rattlesnake Wind
a novel by Lilith Saintcrow
Dez Thompson’s family—now without their domineering patriarch—is busy creating a new life on Wyoming’s plains. To Dez, magic hides in the grass, and especially in the wind--and she is about to find out that magic is real, bloody, and on the hunt for the perfect victims.
Content Notes
Fireside provides content notes for its books to guide readers who may wish to seek out or avoid particular story elements. These content notes may contain spoilers.
There are no content notes for Every River Runs to Salt.
A current list of all the elements covered in our content notes can be found on our website: firesidefiction.com/about/#content-notes.
Table of Contents
Content Notes
Part 1: Pacific
Part 2: Oconee
Part 3: Atlantic
About the Author
Part 1: Pacific
I keep an ocean in a jar on my nightstand and a handful of coffee beans in my pocket. My roommate Imani once held the Pacific Ocean hostage in our living room, but that was before she died and I followed her down to the Under-Ath to fix the mess she left.
If anyone wants to smart off about how I'm spouting nonsense, because the Atlantic and Pacific run together, and all oceans are ultimately one and the same, tell that to the American Lobster. Throw one in a tank and drive across the continent and toss it into the foreign salt, and you just see whether it circumnavigates the tip of Argentina like a lonely Magellan, hell-bent on finding home, or if it floats belly-up and kisses the setting sun goodbye.
Imani decided to steal the Pacific Ocean because she knew nobody could stop her. She wasn't wrong about that. Right after Summer Break, she flew in from California with darkness in her eyes and a Mason jar of sandy water. She grunted out a hi and beelined for her bedroom the moment she got to our place at Steeplechase Apartments. I trailed behind her, trying to salvage some sense of homecoming.
"And how was San Francisco?"
"Sunny. Peaceful. Utterly wretched." Imani flattened out a green napkin on the windowsill and set the sloshing jar on top. Tiny pink seashells no bigger than apple seeds bobbed and swished inside the water.
"Sounds pretty great to me. You know how many chigger bites I got?" I'd spent the summer at the Okefenokee Swamp, tagging migratory herons for my field study biology class.
"That's the problem, Quietly. It is great, but nobody notices. Californians are like palm trees. Overgrown bushes on stilts, heads so far in the clouds they miss what's happening right around their ankles."
I never met anyone in the world like Imani. She claimed to be part glacier on her mom's side—not a demigod or nature spirit, but something caught in between, and more dangerous because of it. All raw power but no schooling, like a tiger cub raised by house cats. I wouldn't have believed her, except Imani trailed weirdness behind her like a jet stream.
I sidled up so close her elbow jabbed me in the stomach while she sketched something on the napkin. I squinted at the lettering through my glasses. "Tell me that's not a hex." Last time I'd seen Imani so angry, she'd swapped a man's thumbs with his big toes, and never undid it, least to my knowledge.
"It's out in the sea, just floating there. They all know about it. They've even named it, like it's some kind of pet." Imani arranged some larger shells on the napkin and gave the jar a swirl.
"What the hell you talking about?"
"The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. A whole continent of litter spun together offshore. It's thirty years old, Quietly. Thirty years. It was born before we were."
"Is that ocean water?" I screwed off the lid and dipped my pinky finger into the jar. It tasted like distance and old wisdom and sixty-two different languages, most of them extinct. It flushed my thoughts round and round. I might've gotten fall-down drunk if Imani's anger hadn't sobered me up. It was crackling static rage, all quick precision and sharp retort.
"Careful. That's a whole ocean in there."
"Ain't a whole ocean in that dinky little jar." I didn't believe her, even after tasting it. I'm Quietly, after all. Not Gullibly or Foolishly.
She bit some extra growth off her thumbnail and spat it in and screwed the lid back on. "There will be. Just you wait."
"For real?" This was supposed to be our homecoming night, where we popped kettle corn and split a bottle of wine and watched the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice until sunup, but instead Imani was starting to scare me. "That sounds…well, kind of evil, don't it?"
Her eyes glittered and laughed. "If they miss it, I'll know they deserved it to begin with."
Glaciers are stubborn things. They freeze and melt and freeze again, and their hearts don't change quickly, if ever. But when they do, they're set in their ways for a long time. Imani's convictions ran much deeper than I could follow, all the way to the ocean floor.
* * *
We did end up having the kettle corn and TV marathon, but Imani drank three quarters of the wine and ducked out long before sunup. I had to watch Colin Firth debase himself on my lonesome. I couldn't even enjoy it, because I kept dozing off and dreaming in sixty-two languages, my head all spinning, spinning, spinning, like my brain could flush down the world's waste by sucking it all in.
By morning, Imani's theft was all over the news. The clip I remember best showed a woebegone surfer perched on what used to be a wave but was now just a lump of sand, rocking his hips back and forth so the surfboard scooted along like a tricycle with the brakes on. Imani drank a whole pot of tea and giggled through hours of live footage, pleased as a tabby in the cream.
That left it to me to be the responsible one.
"Okay. You've had your fun, but it's not funny anymore." It really was funny, but it didn't do to egg on anyone with glacier blood. You might just deepen their convictions. I bit my cheek bloody to tamp down the twitchy little grin. "You going to give it back now?"
She batted me away with her hand. "Not yet. They've barely noticed the garbage. It's all just sitting there, if they'd only walk out far enough to see."
"Well, that's just asinine." Whatever Imani said, you notice when a whole ocean goes missing, especially if you're an ocean liner or a dolphin. I thought she would feel guilty about the dolphins at least, but she kept cycling through YouTube and swirling that jar on her knee—that poor helpless ocean deprived of its coasts.
"Don't w
orry, Quietly. Let me have my bit of fun. I'll put everything back just as tidy as you please, dolphins and all."
"If you promise," I said doubtfully.
When you lose somebody you love, you spend a lot of time looking in your mental rearview mirror, trying to pinpoint the moment it could've turned out different. I've come round and round to that instant, Imani’s grin spread wide and the jar on her knee. When she scratched her braids, white flaky dandruff caked her nails. Her voice sounded exactly like January, all dead brown grass and fragile newborn resolutions.
Maybe in that moment, I could've changed the course of what came next. If I'd declared it Zombie Apocalypse night, and shut off the internet and power, and staged an intimate two-person D&D campaign by candlelight. Or maybe it was too late by then, and the Pacific was already exacting its slow, relentless revenge, turning all her bones into salt.
* * *
Imani's family story about the glacier begins in what would someday be Nigeria back in the BC times, when an Igbo woman set her sights on a promising star as evening fell. She paddled her canoe after it for days and days. The wind blew cold and the water froze, and eventually she arrived in Antarctica.
That's where she met her glacier, all huge and blue beneath the long polar night. It had never met a woman before. It dolled itself up in the Southern Lights just for her—a glacier's idea of wedding clothes. I guess it got the wrong impression when the Igbo woman tied up her canoe and spent the night with it.
Imani's great-grand struck a fire for warmth. It's hard to keep flames going on a glacier, because the meltwater wants to rush over the embers, smothering it to ash.
But the glacier loved her. It opened tiny channels in its ice to leech the water off. As the long night wore on and the fire burned, the woman sank deeper and deeper into the ice. To the glacier, this felt like the heat of love burning into its secret heart until finally the fire and the woman were its heart, its center of gravity.
So the smitten glacier spoke to her.
"What would make you happiest, Love?" (Imani always pitches her voice high and feminine when she speaks the glacier's lines, so that's how I tell it.)
"To sail after that star until I find it," said the Igbo woman.
"Then let me be your canoe," said the glacier.
They chased the star until the horizon bent and took them in circles, so they never arrived and stayed together always.
Somewhere in all that, Imani claims the woman and the glacier settled down and had a few kids, which was how the world got Imani several generations later. I have no earthly idea how woman-on-glacier action might've worked, and no, I won't imagine it for you. I'm inclined toward skepticism on that point, except Imani exists. I don't know how else to explain how she could trap a whole ocean in a jar, or hex men who pissed her off, or any of the other weird stuff she did.
I suppose it's no weirder than any other myth. At least it's consensual, which is more than we can say about Zeus.
* * *
I should've held Imani to her promise to return the ocean—I know that now, in retrospect—but she did it during Drop/Add Week, which screwed with my mojo. I'd enrolled in forty hours of class, which is twenty-two past the maximum allowed. You could get away with that during Drop/Add. They always made me drop most of them, but for a few days, I had my fun.
My master plan was to stay in college forever by carefully failing to meet the requirements of any particular degree. I was one class away from successfully matriculating from two dozen different majors. I mainly did it to collect syllabi. I like syllabi. They're terribly optimistic. Slap a date next to anything and it almost becomes possible.
Imani should've been in class during Drop/Add week, but I never saw her. One night I caught her slinking home so late you could rightly call it early. She had the look of fever-dreams on her sweat-slicked skin, like ocean floor volcanoes boiling in the deep.
"You didn't go to class today," I observed, waving her to the free spot on the couch. She didn't deny it, just flopped beside me, leaned her sweaty head on my shoulder, and blew all the air from her lungs.
"Too dangerous. If I set one toe on campus, I'll have the Oconee River to reckon with, and I'm not strong enough for that. The Pacific’s fighting me every second now, even in my sleep. Oceans don't want to stay inside jars." She squished a kidney-shaped pillow against her chest and burrowed into the cushions.
The Pacific Ocean was currently holding down my stack of 15 new syllabi on the living room floor, keeping them neat from the ceiling fan's ravages. I sheepishly moved the jar back to the coffee table. "With a name like Pacific, you'd expect it to give you a good night's sleep."
Imani groaned and threw the kidney pillow at me. Syllabi scattered around my feet, optimistic ticker tape. "Har har. Funny, but wrong."
"Nuh-uh. It means nonviolent. Peace-loving."
Imani flicked on her phone, and pretty soon I heard her YouTube playlist going. "The Pacific's got war in its heart. It's rotten all the way down, and anyone who says different is a liar. It's the garbage patch, the gyre pulling everything away from the shore. Out of sight, out of mind, out of memory. You float on peace while all your troubles swirl round and round, out where you don't have to see them."
She showed me her phone screen, an aerial view of her theft. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch sans Pacific. A plastic apocalypse heaped over vague ocean-shapes, corals and reefs and shit. Ever seen kudzu smother a forest to death? Like that, but shrink-wrapped.
"Imani, listen. This don't seem fun anymore, right? How about you just put it back now?"
Imani plopped the pillow in my lap and lay her head there. I smoothed back her dreads from her bloodshot eyes. I never loved her so much as right then. Perfect compassion and perfect anger dangled on the scales of her wisdom. When she flexed her biceps, she left a dent in history. There were men and women aplenty in the world, but only one Imani.
"Quietly, listen: Athens is a gyre too. There's a basement of sorts. An underneath. This part—our Athens—just floats on top."
"An Under-Ath?"
"No, really. I've been there. Don't you wonder where I'm keeping all the extra water?"
"It's not in the jar?" I picked it up. The Pacific roared forlornly and smacked against the glass.
Imani touched my hand. My heart flip-flopped like those beached Californian dolphins. Her tired eyes crinkled into a warm smile. "You believed that? God, you're silly sometimes, Quietly. You can't fit the whole ocean in a jar that small."
I stuck my tongue out at her, because otherwise I might've had to kiss her. I caught her gazing back, the same look writ large on her eyelids. I leaned into the warm halo of her, her dark wet glacier-eyes, her chapped lips. So close her breath fogged up my glasses. I hardly dared to breathe.
Then the doorbell rang, and it all went deeper South than Athens.
We jerked apart. I set down the jar and made to answer the door, but Imani wrapped my wrist in cold fingers. "Please. Just let it be?"
She had a point. At dark-thirty the only people who ring your doorbell are drunks and cops. But with thwarted-kiss awkwardness hanging in the air, I welcomed the distraction. "I'll just look through the peephole," I assured her.
It wasn't a drunk or a cop. On our doorstep stood the State of California. He'd dyed every part of himself a different color than what came natural. Bleach-blond hair, orange-gold tan, and white, white teeth that outshone the porchlight. Broken shell necklace and absolutely no shirt, I swear to God. If I had abs like that, I wouldn't cover them neither. Of course, what works out West don’t necessarily fly in Athens. All the mosquitoes in Georgia were having a party on his pecs, and him trying to stay suave through all his slapping and scratching.
"Who is it?" Imani had shadowed me to the entryway. I let her have the peephole. "Shit. Don't answer."
We slouched against the door shoulder to shoulder. Outside, our visitor slapped at mosquitoes and crushed tenderhearted porchlight moths beneath his Chacos.
"He
's going to kill me!" Imani hissed.
"Well, do you blame him? You stole his ocean!"
She made doleful hound dog eyes at me. "God, Quietly, help me and I swear I'll be indebted to you forever and always. I'll even buy next time we hit Creature Comforts."
"How generous. You going to put back the damn ocean now?"
Imani pursed her lips. "Yes," she said slowly, "but it won't be instant. I have to fetch it back from the Under-Ath. They don't exactly like me down there."
She looked so tired and scared right then. It pricked my heart something awful.
"Just go get some sleep," I said. "I'll keep watch. He has to go away soon." That was a lie. I didn't know if he'd ever go. But Imani rubbed her arms and stood on shaky faun legs. She retreated to her bedroom and shut the door.
When her light clicked off, I answered the doorbell. "Ring it again and you can meet my shotgun," I told California. "I call it Bingo." I didn't really have a shotgun—I'm vegetarian—but in Georgia the Second Amendment is practically a sacrament, so it could've been true.
He held up his hands, golden with sand in the cuticles. "Whoa. Chill out, babe. I'm just looking for our ocean." He craned his neck around the door. "I think I can smell it in there."
I took a sniff, but only caught stale weed and Old Spice. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about." I made to slam the door, but he wedged in a Chaco.
"Not cool, man."
"Excuse me." Like my grandmother, I could make excuse me sound like fuck you. "A: I'm a lady. B: it's two in the morning. Come back at a decent hour, thankyouverymuch."
California didn't take his damn foot from the door, but he stopped trying to bodycheck me. "Whoa, hey, it's cool. I don't want anything from you. I just have a little gift, something for the woman who holds the Pacific Ocean in her hands."
Every River Runs to Salt Page 1