But I knew one surefire way to transform water. I crushed a few coffee beans and threw them into the Oconee's jar, where they bobbed on the surface and tinged the water browner. It wasn't what I'd call a proper cup of joe, but at least it was a distinction. A demarcation between Oconee and Quietly.
The Oconee reached a wave up toward me, an unspoken invitation.
"You don't mind?" I asked the Oconee. It was a sin to drink oceans, so this had to be at least a personal failing.
I love you, it said.
I held the jar up to my lips. It bubbled up like a flood and gave itself to me. I drank it down to the last drop, coffee beans and mud and water all.
What's it like to drink a whole river? About like drowning in one, I reckon. I thought I was losing all my oxygen as the water filled up my blood. It pumped into my heart. I fell smitten with river things: long-legged skating insects, little torpedo-headed otters, surly catfish crawling through sand and rounded stones. I lounged long in lazy summer sunshine. I dwindled to a trickle in the heat. I opened my mouth and sucked down the rain until I swelled up and broke my boundaries—the bankline, the skin of the creature called Quietly.
The river reached my brain, and I knew secret river-thoughts. A wily dinosaur crawled beneath the delta where the Oconee met the Altamaha River. I numbered drowned bears, and I named the bacteria. I reached further out, past the Altamaha, to a place where my waters turned to salt, a place that tasted of love and infinite sadness. I glutted myself on all the sorrows I found there, savoring their bouquets, getting drunk on them, until at last I drank the tears of a woman called Quietly.
I was once a woman, I thought to myself, and the thought tasted like coffee.
I opened my eyes.
As the Oconee, I'd washed away the litterfall entirely and rushed fast down the gouge Imani left toward the Foundry, taking all the Has-Beens with me. They took to the water like they were born to it, all their spidery long legs oaring toward their heart's desire, toward the Pacific.
Then I was Quietly—but also more-than-Quietly—standing on asphalt before the Foundry, my fists wet and dripping and my shoes full of pebbles. The Oconee swirled around and around inside me, holding to the bounds of my skin, restless, waiting, hungry.
I held the taste of coffee beans in my mouth and let the river flood.
Water erupted from my shoes like a burst pipe. It wet the thirsty ash-choked asphalt. Plastic bottles floated around my ankles, rose to my knees, and then to my chest. The whole parking lot vanished beneath the spreading, roaring river. The water formed a wall, then a fist. I reached toward the Foundry and picked off its corners, rolling the cheap plaster between watery fingers. I grabbed the whole building front and pulled it down.
The Has-Beens rode my flood into the warehouse and gobbled all that stockpiled desire. Centuries of Stephens's hoarding, consumed in moments. I reached under all the doors and tall shelves, groping for crickets in a man-suit, but I couldn't find him. Imani wasn't there.
I pushed the water forward, overwhelming the building and reaching the streets of downtown beyond, driving the Has-Beens before me. They'd devoured the Foundry down to its screws but stayed monsters because they chased another yearning. Broad Street to Jackson, Jackson to Clayton Street, and still the water rose.
My surface tickled and itched. A tiny fleet of amateur boats paddled up from the Foundry, dipping my waters with oars made from vintage guitars. The old employees, freed of their contracts. They landed on the rooftops, grouped up, and began to jam and improvise lyrics. It sounded a bit like R.E.M.
That's when I remembered Imani. She used to be our roommate, I told the other voice, the part of me that was the Oconee. Then she died and became the Pacific and forgot to be herself.
We'll remind her, the Oconee assured me.
Our waters rushed around and around the streets in ever-tightening circles—Lumpkin, Washington, Hull, Clayton—until the Georgia Theater sat dead center in the whirlpool.
Imani was on the roof, the highest point in all of Downtown, surrounded by a rave. A band jammed at her head, and dancers took turns chucking recycled glowsticks off the roof. They'd contained her infinite, pulsing shores in a cheap inflatable pool, the kind you stick in the backyard for your little cousins on the 4th of July. Two clubgoers paddled around her in their skivvies. Imani just tolerated it.
"God. What did he do to you?" I muttered, but I was the Oconee, and my words turned into a roar that threaded all throughout the Under-Ath.
That's when I saw the crickets. Thousands and millions of the critters, skittering from gutters and dancing light across my waters, and climbing up, up, up the old brick buildings. Some of them ran, and others pelted down from the sky like screaming black raindrops.
The bugs spun together in a cricket-cyclone with Imani's pool at its center. Something thick and sludgy tickled my waters outside the Georgia Theater. Far below, the flattened, soaking skin of Stephens oozed its way from the flood onto the steps and climbed roofward. I pushed against the cyclone with all my waters, but the crickets shattered me into millions of droplets.
This is my city, screamed the creaking swarm. I make the rules.
"What's the point of you?" I asked him. "What state of need called you into existence? You've been trying for so long."
The crickets fiddled me an answer. We are as old as the Under-Ath. We are the bones beneath the floorboards. This city consigned all their castoffs to this place and then had the gall to name itself for the Goddess of Wisdom. The hunger of the Under-Ath called us into existence.
There was so much of him. He went on forever, and still it rained more crickets. Those weren't really clouds blotting out the sun.
"You're only making it worse," I pointed out. "You've mined out the Under-Ath and put the goods under lock and key. Only your employees get fed. Everyone else starves."
We desire their desire, hummed the crickets. We don't want to die. We are not ready to die. We feed those who sign their contracts, and that is enough.
"That may very well be true. But you don't make that right by keeping Imani," I said. "She don't belong to you. She don't have anything to do with this mess."
So much water, said Stephens. Such abundance. Seaweed, fish, krill, whales, life and life and life. Hasn't been genuine water in the Under-Ath in a very long time. I'll drink her forever, sip by sip.
"So that's your angle, then? Salty tea for eons in your little office?"
Trade yourself, then. Take her place. You are also full of good things. One is as good as the other. We could live on you for eons.
I shuddered a miles-long river-shiver. Those weak, oversteeped tea bags dipped into me, sweetened with a little aspartame so I'd slide quicker past Stephen's horrible little moustache into that oozing skin-sack.
But he'd already done just that to Imani.
Take the deal. You have nothing to trade me but your whole self.
Fuck that shit, right? I tossed along my watery length, hunting for the right raft. "Washington!" I called out in all my river-voices. "California! Oregon! Now, now! Do it now!"
Because he was wrong about one thing: trade isn't ever your only option. You can also give away. Capitalists always forget that.
What does it look like when you give the gift of peace to a malevolent whirlwind of insects and hatred? Like a storm dissolving after a rainy bleak night. Like when the sun rises and drives back the memory of thunder. As Stephens winked from existence, his desire snuffed and his purpose fulfilled, the crickets parted like a beaded curtain. I brushed them aside.
I reached out two hands and scooped Imani from her pool into my endless rivery arms, and here I lost myself again, because I was the Oconee, and in joining it I'd touched and tasted the faraway Atlantic. In my waters the Pacific and Atlantic met and mingled and became inseparable.
* * *
Oh, there you are, Imani. I missed you.
You shouldn't’ve come for me, Quietly.
I reckon you're right, but I'm
here now. I couldn't leave you trapped here forever.
I'm not trapped. I exiled myself. Nobody here is strong enough to stop an ocean from going where it will. But I have to suffer for what I did.
That's the dumbest thing I ever heard. Let's go home.
You can't rush redemption.
Sure you can. Poof. There, I washed your guilt away with all the other garbage.
It's still there, at the bottom of the sea.
So? Some things we'll never be rid of, but that don’t mean we can't move on. Oregon calls it "upcycling."
I did a bad thing, Quietly, and I can't take it back. I wanted to, but the yearning. I couldn't fight that yearning forever. I thought I was going to die from it. I had to drink it all down. But it wasn't mine. The Pacific didn't want to be drunk like that. I think it was afraid of me, afraid to become part of me this way.
Not your fault. Not entirely. The Hypotheticals fucked you up. They've got to take their share of the blame.
I don't know how to give it back. I don't know who I am anymore. I'm all dolphins and redwoods and muscadine wine, and I don't remember which of them belongs to me.
You're a glacier. You're Imani. You're a vengeful environmentalist with too much magic and too much temper. And you're about to be a college dropout if you don't get back to school soon.
I don't deserve to go home.
It's not about deserving, Imani. It's about belonging. Now here, take this. I've brought you some coffee.
—
We woke up together on the Georgia Theater rooftop when the waters began receding. We kissed for a long time, waves lapping and retreating until they'd covered the whole beach.
All around downtown, the water had begun to settle in the huge gouges Imani had cut in the ground on her way into the Under-Ath. We were thoroughly soaked. The water had washed most of the salt from Imani's hair. I checked the Mason jar for the Oconee River, but it hadn't come back to me when we'd separated from it.
"You think they're still joined together?" Imani asked. "The Oconee and the Pacific, I mean. They didn't have any coffee beans to separate out again."
"I think the Oconee's gone now, at least the part I brought with me." I got all choked up because the Oconee had been my friend, and it struck me as an unfair cost to pay.
But Imani, wonderful wise Imani, held me against the hollow of her neck. "Rivers understand change, Quietly. You mix with an ocean like that and something new has to be born from it. That's not the Oconee River or the Pacific Ocean out there."
"Then what is it?"
Imani combed back my damp hair with long fingers. "We could call it the Oconee Ocean."
So much for the water beside the land beside the water. But the Georgia red clay hadn't completely gone from my blood, nor the brine from my saliva. For the rest of my life my kisses would taste of the surf. We had all traded parts of each other, me and Imani, the Oconee and the Pacific. Nothing could fully sort that out again, not even great coffee.
The Hypotheticals rowed to our rooftop on a pontoon made from chapel doors that floated over netted plastic bottles. I refilled my empty Mason jar with water from the new ocean, then filled up a second bottle and handed it to Oregon.
"There you go. One sample of your ocean, more or less. That should be enough to return it to full force. The rest belongs to the Under-Ath now." A fair repayment to Briar and the rest. All those Has-Beens, quenched for good. They would have no more need for Stephens.
"Looks good to me," said Oregon.
"Hold up," Imani said sharply. She snatched the water bottle back from Oregon. "Don't you think I've forgotten about the garbage patch. No one's going home until you've done something about it." She got right in their faces, backing them all the way up to the roof's edge.
California held up his hands. "Okay, chill out. Our people are already on it."
"All of them?" asked Imani.
"All of them," Washington affirmed. "They've been traversing the ocean floor for days now, cleaning up the mess and taking it back to shore. We won't return the water until they're done."
Imani sized them up like she was weighing their character on a scale. "Do you trust them, Quietly?"
It was a good question. When it came to their nature, we had no word to go by but what the Hypotheticals told us. "I trust them to be true to their mission," I said. "I don't rightly know if we could call them friends. But I think they mean well."
"Then come visit us sometime when you get the chance," Oregon said. "Our gifts are yours to keep, after all."
Imani got this look halfway between despair and acceptance. "I'm never going to stop longing for it, am I?"
"We never do," said Washington. "The Pacific is part of you now."
I thought I understood. Living will always mean hurting a little and wishing for things absent from our arms—just like the Has-Beens knew. Even oceans couldn't be everywhere at once. They picked a bed to lie in, and sometimes they settled too far off for your heart's comfort.
But sometimes your ocean stays.
* * *
Imani and I returned home to an apartment draped with the trappings of absence and old grief. A bed full of salt, diplomas carpeting the floor, and a door tilted shut on broken hinges.
I shooed out a stray cat parked on the couch and set the Mason jar of Oconee Ocean water—unhexed, of course—on the coffee table. Imani rolled up the diplomas and wedged the door shut with a Birkenstock too large to be one of ours. Together we gathered up the sheet corners from Imani’s bed and shook the salt into the parking lot, enough to keep the sidewalks clear for a Southern winter.
"What now?" asked Imani.
I knew what she meant. You can't just come home from an adventure like that, tidy up, and call it done. I needed to get a job soon, and Imani still had to socially and legally resurrect herself. We'd melded with oceans, had our hearts broke, and lived to tell the tale, but it left a mark. Murky river-thoughts and heavy ocean-cares plucked and pulled at my attention. It felt like drowning in too many identities.
I looked out the living room window, down toward the thicket that marked the Oconee Greenway, and beyond that the sinking sun. Imani crept up behind me and slipped her fingers into mine, both of us lost in a westward pull we couldn't evict.
Maybe we'd follow the call. Maybe we'd leave Athens, buy a boat, circumnavigate South America, and make our way at last to the Pacific. Or maybe we'd just pick ourselves a new star and go after it as far as we could, until we sailed right into the tale of how an ocean, a river, and a little glacier entered my family tree.
But you have to hold some space for yourself. A place to stop being bodies of water, and just be bodies for a while. I marvelled at the miracle of Imani's hand in mine and wondered if I dared kiss her again. The Big Waters rolled ice-cold in my veins, but this time I held firm to the bounds of my skin. Not here. Not now. I shushed the oceans asleep, wrapped myself in brine-washed sheets, and let my glacier warm me.
END
About the Author
Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Portland, Oregon. Contrary to the rumors, she is probably not a secret android. Rachael is a World Fantasy Award nominee, Tiptree Award honoree, and winner of Writers of the Future. Her fiction has appeared in dozens of venues worldwide, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.
Thank you
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