The Sea-Change

Sara Omer

Families moved into the underwater pods at staggered times, so we never met our neighbors. On the long car ride to the ocean, as the air became saltier and the types of trees changed outside the windows, it felt like a beach trip. In the trunk, in Dad’s cooler, ice sloshed around as it melted. We stopped at a drive-thru for dinner and ordered burgers and fries and ate in the parking lot. For a day after I could still taste the salt on my fingers, and I never stopped thinking about that last meal on land.

It was dark by the time we arrived at the facility, and Marcy was already asleep, so Dad lifted her up while Papa stacked our luggage onto a cart.

“Where’s the water?” I asked. The entrance to the facility was inland, and nothing was around except rows of long warehouses.

My fathers shared a concerned look. “Shh. Your sister’s sleeping. Use your nighttime voice,” Papa said.

Dad smiled. “We’re close to the ocean, Andi. Can’t you feel it in the air?”

Inside, Papa gave some papers to the person behind glass, a man wearing blue latex gloves and a yellow suit. I was distracted by how bright everything in the lobby was. I expected more elementary-school-aged kids like me, other little girls and other families. Besides the workers, the lobby was empty. 

A doctor wearing a long coat and a mask led us one by one into a room with glass walls. “You’re very brave,” she told me as she administered the shots, which I never fussed about, even as I felt a particularly painful prick as some blood was drawn. I was in third grade. Papa said I was too old to be fussy. I didn’t cry, but I had to look away as the vials filled with red. The doctor distracted me, asking about my friends and my favorite subjects. She even gave me a sticker.

 Marcy screamed when the doctor pried her gently from Dad. Our parents had to both go console her as she cried and resisted, a hurricane of pink. She was wearing rain boots and a puffy winter parka that hadn’t fit in any of our bags. I pressed my face against the glass, not wanting to be apart from my family. When it fogged under my breath, I drew a frowny face.

A man in a hazmat suit escorted us down a long access hallway. First I walked and asked questions: “Are the other buildings outside like this one?” “Are you sure we’re in the right one, then?” “What will my room look like?” Then I complained: “I want to go home.” “I’m tired.” “I don’t want to walk anymore.” “I’m hungry.” Papa told me to sit on top of a suitcase on the luggage cart, and I rode the rest of the way there while Dad played I Spy with us. “I spy something bright.” “The light at the end of a hallway.” “I spy something tall and silver. “Metal stairs.” We spied door after door, big circular ones that looked like entrances to bank vaults.

Eventually Marcy fell back asleep, so Papa said we had to be quiet. I opened a chapter book on my tablet but quickly grew bored.

“Count the doors and think of how many neighbors we’ll have,” Dad whispered. I liked the people at our apartment in the city—girls my age, cool older kids with interesting gaming rigs, and wrinkly people with big stacks of board games and bowls full of caramel candies. 

The luggage cart jolted as Papa tugged it onto a moving walkway. Far ahead of us and behind us, so far away I could barely make out the shapes of them, were other families, other luggage carts, other employees in yellow suits. They were such vague blobs that I wasn’t sure if I dreamed them. I jolted awake.

The person in the hazmat suit stopped us in front of one of the round doors. He used a keycard to unlock our pod, spun the handle, and we climbed in through the hatch. When they’d unloaded all our bags and we’d climbed inside, the door sealed shut with a pop.

It looked how I imagined a submarine would look. The cold walls sweated, the bunk beds looked like trays in a morgue, and the pod’s steel body screeched when the tides threatened to tear the building up from the sea floor.

“It’s like an aquarium!” I shouted.

“I wanna see a shark!” Marcy said, rushing after me.

The wall behind the television all the way into the kitchen was made of glass, a foot thick. The water was murky. Feathery dead plants and sediment floated past.

That first night, Papa didn’t want to cook, even though we were all so hungry and the dinners in the freezer had all of the gross vegetables that Marcy called “icky,” like little cubes of carrots and squishy peas. Marcy was about to throw a tantrum, but Dad said, “No, let’s cook. It’ll be nice.”

When we ate our fill, my sister and I were content to explore our new, temporary home. My stomach was stretched to capacity and the taste of French Onion soup and grilled cheese lingered as a juicy film in my mouth. We claimed bunks and unpacked, tossing toys, clothes, and books into piles on the floor. Then we gawked at the huge window.

“I see a fish! I see a fish!” Marcy said.

I grinned. “I want to live here forever.”

“Maybe we will live here forever,” Dad told us, laughing. But Papa frowned and disappeared into their room.

•   •   •

The world doesn’t have to end with a bang and a flash, I learned. The world as I knew it died marked only by the words of waves. And in the aftermath, what remained didn’t burn, it churned.

One day, Dad used the service terminal to request more salt. There was still a little left in the cabinet. His request glowed in green letters on the black screen and an ellipsis appeared, meaning someone from maintenance was formulating a response, but it never came.

“Taking their time,” Dad joked. Only Marcy and I laughed.

We waited for months, running out of more and more. No one came to fix the toilet when it clogged and Dad reported it. No one responded to Papa’s frantic message to maintenance when something slammed into the glass wall so hard that the pod shook violently and a foot-long crack fissured across the window. Marcy had been playing in the living area when it happened, and although she had been focusing intently on dolls, making their naked bodies slam together, she insisted she saw a monster.

“There was a huge shark with a face!” she shouted. “A shark with a face!”

“All sharks have faces, Marcy,” Dad said. “They have eyes and—”

“It was a face like a person!”

In the months that came, Dad and I swore we could make out the wing of an airplane in the water and even the swelling curve of the fuselage, settled in the sand. Wreckage, tossed against our pod by the current. I asked a torrent of questions about airplanes.

“I’m not sure Andi,” Papa said, sighing, exasperated.

“We’ll have to read up on that,” Dad added, nodding seriously but smiling playfully.

The glass held, though I had a nightmare where beads of water slowly squeezed through the crack. In my sleep, I heard the water puddling on the floor, sound growing as the pressure against the glass intensified. The window shattered and then there was a roar. All of the ocean was coming for me. Through the clouded waterfall I saw the plane pilot swimming toward me, but he was pale and swollen like no person I’d ever seen. Chasing him was Marcy’s shark with a human’s face—and I woke up. 

Lying in my bed, I heard the sound of the water running through the pipes in the wall. With our parents sleeping, Marcy snoring, the dishwasher off, and the laundry closet silent, that sound meant that someone in the pod to the left of us was calling water into that pipe. It wasn’t just the four of us, alone under the rising ocean.

Dad made imaginary friends for us. Those kinds of creativity games weren’t his strength, but Papa was irritable, so it was Dad who told us the stories about mermaid sisters who watched us through the window.

He said, “Talk to the mermaids when you’re mad at each other.”

One of us was always angry or annoyed. There was only our parents’ room, our room, the cramped bathroom, and the undivided living and kitchen area, which gave the illusion of more space but really meant two people mad at each other could only ever be thirty feet apart.

“There isn’t enough room in this place,” Papa had complained to Dad after I’d yelled at him about Agatha, the stuffed elephant I forgot to pack. At the height of the argument, Papa had snapped and yelled, “It’s probably been incinerated with everything else!” His face was red, but the angry lines smoothed out and he apologized.

Marcy drew Papa a picture in crayon to cheer him up—all of us, smiling with a puppy— and he put it on the fridge. Dad told me in a clumsy way that the mermaids probably found my stuffed elephant. He should have just said that Agatha was in good company, with the other stuffed animals I hadn’t been allowed to pack.

“And they’ll bring her back to me?” I asked.

He hesitated. “Maybe. The mermaids probably never had a stuffed animal, and it’s good to share with our friends.” The problem was I didn’t want to think that the water levels rose so high that there could be ocean-bound fish people a hundred miles inland scavenging our fourth-floor apartment.

One night, long after I’d forgotten about it, I went to get water from the kitchen, and in the brackish ocean outside I thought I saw a stuffed animal press against the glass then buoy there with the tide, moving unnaturally. I inspected closer, but I didn’t let myself turn on the light. Sometimes the things that floated past were nightmares I wanted to forget as soon as I saw them, like the engorged bodies.

Panic set in after we stopped hearing from maintenance and never received new crates of rations. After weeks of Dad trying to open the hallway hatch to escape our pod, an alarm went off.

“CAUTION: FLOODING HAS OCCURRED. WING TWO-OH-ONE IS COMPROMISED. CAUTION: FLOODING . . .”

The effort to open the thick metal door was abandoned because it had suddenly become a barrier between us and even more ocean. An emergency handbook told us that in the event of a flood, the alarm would sound, even if there was a minor leak, but maintenance would make repairs and then we would be notified. Then regular deliveries and maintenance would continue, but that already stopped weeks before, and the notification never came, only every so often for a few days the “CAUTION: FLOODING” alarm started again, until it started to become fainter and then was just a small static buzz that cut off mid “compromised” and stopped. We rationed everything then.

The pod was stocked with a certain amount of vitamin supplements. My parents knew we would live the rest of our lives in the pod. The children’s vitamins were for me and Marcy. The adult vitamins could either be split between my parents or one of them could have them all, which would mean either two dads for one year or one dad for two years. That’s why Dad got scurvy, from a vitamin C deficiency.

My sister and I had memories of a happy family, of being loved. Any idea that lingered for any amount of time in our heads was about magical animals or cartoon fighting. It would have been easy to make us one last special meal, watch TV with us, put us to bed, and let us drift into oblivion. I’m not sure if it would have been better to poison our food or suffocate ourselves in our bunks. We all should have gone together, at one time, as a family. What would a year matter? Two years? What has the ten years they bought me mattered?

Papa was the parent we needed most when he was at his best, happy and telling stories so detailed they played like movies in our heads, cooking delicious food, giving the warmest hugs that felt as if they lasted forever, but at his worst he was surly and depressed, and he was worse more and more. Maybe Dad insisted on giving Papa his portions of vitamins and larger servings of food because he loved him so much, and he knew Papa loved us, so he hoped Papa would be strong for our sake. Being in the pod made Papa miserable and Dad dying of scurvy made him inconsolable, so he shrunk into himself and became more unstable and fragile, glass we couldn’t count on to not shatter.

•   •   •

Months after Dad died, Papa opened the door to the hall, and we discovered that our part of the hallway had not been entirely flooded. The water was an inch deep and unclean, dark green-brown like sewage. By that point, Papa had hardly been eating anything other than vitamins but still fed us small portions of flavorless warm slop—unflavored grits, mealy reconstituted potatoes, or, if we were lucky, plain rice.

“He died for nothing,” the shell of Papa said as he bloodied his hands trying to open our neighbors’ door. Another neighboring pod was leaking water. It was spraying out of the hatch through a pinprick-small hole. The metal door bulged against the weight of water inside. The glass window inside must have broken, maybe when our pod shook that one night with the airplane. Marcy pressed her ear to the door of the next pod over.

“The water got in there, too,” she said. I wasn’t sure. The door didn’t bulge on its hinges. No water sprayed through into the hall. I knocked hard. 

“Hello! Is anyone there?” I asked loudly.

I expected Papa to tell us to cut it off and be polite, but he was distracted by his task, using his shoulder to try to force the door open, then retreating to our pod for a tool to try and break the card-activated lock. My sister and I called out at twenty doors, but no one answered us.

When Papa finally opened the door to our other neighbors’ pod, he wouldn’t let us go inside. A foul smell slunk out into the hall. There were dead people inside. As Papa scavenged the pod, I wondered, not for the first time, what had happened to Dad’s empty, bloodied body, after Papa had let us into the room to say goodbye to his corpse.

Dad’s body had been covered in black bruises, and where there weren’t bluish-red spots, his skin was yellow from the jaundice. His mouth had been a gummy, bloody mess, and by the time he experienced organ failure, almost all of his teeth were gone. Papa had to pull me from the room as I clung to Dad’s cold, clammy hand. Marcy watched on in a daze. What had happened to his body? Papa must have dismembered him and put in the trash chute, like the stuffed elephant I’d almost entirely forgotten: incinerated with everything else.

Inside our neighbors’ pod, Papa found paper and pencils for Marcy and a few new books for me. That night, my dreams were haunted by huge rats, black flies, and slimy maggots.

Like animals eating the dead and raiding stores of food, we survived for years on left-behinds. My sister and I grew up. When I turned eighteen, Papa made a cake.

Marcy was fifteen years old, and every day she drew more and talked less. I found her drawings on my birthday. The pencil sketches in the front of the sketchbook were all of sharks. Sleeper shark, basking shark, frilled shark, whale shark, hammerhead . . . I almost closed it, bored. Then my eyes widened. There was a sketch of a whale with a hundred human arms, a field of pink jellyfish with babies’ plump cheeks, and fish with gaping maws the span of half their bodies baring long, needle teeth. One of the sharks had Dad’s face.

She found me shuffling through the pages and ripped the book away from me. A flush spread over her neck, and her hands shook.

I took over cooking. When we were younger, sometimes our parents gave me and my sister wads of pizza dough to play with and small spatulas to stir brownie batter. For all the time I’d spent in a kitchen, I hadn’t learned much by watching my dads cook. I couldn’t pour love into every meal, and I didn’t enjoy the time I spent by the stove. Whenever I had free time, I imagined the life I could have been living outside the pod: going to high school, working a part-time job, having friends, going on dates, going to a party at a cabin near a lake, never the ocean. What did people do at lakes? Go fishing?

I sometimes wondered what fish tasted like. By the time I was born, maintaining livestock was too environmentally hazardous and was heavily taxed. An abundance of artificially created meat made the real kind obsolete. Fish farms spread disease, devastating wild fish habitats, and wild-caught fish contained record-breaking levels of mercury and microplastics.

I guess the fish were already transforming before we came to the pod.

•   •   •

Papa vanished one night. He must have gone through one of the large doors keeping the halls separated in case of flooding. Both were locked, which meant he had to have found a maintenance access card and sealed it shut behind him. Without a key card, I couldn’t follow, and even if I could somehow get one of the huge things to open, I couldn’t be sure there wouldn’t be a wall of water waiting to pour in.

“Papa went to find a way out of the pods,” I told Marcy, who was scribbling by lamplight near the ocean window. Her hand abruptly stopped moving, and she looked up at me, face pinched, like I was a cockroach.

“That’s so stupid, Andi. Why would we ever want to leave?” she asked.

Her reaction infuriated me. We didn’t need to live thirty feet apart anymore.

“We don’t have to be in the same pod,” I shouted. “You couldn’t really even call us a family anymore anyway!” 

I moved my things into the cleanest-smelling pod on the hall. Someone had died inside, but not Dad, which was more bearable. Crumbs on the kitchen counter and grease around the burners on the range meant someone else cooked in that kitchen, but not Papa, crying when I wasn’t looking. That made it easier to cook simple meals and bring them to Marcy each day when I went to collect her dirty plates.

Without Papa to brush and braid her hair and remind her to clean, she began to look more and more wild, like a siren. Maybe Papa left us thinking he wasn’t important, that we didn’t need him, that his misery was becoming our burden. I thought some of that myself, but with him gone, there was a hole in my chest, and every night I cried myself to sleep. Worse, Papa had been the only thing keeping Marcy grounded.

My little sister hadn’t stopped talking to imaginary people. I realized this one day when I climbed through the unlocked hatch into her pod and heard her whispering. I still thought Papa would come back. The water above us was several miles deep now. There wasn’t any escape. Maybe he was in some other part of the compound of pods, living a life apart from us, or maybe, like a wounded animal, he had sulked off to die alone . . . or he had returned to us.

“Papa?” I asked.

All the lights were off, and my sister stood pressed to the large window, her breath fogging the cold glass. My eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness. Sediment stirred in the green water as a fish kicked up a cloud of sand. A grouper must have just flicked away. My sister jerked away from the glass. I scanned the room, squinting at the dark silhouettes of furniture, half-expecting to find Papa sitting on the couch. Marcy pushed past and walked quickly to our old room.

I left her a bowl of curry and collected a plate with toast from that morning. She’d hardly nibbled on it. I’d found a vacuum-sealed packet of yeast in someone’s cupboard and made bread from a recipe in a book, and Marcy wasted it.

“At least eat the food I bring you!” I shouted. “I don’t have to feed you! You could grow up and make your own food!” She slammed the door, locking herself away.

That night, I woke up to something glowing in the water outside. I couldn’t sleep in the bedroom, where someone had died on the bed. Instead, I tossed restlessly on the couch, enduring the cold dampness seeping through the window from the ocean outside no matter how many blankets I cocooned myself in.

Some fish evolved to be bioluminescent to find food and attract mates in the abyss. How deep were the pods, then, if an angler fish was swimming outside? My hands trembled as I sat up. Increasing water pressure made the whole structure groan. The pinprick of water spraying through our neighbors’ door steadily grew stronger each week, no matter how frequently I resealed it.

Cold sweat beaded on my forehead, and the light outside my window grew from a blip to a steady burn, becoming larger as the fish drifted closer. I thought deep ocean fish were small, but through the gloom I could almost make out the shape of the rest of its body, larger than me, with long legs and slim fins like arms. When it pressed a hand to the window, I bit my knuckles to stifle my scream. The figure vanished. I couldn’t tell if I had been awake or asleep.

I heard bubbling water, louder than ever. I stumbled up. Seawater wrapped around my ankles, rapidly rising. My head pounded. The emergency tanks built into the water recycling system must have already filled. I stepped through the hatch out of my pod. In the hall, I waded through waist-deep water. The whole structure creaked, metal bending, straining. Something snapped. I froze, staring as my worst nightmare was realized. A rush of cold green water was spurting out of the hatch to the pod my family had once lived in.

“Marcy!”

I could have run back to the other pod, sealed myself in, and lived for a while inside, but then I would have died like Dad. I could have tried pushing back against the door. It would have been futile with the weight of the water working against me. My sister was inside.

I entered the waterfalling spray. For having lived underwater for almost half my life, I swam clumsily, fighting against the weight of my clothes. I felt a jolt of surprise when salt stung my eyes and barely remembered to hold my breath as I ducked under the surface. Couch cushions, a blanket Dad crocheted, a stuffed animal, one of Papa’s shoes, paper books, clothes, and paint brushes all floated in the water around me.

I searched for my sister in the green-black stew until my hand touched the metal ladder to the emergency exit hatch on the roof of the pod, sealed for our own protection before we’d ever arrived at the facility. The large glass window in the living room was intact. I forced myself to look away from it. Forced myself to look away from the dozens of lights outside attached to shadowy human shapes.

At the top of the ladder, the hatch was open, and the ocean waterfalled in, making my hands slip on the metal rungs. When I was through, would I implode from the pressure? Cold rushed over my skin as my body was expelled through the hatch, flicked out into rough water. The air in my lungs pulled me up, but not fast enough. It was total darkness, and I couldn’t make out the surface above me. I looked back at the pod system sprawling under me, a long, glowing snake on the seafloor. Outside every window, the humanoid figures shuffled, pressing against the glass. I could see the broken body of the crashed airplane, and in the distance another one.

Something nudged against me and I nearly choked. Walking beside me was a spider crab with legs like ladders. My vision was cloudy—my insides stung. Every cell screamed for air, but my head hadn’t imploded, yet.

“Marcy!” I screamed. The ocean ate her name. Bubbles poured out of my mouth as water snuck inside me. The salt water transformed into razorblades, serrated in my throat.

As I drowned and my body reflexively thrashed, the horror of the ocean stabbed through my heart. Massive tentacles snaked around the pod structure, making the metal groan and shriek. Then I saw them: 

A lethargic sleeper shark floating like a corpse. A basking shark with a mouth the size of a door. A frilled shark with a winding body like an eel, grinning maniacally. I knew their names and I recognized their faces. Dad, Papa, Marcy. For one fleeting moment, as my mind jolted between pain and fear and surrender, before the dark world turned white, I wondered what I would become.

Sara Omer (she/her) is a technical editor in Atlanta and is a first reader for Orion’s Belt. When she’s not reading or writing, you can find her baking something sweet or spending time with her senior cat.

“The Sea-Change” by Sara Omer © 2023