On Fevered Waters
Part One
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians … for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
— Plutarch, Theseus
The funny thing was that humanity didn’t notice it was doomed until the corpse it lived on began to show signs of rotting - myself included. When the fish carcasses began to double, then quadruple, I no longer shrugged off the scent of rotten seafood and the buzz of flies. Now, concern knitted my brows together as my boots squelched over the soggy flesh and scales. There was more dead fish than sand visible along the coast. For a while, the gulls and other scavengers took care of the bulk of the debris until they too began to drop dead.
Not even a week after I discovered my home had become an oceanside graveyard, the birds began to rain. A bright sunny day turned foul as their bodies drummed against the tin roof of my shack. Red raindrops streaked down my windows, filling in the cracks in the glass. I never could scrub it clean, the cracks now stained brown from embedded bird’s blood. We never did figure out if the fish had been poisoned and killed the birds, or if the air had become so polluted, that they’d choked to death on the gray sky itself. I wish I’d known then what I know now. Maybe I could have caught their broken bodies as they fell and helped them. I’d give anything to hear birdsong again.
That’s why I now found myself standing in the drizzle of acid rain, watching a streetside musician use a combination of trashborn constructs to drum out a convincing mimicry of forest sounds. A small circle of my fellow humanity watched with glazed eyes and small smiles. One femme was swaying on her feet with her eyes shut. I wondered what she was remembering, the scene recreated in the vivid hallucinations of the mind’s eye.
The musician picked up a bundle of worn toothbrushes, held together by a rubber band and slid it across a synthetic plastic leaf. A collective shiver went through the crowd. The sound of rain on a real, magnificent tree. I told myself it was just the moisture in the air that had got in my eyes through my goggles and not tears. The musician himself was an aging masc with a rumpled and torn fedora perched on his bald head. A long thin beard was braided into a solid cord that hung to his bare chest. Colorful pony beads were threaded throughout on the end. A few were children’s beads in fun shapes - one a lemon-yellow dolphin, another a purple butterfly, and so on. The skin of his arms and shoulders was marred with brown and purple splotches from years of acid rain eating away at his dermis. Even now, droplets falling from the metal scaffolding above us sizzled on whatever patches of skin were not already scarred and hardened over. It didn’t seem to bother the musician who continued to create the illusion of Mother Nature for us.
Eventually, I managed to break free from the spell. I shook myself like a dog and tore my eyes away from the man’s withered but nimble fingers and his strange instruments. I was here for a reason, not to stand in the downpour and listen to music, I scolded myself internally. I pulled the collar of my thick raincoat up a little closer to my face. I was already sweaty and uncomfortable beneath the thick woolen ski mask that was protecting my head and neck from the brunt of the rain. I looked a bit absurd. The raincoat was an obnoxious hazard orange collar. Thankfully, the ski mask was black. My goggles on the other hand were swimming goggles that were a tad too small and clashing violet in color.
Shuffling away, I wriggled my fingers where they rested in my pockets to return feeling to them. They were numb from a combination of disuse and the brutal chill of August. One benefit of living so close to the sea in this area was the cold chill that the waters gave off, staving off the heat of the desert beyond. I’d much rather be too cold than burning to death in the wastelands.
The city was awash with human activity today. The crowded masses of tattered fabric, dirt, and flies undulated like the waves beneath the violently bright fluorescent lights. I waded into the filth and thanked whatever deity hasn’t abandoned us yet that I had a good ventilation mask. I tried not to stare at the uncovered mother and her children beside me, nursing a baby who was howling as the skin of its face burned whenever a raindrop hit it. The tarps above us blocked the majority, but it was not perfectly sealed. It prevented death, not disfigurement. The family clung to each other, tiny hands gripping whatever piece of their mother’s skirt they could hold. I turned away and tacked on an additional prayer for her and her young.
The rain was going to turn into a storm within the hour. I could feel the tension zing through my fellow humans around me. Elbows jabbed me from every angle as the jostling increased, frenetic energy, every being seeking shelter from the impending torrent of flesh-eating liquid. I weaved and bobbed past blooms of umbrellas fitted with metal sheeting unfolding left and right like silver rainflowers. They tipped their hungry faces up to the downpour. Umbrellas like that were technically banned. They sprayed droplets on everyone unprotected around you. A selfish creation that only protected the user.
I ducked into a nearby doorway and was immediately assaulted by color, warmth, and sound. The doorway led under the foundation of a nearby building. The underbelly of the city had scraped away at the ground and tunneled beneath the palaces of the rich where they thrived like roaches beneath their floorboards. The stone above twinkled with thousands of strands of lights. The electricity that powered them was siphoned off from the buildings above. Wiring hung in loops like vines in a jungle, trailing down into the community below.
The crowd was thinner down here. Some preferred the acid rain to the paradoxical closeness of fewer people. With fewer people, you didn’t go crowdmad, disassociating into space, floating amongst the debris in the trash belt encircling the planet. Less people meant less stress and more smiles. But it also meant a level of human interaction some folks just weren’t used to anymore.
I wandered freely down the dirt road, swinging my gaze between each makeshift bungalow and market stall. Every eye that met mine twinkled, every head nodded. I heard a whistle and paused, spotting Margie at a stall laden with trinkets. She was a trashhound, diving into the refuse dumps at the edge of the city. Thanks to the efforts of Margie and others like her, the once towering mountains of mankind’s shame were shrinking to foothills. It was far too slow chipping away at it and far too late for it to do much good now.
Her trash had been spun into treasure. Necklaces hung in shimmering curtains along the top of her stall. On the table below, various bits of plastic and were molded into colorful frames around glued together bits of glass, polished to a semi-perfect smooth surface. A beautiful garden statue, reassembled into near-perfect condition, sat closest to Margie. It was an angel, hands pressed together in prayer, its face reminiscent of the Virgin Mary. I tried not to gape at it, in awe of her salvage skills.
Margie was an aging woman with wrinkles as deep as canyons on her round face. Her caramel skin shimmered with a homemade lotion I’d made for her from fish fat. I had jars and jars of the stuff that I’d preserved before the fish carcasses rotted that horrific day on the beach. I’d managed to make it smell more palpable with enough lavender to disguise the scent of a dead man. The result was a good number of people were naturally drawn toward Margie’s stall. The heady lavender scent of what was once alive, green and growing, mixed with an undertone musk of living creatures was more than enough to lure in the weary heart of humanity. She was a charming woman, long black hair tied into thick matted braids, a grandmotherly warmth emanating from her soul. Today, she was wrapped up in an old comforter, covered by a threadbare green shawl. Even down in the underbelly, the cold was creeping in along the floor.
Children were delighted to find salvaged toys at eye level beneath the tables at her stall, heaped up in buckets and boxes for them to rifle through. More often than not, Margie let the urchins run off with whatever toy they wanted. Sometimes, if they wanted to be sneaky and steal, she’d pretend not to see them so they could have the satisfaction of a successful heist. A few thin goblin-like creatures were digging through a plastic tub filled with sun-bleached toy horses and blank-faced barbies. Margie paid them no mind, continuing to wave me over to the stall. I let myself be pulled in by the aroma I myself had helped create. My hand drifted up to the necklace hanging closest to my face. It was a misshapen wire cage, probably twisted together by Margie’s weathered but nimble fingers. The cage was wrapped around a bottle cap, a relic of a time long gone. The bottle cap said ‘Sunkist’ and it was a violent orange color.
“Well preserved,” I praised.
Margie beamed. She’d replaced her teeth with polished and carved smooth river stones, two rows of grey and white. Her left front tooth was the only brown stone, a fleck of black on the bottom edge.
“My boy, I haven’t seen you since the last flood, I-” She was babbling a mile a minute, so I interjected quickly,
“Oh, are you running low on the balm?”
Her milky blue eyes widened, then blinked, “Well no, I was just worried about you.”
Something twisted painfully in my chest. It took me a moment to realize it was a good sort of hurt.
“Sorry about that. I should be coming around more after this visit. I’m visiting the Tinker.”
Her face fell and she seemed to shrink into the thick blanket wrapped around her, a turtle retreating into its shell. The city’s inhabitants bore mixed feelings toward the man known locally as the Tinker. He tore apart the robotic junk left behind by our planet-destroying ancestors and worked his magic on the flesh junk of human bodies ravaged by the toxic environment. Most places had local chop-shops for the routine amputation, appendix removal or tooth pull. Here by the seaside, we had the Tinker.
Margie was wary of him despite having a set of teeth he’d installed for her. He’d wanted to give her something with metal, but her irrational fear of change drove her to more old-fashioned means. In the old days, when the world first ended, folks used whatever they had on hand to solve problems, push through and survive. If you couldn’t eat without teeth, you’d make some from stone yourself. The carved ends mimicked the roots of her existing teeth, and her flesh grew around them, accepting the replacement. It was impressive work for a man who usually dealt in an entirely different field of handicraft.
She reached out a weathered, gnarled hand adorned with various children’s plasticine rings. Her wrist was thick with layers of bracelets in all the colors known to man. Buried amongst the cacophony, I spotted an alphabet bead bracelet that spelled out ‘dream on’ in fluorescent pink. Her hand took mine and squeezed with what little strength was left in her small body.
“Be careful dear,” There was such care in her eyes, but I could not fathom her existence. She lived without seeing the sky, fearful of the rain. Meanwhile, I daily plunged my hands into the rushing torrent of poison that crashed on the rocks with every wave. Those who lived in the underbelly were divided into two groups. Those who came and went, and those who stayed. Margie’s age belied which group she belonged to. Those who saw the sun were cursed to die young. Years of inhaling the toxins, swimming in the acrid waters, and eating tainted food, would one day catch up to me. I was visiting the Tinker for a reason, after all.
I could not stop the tremor in my hand that she held with both of hers now. The concern deepened her brow. Her nimble hands found the twitching muscle beneath a red and wrinkled patch of acid damage. She smoothed her thumbs over the spasming flesh until it calmed itself to a barely perceptible quiver.
“There, that’s better.” As my hand quieted, so too did the knit in her brow come undone.
“I can’t. Not without my hands,” I felt disconnected from the frail, whine of a voice that came from my lips. It twisted that thing that had once been warm and sweet in the pit of my gut into something sweltering and piercing.
Margie did not respond. She pressed her lips together, but not unkindly. With a nod, she released my hand and patted the back of my knuckles with the tips of her fingers.
“I know,” She sighed and looked up to meet my gaze. There was a fond smile in her eyes.
“I know.”