The End and the Beginning [A Short Story]

What You Think You Want to Know Isn't Always So

I chased her across the sand, through a rough boulder, disturbing an octopus hiding in a crevice, and down into a rocky dip in the ocean floor where the cliffs cast long shadows across schools of fish that fluttered and dashed away when we ran through them. She turned toward me and smiled for a brief moment before it dropped into an expression of horror. She let out a scream and pointed behind me. I turned around and looked at the rock that we had just passed through. Near the top, a red dress lay like a napkin tossed on the floor.

"That's me, isn't it," she said. Then she went quiet and shook her head, covering her mouth with her hands.

I nodded solemnly. "It does appear so. Would you like me to go have a closer look for you?"

She dropped her hands and blinked out a tear. "No," she said, taking in a breath of strength. "I'll go. I need to see for myself." She shook off her feelings and took a step forward to stand next to me. "I wanted this, right?" She tried to smile at me, but it didn't didn't shimmer like before. "This is what we were looking for, wasn't it?"

"I'll go with you," I said, putting my hand in hers.

Together we made our way toward the dress, stopping briefly at the woman's skull that had rolled to the base of the rock. She bent down to look over the bare skull, squinting into its eye sockets in silent searching before moving on.

"Is it the same dress?" she asked as she stood over the torn fabric, and spread out her own skirt to compare. She didn't need to do that, though. It was obvious from the neckline that it was the same dress. I nodded.

She nodded too, but as the nod faded, she collapsed into a heap on the rock and stared off into the distance. I sat down next to her, but said nothing. There was nothing I could say.

"I wanted to come out here to get away from the idea of finding myself," she said, "and here I am finding myself in the middle of the abyss." She went quiet for a moment. "And its not even a good feeling like I thought it'd be. I found myself, but I still don't know who I am. It's just depressing."

"Well... then lets move on." I searched the horizon for a sign of something beautiful and full of life to help drag her focus away from herself. A shark glided by us without notice, heading toward a cloud of fish that shimmered as they turned in the water. "Do you want to go find a coral reef perhaps? Maybe Dale knows where to find one."

She shook her head for a brief moment, but then stopped and tilted it to the side in a thoughtful sort of posture. "Well," she said, "I suppose we might as well. There's nothing else to do. This feeling, though... I've never felt so empty. It's as if I have less now that I had before. How can a body take away so much from me? I thought it would give me what I wanted." She didn't look at me when she spoke. She stared off into the vast deep blue of the ocean.

The school of fish moved like fabric in a breeze, twisting and bending their cloud to stay clear of the shark. Even though they enveloped him in their mass, it was obvious from the lack of blood in the water, that they stayed clear from the shark's teeth, forming a circle around him like an eye of a storm.

The mass of silver bodies moved toward us, flowing back and forth as if they were caught in a tide. Soon they were on top of us and all around us, stirring up the water and tickling our forms with their fins. Several fish swam right through us, causing the strangest of sensations throughout our beings. The fish felt it too and circled back around to run through us again. Even as the cloud of fish moved past us—still working to avoid the shark, a small puff of fish stayed behind, circling around us and swimming through in an exploratory manner.

I shivered and laughed—despite the sadness of what had just come before. Looking over at the woman in red, I could see she was smiling, too. A fish circled around her head and swam through her face over and over again. Out of instinct, she tried to wave it away with her hand, but that did no good. "What are they doing?" She asked me, moving her head to see me clearly without the fish swimming through her eyes.

"I don't know." I shrugged. "I guess they like the feeling." It was a nice feeling. Even though I shivered, it actually felt quite warm. I could have stayed there and let the fish continue their game, but I wanted to see what would happen if I moved. I stood up and took several large steps away from them, testing to see if they'd follow. The fish swam around in a circle twice more before noticing that I was no longer there. Then they branched off from each other and swam around the area looking for that sensation. They found it in the woman in red and swarmed on her until she broke into laughing, knocking her bones down from the rock. Her skeleton fell to a heap at the base of the rock, but she stood up and looked at me, the fish swirling around her.

"Thanks," she said sarcastically. "Now I have them all."

"Well, if they bother you so much, you could leave them like I did."

"They don't really bother me at all," she said, "Only my vision." She waved her hand in front of her face again as a fish covered her eyes. "However," she continued, "I wonder..." Then, just as I had, she moved away from the fish, stepping out toward me until there was a good bit of distance between us and them.

The fish split up again, surveying the area for any sign of us. "Do you think they'd be able to find us," she said in a whisper. "They can't see us, right?"

"I don't believe they can hear us, either," I said with a smile. She tried to shove me, playfully, but her hand went through my arm and chest without moving me from my spot.

The fish did find us, if only by chance, and started swarming through us again. We took a step back and they followed us. The event turned into a new game of tag, until the fish finally got tired of playing and swam off to join their school again, which was swishing and swaying in the distance. The sunlight, by that time was dim and without the company of the fish, the water felt particularly cold.

"Do you want to go back to the ship?" I asked, looking around for its silhouette.

"Not particularly," she said, "Besides, I can't remember which direction it's in and we lost sight of it quite a while ago."

"Where, then, should we go?"

"I don't know." She looked up at the surface of the water. It was dark except for a spot of pale, blue light that might have been the moon. "But I don't much care anymore. Besides, what's the worst that could happen? If we're ever lost in the darkness, all we have to do is go up, right? I wonder what the surface of the moon is like."

"Do you want to find out?" I asked.

She looked at me and smiled, but then, "No," she said, "Let's go find a star."