Waterlogged

I was born after the rain began.

My grandfather told me how amazing the world was before the storm; how bright and green the grass was on cultivated fields as far as the eye could see. He told me climbing the mountaintops was a test of skill and endurance, not a simple saunter up onto what limited dry land we had left. He told me, through tired eyes and matted hair, of a time when the world was warm and dry. But that was before the rain fell. Before the sun went away.

Still, I’d always sensed a feeling of jubilation when grandpa told me of a time when he and my late grandmother would picnic on the grass outside their home, just because they wanted to. They would spend all day outside during the spring because the sky was blue, and the clouds were white. I’ve admittedly always felt envious of his stories because I look outside my port window every morning wondering what that could have possibly felt like. The closest thing I ever felt to a blue sky and sunshine was watching old movies from that era.

Grandpa never told me why the rain began, mostly because he never actually knew. Speculation was said to have run rampant when the skies began to darken, and the first drops fell. Some saw it as a sign from a higher power like in the old books. Others felt it was man’s folly, playing with nature without thinking of the consequences. I couldn’t find out much information myself; all I knew about was staying inside most of the time.

I grew up near the Strike Zone, an area in the ocean world where lightning filled the skies every second of every day. My father worked in a floating fortress covered in lightning rods which harnessed and stored the plasma from the lightning, so the other ocean-top colonies could reap the benefits of our hard work. My mother spent her days fishing off our roof outside the Strike Zone and collected junk from the ocean, mostly artifacts of the world before us. Some days she would stay on the roof for hours, nestled underneath her umbrella which itself was bolted to the rubberized roof with a lightning rod attached.

One morning as I was walking up the pier off the roof, I saw my mother struggling to pull what seemed like a new prize out of the water. She’d recently caught enough fish for us to cook for a week. Any more fishing she’d done after that was a hobby at that point. She was struggling so I, a rather weak seventeen-year-old girl at the time, decided it would be great to help her out. This was a mistake. Oh, heavens above, was this a mistake.

I ran over and tried to help her as she yanked back on the reel. I grabbed the umbrella stand with one hand and the back of her raincoat with the other. We’d made headway with the reel, but the rain was getting to be too much for a weak girl like myself.

It was an unfortunate moment of clarity which made me wrap a bit of the line around my lower leg to get leverage, but we were still struggling. A bolt of lightning struck the water nearby, startling my mother and myself, and it was at this point my mother must have thought whatever she was trying to get was not worth getting struck by lightning over. With a sigh of contempt, she let go of the pole and let the weight of the treasured object pull it down into the ocean.

What we had both forgotten, however, was my leg still being wrapped with the fishing line. Before I could react, I fell forward onto my face and slid down the wooden pier and into the water below. It felt like the world had stopped as I fell, the rain around me slowing to a crawl as lightning danced across the sky above me. While falling the two stories from the pier to the water, I had managed to twist my body and ended up slamming directly into the water on my back. I heard my mother frantically call my name as I fell, and when I began to sink into the ocean her voice became more and more distorted.

I was floating, barely conscious, and I felt the world around me go dark. I knew this was the end if I had not relaxed and let the tide work its magic. Regaining my composure, I kicked the fishing line off my leg and reached down to grab it as whatever we were holding was floating softly with the darkened water. My curiosity got the best of me as I was determined to see what we were holding. I got closer and saw the silhouette of what looked like a human grasping something in their thin hand, but before I could swim down further, I felt hands grab my legs and pull me up to the surface.

My mother pulled the two of us onto a lower pier deck, situated on the bottom of our houseboat just in case something like this had happened. While grabbing me, she had also grabbed the fishing pole and, when we surfaced completely, she lodged it in the deck to keep it from flying away again. I caught my breath and laid on the wooden surface. My mother was trying to talk to me but the water in my ears and the pouring rain prevented me from hearing it. I assured my mother I was okay before turning over on the deck and passing out from the experience.

---

I awoke a few hours later in a daze, laying on the living room couch as my parents were standing near the observation window. I overheard them talking to each other, mostly about what had happened to me. When they saw me groggily standing up, they ran over to me and tried to help me keep my balance. My back was killing me after slamming into the water as well as my lungs feeling like they were partially filled with liquid. I walked over to my father and gave him a hug which he’d reciprocated, and the two of them led me down into the lower decks of the houseboat.

Sitting on a table, wrapped in a bag, was the person I saw in the water. My parents explained to me that after I passed out, they were able to recover the body from the fishing line and pull it aboard. They told me to steel myself before pulling the plastic off, and I laid eyes on a drowned woman wearing clothes from the old world, in her hand a silver, slightly rusted heart-shaped locket. This was not the first body I’d seen in my life, as my other had recovered them a few times in the past with her fishing hobby. Still, this one was different. As her body began to drain, her arm slid off the table and dangled downward, dropping the locket to the floor with a resounding clang. I picked it up and opened it, looking closely at the water-logged faces of what was most likely the young woman and her husband.

The husband looked familiar.

The eyes were still visible, and they were unmistakable.

My grandpa had told me of my grandmother being lost in the rains as they tried to board one of the last ships leaving their state. After years of being lost, she was finally found by my family of all people.

This woman was my grandmother.

I grabbed the locket and held it to my chest, tears flowing from my eyes as the whole situation finally hit me.

I went upstairs a few hours later and told my grandfather about the locket, and the woman, and how the picture was of him. I wasn’t sure what his reaction was meant to convey. Pain? Relief? Closure? He sat on his favorite chair and rubbed the metal locket with his thumb, tears dropping down from his chin onto his ragged clothes. He thanked me and gave me back the locket. He told me it was mine now, that my grandmother would have wanted me to have it.

I still have that rusty old locket around my neck to this day.