{FICTION}
Braids of seaweed spotted with milky pearls, blush-pink sea scallops, star fish and sea glass wrap around the whale bone skeleton of Lumina’s vanity chair. When her father died she sawed the net of kelp that was the chair’s seat out of the rib bone frame.
Lumina: by Harry the Shell. 01/14. 5:49 A.M.
Braids of seaweed spotted with milky pearls, blush-pink sea scallops, star fish and sea glass wrap around the whale bone skeleton of Lumina’s vanity chair. When her father died she sawed the net of kelp that was the chair’s seat out of the rib bone frame. Tiny, tropical fish – salmon-pink, sun-fleck-white, and oyster-shell-gray – would swim in and out of it like the ballet dancers in the stories her grandmother would tell when she and her sister were little. Lumina couldn’t have that anymore.
The princess raked an heirloom comb through her indigo and iris hair. There were so many knots from yesterday’s expedition into the amethyst coves at the east end of Atlantia. The princess blotted coral-pink blush (made of crushed Muricidae) to her cheeks with her pinky finger. She ran a tube of pricey, ruby-red lipstick (made from cockineall; sp.?, it was stolen from Up There) her brother had gifted her for her birthday. She made a wide smile for the mirror made of hunks of glass from sinking Up There hand mirrors, armoires and vanities bought from Seraphs’ Crafts stuck together with clownfish glue from Winslow’s Apothecary.
Sounds of whipping water rushed past her clean rectangular cut-out in the premium limestone that makes up all of the insides and family furniture of Morrigan Fortress. The Sebille daughters were not permitted doors. Of course Liliana and Lazarus would beat her to the Sebille family archway. Not that Lumina was in any hurry to make it there herself.
Sebastian. 01/14. 8:14 A.M.
Empyrean Inc. wanted to mine the oil reserves beneath the waves off the eastern tip of Balcalhoa Island. Anna, head of tidal geometrics, alerted Hornsby, my asshole boss, of some strange aquatic happenings that made the lot of We Get Paid To Rip Up Oceans smile like children on the last day of school.
So, here I am. 35,000 feet into the hadal zone in a suit that swims at insanely fast/hour and also regulates the pressures inside of my body so that I don’t explode. I could bore you with the science that makes my floating in the deep sea sans a submarine a thing I can be doing, but I would hate to go down in history as boring.
You, reader from the future, might be wondering why I would agree to embarking on such a lonely and frankly boring mission. I mean, if you’ve seen one translucent crustacean you’ve seen them all!
Anna called off our engagement after five glorious years of Chinese takeout and fights about money and I don’t want to have to see her at work.
So, its me and the see-through nightmares. Or…is it?
Are Heaven’s Gates before me, or do my eyes deceive me? Snow-white spires and gardens as lush as the ones of Eden! Luminescent palm trees with cloud-like fronds! Fruit trees and berry bushes in colours of the rainbow! Sea-horses pulling tens of carriages! An ice sculpture of the most breathtaking girl I have ever see–
Lumina: by Harry the Shell. 01/14. 8:12 A.M.
A tiny fork engraved with “Tower of London” next to a Blue and Two Red Starfish Flag pendant pushed around bits of seaweed dressed in beluga oil and sea salt. A chorus of men’s voices dripping in self-conscious bravado rose and fell in a hall made of the same gaudy, premium limestone that The Fortress was covered in. Gold-thread cords of Atlantia bunting hung like dried tuna in between Corinthian columns painted seafoam-white.
Lumina traced shapes of fish formations she and Harry had found while searching for sunken treasures the other day. He had caught sight of a desk leg carved with ornate, Rococo leaves while out lobster hunting with his older brothers, so the nautilus and the future queen of Atlantia set out hours later in the hopes that the leg’s skeleton could be found. If Lumina could jam open a desk mouth it might have an Up There book in it.
A crash radiated from where her mother, the widowed Queen Lilith, instructed the skilled tradespeople at Seraphs’ Crafts to chip Lumina’s bust into a block of ice. Like Nero, the then-Princess/now-Queen thought to herself.
A Pretty Blonde Boy with shallow-water-green eyes hid behind the column that the ice sculpture heaved on. Pretty Blonde Boy (Lumie’s word choice) wore the same astronaut suit with the squid-ink glass eye-window that Lumina and Harry saw floating through Cancer corals the other day. The astronaut suits were using larger versions of those three-pronged tools that The Little Mermaid By Walt Disney Pictures says is a “Dinglehopper,” to saw off the heads of toddler sea anemone.
Luckily the Misters’, “Isn’t little Lumina so beautiful…And smart too…I bet she’ll be every inch a ruler as her father…Did I tell you about when and where I first met her,” were too self-aggrandizingly cacophonous and the Missuses’ coquettish smiles were too insecure to pay attention to the spot where the thunderous crash struck the ocean floor.
Lumina: by Harry the Shell. 01/15. 3:27 P.M.
Lumina picks the petals off of a plant with Bolinus-brandaris-purple petals.
“He loves me, he loves me not,” she mumbles under her breath. Harry, the nautilus working on his best friend, Lumina Sebille’s, biography, watches her, enraptured. The little mermaid had not been this upset since her mother, Queen Lilith, forbade her from seeing Prince Nike of the Capricorn crags, because the prince shared her interest in Atlantia’s shallow-most waters.
“He’s sooo prettyyy, and sooo smarttt!” she shouted, though her shout sounded like she was singing. “My mother would have a Gods-damn CONNIPTION if she knew that I was hanging out with someone from UP THERE!!!” Lumina smiled, and it reminded Harry of how Lumina used to smile when her father was alive.
“We could paint naughty words onto beluga-leather purses with tail polish, and hang them up on the chandelier above the Fortresses’ archway, like we did when Odette and her pack of anglerfish called you stupid for believing in your grandmother’s stories about Up There?” Harry offered up.
But Lumina went silent again. Lumie continued picking petals – a thing she never does, because we think that every organism in Atlantia has feelings.
“Or ride around Rainbow lagoon on seahorses? I know that that helped when Mrs. Lilith stopped you from seeing Nike outside of classes at East Pearl Private School.”
“Fuck that, and fuck her, and fuck everyone that even KNOWS I go to East Pearl Private School!”
Sebastian. 01/16. 2:18 A.M.
The breathtaking blabbermouth M E R M A I D took me out to the crumbling temple-building that has books from our world in it a few hours ago. It has papyrus manuscripts we from “Up There” have written epics and book series about as a cheap alternative for not having the manuscripts themselves. Loomie (my sad, sad, female confidante) can read ALL OF THEM and there are some whose alphabetic characters my weak, weak, Up There eyes go all cross-eyed just LOOKING AT. In a truly feeble attempt to amaze her half as much as she was amazing me, I taught her the magic of how my suit works.
That every thing I think comes out of the mouthpiece beneath the portal my binoculars peek out of and gets zapped back to We Get Paid To Rip Up Oceans. I made sure not to tell her that I have been strategically not thinking about dirty thoughts while talking to her. I have had to get very good at n o t thinking dirty thoughts recently. (When I asked her how SHE could see my FACE THROUGH THE SHEET she just said that she had really g o o d eyes.)
For every question I ask Loomie, she has a million and one answers. Life is apparently possible at the BOTTOM of the OCEAN because of the lamp posts scattered around “Atlantia” (checkmate, Plato ;)). Have I said that Loomie is the QUEEN of this underwater Eden? She is hiding me in her closet because if her mom – the old wayyy less cool and smart and beautiful queen – discovers that we are hanging out Lumina will never be allowed to leave her house again.
I’d be fine if Loomie never left her house (which is a freaking CASTLE) so long as everyone else that lives here that is not me suddenly perished…
That’s probably a selfish thing to say. She’s craaazy ambitious; she wants to make things better for the tropical fish and corals of “Iris groves,” for the dolphins and starfish of “the Meliai’s reeds,” for the belugas and orcas of “Khione’s pond,” and for the sad, sad, blue whales of “the gulf of Mnemosyne”. And even for the freaking see-through jellyfish and see-through mollusks and those ugly motherfuckers with the lights that hang in front of their faces.
So for now I am happy in her closet :)). Bookshelves line the walls of her (kind of terrifyingly cavernous) closet and I intend to read everything I can until she lets me out.
Lumina: by Harry the Shell. 01/21. 3:04 P.M.
Teary, opal-coloured eyes finger through Atlantis By Plato like it was their first time doing so. Seb, Lumie’s new nickname for Pretty Blonde Boy, taught Lumina when her favourite book since Grade Five English was written and for what purposes. He sounded unsure while reciting this information but she felt good about believing it. Her gut knew, and Lumina trusts her gut more than any Atlantian she had ever known or would probably ever know.
Lumina loved Atlantis By Plato so much because it was all wrong. She almost dropped out of Grade Five English because a glaring, indigo “F” stained all of the critical essays she wrote. You’re Not Supposed To Criticize Plato on the ones she wrote in first semester. You’re Going To Keep Getting Fs If You Don’t Start Taking Feedback Lumina on the ones she wrote in second semester.
“But why does He write about Capricorn crags and the mountains at Leo like they are cut up by Rainbow lagoon and Snowflake bay?
“Why are the gates of Gemini talked about like they are the Gates of Eden?
“Or even the Gates of Heaven? Are people from Up There really that gullible?”
Pretty Blonde Boy said that Atlantis was written to warn the King and Queen of Athens to not be such dixx; sp.?; about the Little Guy. Not to take too much just because they can. To make a mess out of something beautiful just sitting there, minding its own business.
His eyes got all sparkly during that last part.
The little mermaid knew that that’s why the Sebs-that-are-not-Seb were here. That’s why her mother had moved up her Coronation Ceremony three months earlier than her eighteenth birthday (when it is sacred tradition to have the two be on the same day).
Empyrean Aquatic Voyaging Log System, Version Beta. 01/23. 12:01 A.M.
“In the days leading up to my departure into the Atlantic, I swore that Hornsby had been cozying up to Anna, my money-hungry ex-fiancée, more than he ever had before. I told myself that this was not n e c e s s a r i l y a big deal – the two had a history that was responsible for her being hired by him…A history that she would NEVER tell me anything about.
“Anna was fresh out of UBC with a Bachelor’s in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology when Hornsby himself, had reached out to her parents and offered her the p r e s t i g i o u s position of, “Head of Tidal Geometrics.”
“Her being so receptive to his totally-not-appropriate boss-and-employee comments and touches was ultimately, the thing that killed our relationship. I could tell she wanted him (/s money and status), more than she had ever admired or respected my wit and lofty goals for my future.
“I have always loved INTENSELY. Anna would sometimes say to our friends and her family, that I loved obsessively. But is that really a bad thing?
“A few weeks before my 24th birthday, Anna came to me with the news that her boss, Alexander Hornsby IV, was looking for someone to man Empyrean Inc.’s First Ever Aquatic Voyaging Unit. Because she is seven years older than me, I always say, “Yes,” to what she tells me to do. Or…at the very least, try to get her what she asks for…
“Loomie is nothing like that. Loomie is…unlike any girl I have ever met, for that matter. She does remind me a lot of my mother, though :)).
“O.K.: midnight stroll over; head cleared. You, reader from the future, should mark down that Lumina Cleopatra Lindsay (née Sebille) grew up at 1712 Olympias Crescent.”
“Sebastian Lindsay, thank you for your service,” speaks Empyrean’s Chief Executive Officer, Alexander Hornsby IV, for the first time, into the microphone connected to the left earpiece of the company’s first Aquatic Voyager.
Loomie. 01/22. 10:48. P.M.
Before Sebastian Willamette Lindsay, the first and last soldier of Empyrean Incorporation’s Aquatic Voyaging Unit (v. Beta), went to bed last night, he took out the earpiece that connects him to Up There (well, at the least, he severed anyone from Empyrean from communicating directions to him). Nobody (except Harry, the nautilus) tells Little Lumina anything, so the fact that Sebastian is incapable of lying to her, has made him the first creature ever that she could really open her self up to. She had Harry, and the Library of Atlantia, but there was not really anything that she Gods-honest-truthfully cared about, back home in her, “Garden of Eden”.
When Loomie, Lazarus and Liliana were still all young enough to be delegated the same daily tasks by the Atlantian Republican Parliament (of which her father was the Head of by the time the Sebille’s eldest was brought into the world), her paternal grandmother would tell stories about Sebastian’s World. In Moscow, in the 1900s: graceful young women who hurled their bodies through the air – from sprints on tippy-toes to pirouettes which whooshed the empty space that encircled them! In the French courts of Louis XVI, and Louis XV, and Louis XIV: ball-gowns, precious gemstones birthed by the Earth, fluffy confections made with Sugar and Cow Milk whose frosting could stay in place without a surplus of alginate, and dancing! In Plato’s Greece: petty goddesses that gifted golden apples, weaved tapestries, and started wars, and petty gods that demanded sacrifice, mated with women as animals, and oversaw wars, and heroes-in-conflict that stole golden fleece, betrayed Ariadne, and drove Dido to the pyre!
Whether her grandmother had read them in the same books that Loomie would eventually read them in, or whether she had seen them with her own two eyes, Loomie and Liliana would never know. Queen Lilith and King Neptune shielded secrets that they knew about sightings of merfolk in Seb’s world from the Sebille siblings. The Sebille daughters,…at least.
Lumina liked marine biology – or so she had thought, ever since firstly, she could think, and secondly, she could ask questions. Morrigan Fortress’ neglected attic held piles of notebooks scribbled with diagrams of whale bones and dolphin beaks; coral flesh and fish teeth; exoskeletons and membranes, and antenna, and antenna, and antenna. Harry’s parents got mad at him for asking the same kinds of questions that Lumina did – so the reigning-Queen-of-Atlantia had always, for as long as she could remember, stuck to his side.
Loomie. Never. Fucking. Wanted. To. Be. Queen. But her father did.
But he was dead now. So why would she stay?
Alexander Hornsby VI. 01/23. 3:33 A.M.
Dear Lilith Sebille (née Hornsby),
I hope someone in your New Family finds this well. I am sorry for ordering my Aquatic Voyaging Unit, Battalion Alpha, to make their way into Atlantia. What we at Empyrean are doing, is for the greater good of both of our Worlds.
I am writing also to inform you, that the apple does not at all fall from the Tree. Your eldest daughter, Lumina Sebille, Queen of Atlantia, Duchess of New Troy (if she accepts the title), has fallen in love with one of us.
Frankly, I didn’t know Lindsay had it in him! It’s like he became a different man around your daughter. She’s a feisty one, isn’t she! A lot like her mother, but with an even nastier bite.
I can see why you were so hard on her. Why her father kept her and her sister (Liliana, if I am not mistaken) hidden away with that old bat Mother of his, every time I came around Morrigan Castle to discuss the health of our respective domains. Why, I can still hear his laugh, and the smell of his homemade celery-salt-milk pancakes.
I can never forget the touch of your hands, and the sweet melody of your voice.
Yours always, in Death as in Life,
Alex.
Lumina: by Harry the Shell. 01/23. 2:14 A.M.
Busy hands throw well-worn books into a beluga-leather saddle bag. Burning tears fall like a rainstorm onto the few treasured pieces of clothing Lumina is taking with her and Seb to Up There. In the hours in between my (Harry, Lumie’s best underwater friend’s,) last journal entry, Lumina learnt that she can walk on land.
Sebastian and Lumina sawed through the chains on Queen Lilith’s secret treasure chest – the one that Harry and the new Queen of Atlantia have been curious about since Lazarus had told them about it when the mermaid and the nautilus were in Grade Seven – using the “Dinglehopper” the Impirion; sp.?; diver pulled out of the trunk he carries on his back.
No one could stop Lumina from seeing what was inside the golden chest after she put it together that the divers from Impirion were in Atlantia to take it for the benefit of everyone from Up There. All her life Queen Lilith forbade Lumina from breaking through the water’s surface because any skin that touches the air would turn into seafoam.
Carved, anthelia coral fingers wrapped around the bottom corners of a spider crab-sized book made wholly out of marble. Frantic, iridescent-scaled fingers flipped to the very last page because her gut just knew.
All of the electricity in Atlantia came from an infinitely vast reserve of oceanic sapphires guarded by the King’s Watch (a State mandated military force whose lowest infantry Lazarus had entered into upon turning ten). The energy emanating from the tactically placed lamp posts dotting the roads, streets and wilderness trails of Atlantia has regulated the temperatures of the diverse yet landscaped Atlantian Gallia for eons.
“Sapphirus salacia, or ‘Salacia’s sapphire,’ contains nineteen times more potentiality for the emittance of energy than the element uranium, and twenty-two times more potentiality than the man-made element plutonium.”
Sebastian. 01/23. 6:16 A.M.
Even Hornsby came to Lumie’s world with Empyrean’s Aquatic Voyaging Unit in the early hours of January 23rd, 2033. Could you blame me for thinking about Lumina, Atlantia and everything that made its Eden so lush and harmonious? I came into this thinking I’d reach the bottom of Notre Dame Bay and there would be nothing but the freezing and the darkness.
Lumina had made up her mind that she wanted to leave Atlantia for somewhere of our own in my world. I promise you, reader from the future, that I begged her to stay.
“I have never wanted to be their queen. I was hoping an earthquake big enough to drown here and Up There would come before I turned eighteen.”
We read in Lumie’s mom’s B I G F U C K I N G B O O K that the only place Up There kind can breathe in Atlantia is Morrigan Fortress. Where I have been sleeping in my suit, in Lumina’s closet, every day since her coronation. Thinking that I couldn’t kiss her. That I couldn’t talk to her like a normal boy talks to the girl that he loves.
We were as close to the surface as Iris groves when the squid-ink portal of an Empyrean Voyager Suit passed in between the waving fingers of an adolescent xenia coral. Obviously the not-Sebs can’t find out about my dear blabbermouth. I need them to get as fucking bored as I was before I crashed through the Gates of Gemini. They’ll all give up and go back because they all have something to live for.
Lumie waves goodbye to the shell-with-teeth that is always around her. I can tell that she is trying to hold back tears.
Now I am giving Lumie my own Empyrean Voyager Suit. She swears she can get us to ox-cee-gen sooner than Seb’s lungs will even start to tingle.
Loomie. 01/23. 8:27 A.M.
Alaskan-water-blue stretched all around Loomie and Seb. Washes of white speckles like glimmers of sunlight in the light-green shallows spill onto the ground. When the spots of white hit Seb’s nose he shivered. I have never felt safer in my seventeen-years, three-months, and nine-days of living.
The ground is hard. Char-black like the earth of Pompeii in the photographs in my Grade One History textbooks. I am covered in char-black dust because walking is brand-new to me.
“It’s igneous! Kind of hard to walk on, even for us Up There folk. I could carry you until we find the closest thing Newfie has to white sand?”
I nod quicker than I would have liked to. Lazarus teased me anytime I moved my head in such a naïve and trusting way. “You’re the oldest, so you get to be Queen,” he would sneer. It always took him two-and-a-half beats to feel remorseful over how envious the courageous but tempestuous only Sebille male-heir would get over his silly and starry-eyed big sister’s destiny.
Sweet Atlantia, good luck being governed by Lazarus, the Petulant, and his puppet-master Lilith, the Succubus.
Grand pyramids like the ones built for the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt but made out of ig-knee-us rock reached from the gravel bed to the Alaskan-water-blue. Seb smirks at Loomie’s starstruck wide open mouth – but not like how any boy had smirked at her before. His eyes were sparkly, where theirs were steely and ravenous-looking.
Loomie felt more at home in her own body, than she had ever remembered being. Lumina was the strongest swimmer in Grade Six, Seven, and Eight Physical-Education (Aquatic Stream), but during the Season of Frey her mother forbade her from ever swimming at the fastest speed she could, before she began her Grade Nine Year of East Pearl Private School. Because that would be intimidating to the boy-that-will-become-the-man-that-will-become-your-husband.
With no Lilith to hold me back, I am going to become the fastest, Gods-damn runner that Balcalhoa Island has ever seen.
There was no white sand or any other colour of sand but there was a lighthouse. It was striped like the peppermint saltwater taffy my grandmother would make for me and my siblings on Christmas Eves before our father died.
Seb shoved the heavy door open with his shoulder blade. Posters of pin-up girls from the 1940s like the ones Lazarus clipped out of sunken DVDs and hid beneath his bed lined the walls. A bed with no headboard nor feet sighed in the backmost corner of the barely breathing room.
Sebastian set Loomie down on the centre of the mattress and tucked the holey Cheviot blanket up to her chin.
“You rest little one, while I figure out how this thing works. It shouldn’t take very long, but I have a feeling you’ll be out like a light in a matter of minutes. You’ve had a very stressful few days.”