Praying to the surface he stares without ask into the fracturing light, the soundless clatter, the teal skin of the world. Without eyes. Sightless he stares into the place where the sun is, beyond the surface, a disk that fails to reach down around him except to pale the drifting sand. The sand is cold, around his knees. The fish are accustomed to the cold. They swim among his sand-packed body, the dug up place that looks like a struggle, as though he had tried, once, to step out of the earth. He is not struggling now. He holds his staff, and he is not calling, but he is calling the way the whales call. Hear me hundreds of miles away, hear across depths deeper than the mountains that the land bodies know. When tectonic plates shift, they hear his call. When the palm leaves out of sight beyond the surface but touched by that disc of sun hear him, they flicker together, they lift and billow on the wind, useless.

What is he asking for, if not to be taken back to the surface where he once was.

But that isn’t it, and he knows this, and so does the empty and dune-trodden sand.

How can I belong with the land bodies now? When my skin is caked in sand as though made from it; you cannot scrape into the surface deep enough to break it off without breaking my bones. How can I ever return to there, where the air is, when the lungs you once would believe I had have leaked away, through these pores, to be swallowed by fish, to be swept sideways into the aquamarine silence. My elbows are still human, my hands gripping this staff.

He is not asking to go back, no. Because backwards in time means erase the blue fish that ripple around him, their bodies the same color as the water in the daylight, thin yellow edging their fins as though burned. They remind him of paper, their fragile proud movements, the pages he must have known in another life.

Every fish is a prayer, though not one of his. They are prayers from the water, from the sand. From themselves.

What is he praying for, if this is no prayer, this leaking place? It is more than a prayer. There is no word strong enough in English, though prayer comes close. Prayer has a shadow, a reaching. To pray is to beg while knowing that the voice has to reach deeper than the action of prayer can tolerate. I am asking for the life of someone I love. I am asking for time to slow down a little. God won’t you let me stay in these seconds just a little bit longer. Let my gratitude last before slipping away. I am grieving for my life, which will go. My brother, my mother, I am grieving for the glaciers and the animals.

There are many words, in many languages. He is hurting more than a prayer.

Agonized peace.

Is this tragedy? Ask the distant ceiling, which is darker blue with distance, where the fish vanish into shadows that congeal rather than fall. The palm leaves in their rhythm of ribbons on that distant land will understand. The whales, who also call, singing into the darkness, understand. The clouds above the earth’s surface, forming and swirling and vanishing, gliding enormous, though smaller than the whales, understand.

The land bodies may never.

Let them see the shadows in the sand on his shoulders, his neck. Let them look at the scepter he holds and think Ancient God, ancient hero. Poseidon. Warrior. Are you my ancestor? Let them look into the sightless eyes of the face they carved, and know he sees them, are included in the vision of his beseeching, back and forth, this echo. His prayer.

Sierra Warrick was born and raised in Oakland, California, on the unceded and ancestral Chochenyo Ohlone land of Huchiun. She holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has been recognized in the shortlist for Room‘s Poetry Contest, twice in the longlist for The Master’s Review Short Story Award for New Writers, and in Meridian where she was published as a finalist for the 2019 Editor’s Prize.

About the illustrator: Michael Noonan is from Halifax, Yorkshire. Has had artworks published in literary journals in the US and UK, including After the Pause, Utopia Science Fiction Magazine, and Noctivigant Press. Won a runner-up prize for a drawing in a competition run by Arts and Illustrators Magazine in the UK, and his own painting can be seen on the cover of a volume of his short stories, titled Seven Tall Tales, that is available at Amazon.