[FICTION] — The Saltwater Cradle, part 1

Not necessarily going for spooky in this one — but weird and maybe a bit otherworldly? For sure.

CW — language, oblique sexual references

I stepped outside this morning to discover what appears to be a tide pool in our front yard. It definitely wasn’t there the last time I walked out to my car — i.e., yesterday morning — and as far as I can tell, it had no business being there at all. We — that is to say me, my girlfriend Cheyenne, and our dog Pug (who is not a pug) — live in the firmly landlocked southeastern corner of Washington state, hundreds of miles from the coast in an area that is technically high desert.

Whenever I venture to other parts of the country and tell people where I’m from, I always enjoy blowing their minds with the revelation that, geographically speaking, only about a third of Washington is anything like what they picture. The trees and damp and hipsters make up a minority (although the hipsters have admittedly encroached inland), and much of the state is in fact covered with sagebrush and bald hills.

All of which is to say that a tide pool in the front yard is not a natural landscaping feature. And I’ve never heard of one being installed artificially, though come to think of it I’m sure someone somewhere has done it. But that someone isn’t me, nor Cheyenne. I don’t think it’s Pug either, but honestly who knows. There’s a goddamn tide pool in the front yard, so I guess anything is possible now.

When I first opened the front door this morning, I immediately noticed the brackish, unmistakable smell of seawater. I sucked in a deep breath upon recognizing it, feeling suddenly derailed. This was a “vacation in June when I was fourteen” smell, not a “going to work on Tuesday at age twenty-nine” smell. Stepping off the porch, I scanned the street and the front yard, trying to figure out the source. I then happened to look down at my feet, just in time to avoid stepping in it.

About five feet from the driveway, I stopped in my tracks and stared at the gaping divot that had suddenly appeared in the lawn. It was a jagged sort of diamond shape, maybe four feet long by two feet wide. Unlike most other tide pools I’d seen during childhood trips to the Oregon coast, this one was not surrounded by barnacle-crusted rocks. The grass marched happily up to the very lip of the hole, flat and undisturbed, and then just gave way to tranquil clear water maybe two feet deep.

I’ve aerated the front lawn a couple of times (yes, really) without any problems, and there’s never been any evidence that it sits atop a bunch of boulders. But sure enough, the walls of the pool were rock — a few porous, rounded basalt bellies ensconcing a tiny ecosystem. The stone walls gave way to a sloping floor of sand, embellished with rubbery clusters of brown kelp. A couple of small anonymous fish darted in and out, miniature dirt-colored koi — things that I had seen dozens of times before at the beach but never did the research to identify. Gravelly lumps that I immediately recognized as shy anemones were spattered all around, though a few of them were shamelessly open and flaunting their stubby jade fronds for all the world to see. And trundling along in the middle of the sand floor was a little orange crab about the size of a dollar coin.

I gawked at the whole thing for about a minute, then turned toward the door, about to go get Cheyenne and ask her about this new… feature in the yard. But I stopped myself. Bringing someone else into this would confirm that I thought the thing was real, and I guess I wasn’t entirely convinced of that yet. Not that I had any good alternative hypotheses in mind. “Hallucination” didn’t sit right — if I were having some kind of trip, shouldn’t I instead be seeing fractals in the sky or purple lizards or something? And if it were a practical joke, I just… didn’t get it. A tide pool felt simultaneously too vivid, specific and mundane to be either a hallucination or an ornate prank.

So I just went back to staring at it for a minute, until the little crab made his way to one end of the pool and shimmied into a crevice. I blinked twice, looked away, rubbed my eyes and looked back. The pool was still there. One of the fish flitted into some kelp, sending a couple of bubbles up to the surface. They popped noiselessly, and I shook my head and walked over to the car. The thing didn’t seem to pose any immediate problems, so I decided not to worry about it. I’m good at ignoring things like that when I have to.

— — —

When I got home, there was Cheyenne in the yard, staring down at it. Pug was with her, whuffing and bobbing around the pool, periodically crouching at its edge with her nose down and butt in the air. It struck me that her vision must be better than I thought if she was able to see the little critters under the water and get this worked up over them. This is a dog known to be spooked by windblown plastic bags, after all.

“Hey babe, uh… what’s this?” Cheyenne asked, pointing down at the pool and grimacing slightly as if it were a porn collection she had stumbled upon.

“Ah. Yeah, saw that this morning when I was leaving,” I replied, drawing up next to her and feeling a little woozy.

“Did you… uh. Hmm.”

“I know.”

“Is it…?”

“A tide pool?”

She looked at me, squinted and nodded.

“I mean, yeah, looks like it,” I admitted. The matter-of-fact nature of my response confused me as much as it likely confused her. I felt a bit disassociated from everything.

She looked back down at it. “The fuck’s it doing in our yard?”

“No idea.”

“Should we…” She trailed off.

“Call someone?” I supplied.

“Yeah, I mean… I guess?”

“Who would we call?”

“I dunno. The 811 guys?”

“You mean the dudes you call before you dig so you don’t blow up a gas line?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would we call them?”

“I mean, if anyone would know about weird shit underground, wouldn’t they?”

“Oh.” She had a point. “Maybe.”

We went back to staring in silence. I couldn’t see the crab anywhere, but the little dirt-koi were still zipping around, much to Pug’s perturbation. A few more of the anemones seemed to have bloomed. A big fat one in particular that I hadn’t noticed before lurked in a corner. I scanned from there to the other end of the pool where I saw a wrinkled lump of mottled purple with a couple smaller lumps tapering off of it, all peppered with tiny white pinpoints.

“Woah. Is that a starfish??”

“Oh yeah. That guy bunched up in the corner there?” She pointed where I was looking.

“Yeah.”

“Guess so. Was he not there this morning?”

“I mean, maybe, but I didn’t notice it. You seen the crab yet?”

“No. There’s a crab?”

“Well, there was one this morning.”

“Huh.” She was intrigued, and squatted down to peer more closely into the pool’s depths. Pug trotted up next to her, whining a bit. Cheyenne reached over and tousled her ears, shushing her, staring fixedly into the water. The dirty koi — there were about four of them total, I figured — were either out of sight or sitting motionless on the sandy floor. Pug stared in anticipation at one that was hunkered down square in the middle.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, the little fish zipped into a bundle of kelp. Pug lunged at it with a bark, slipping a bit on the edge and dipping one paw into the water with a comical plunk! I stepped back, feeling a disproportionate rush of adrenaline.

“Hey girl!” Cheyenne yelled.

The ripples from Pug’s intrusion slopped over to the far corner of the pool, and my mouth literally dropped open as several chunks of the lawn on that side sloughed off and splashed lazily into the water, extending its reach by a couple of feet. As they did so, water surged seemingly from beneath them where there should have been just dirt, filling up the new space. As the chunks of sod drifted down into the water, I saw that the stone walls extended along this new addition to the pool as well — more basalt boulders where, again, there should have just been dirt.

I realized that both Cheyenne and I had lunged backward from the pool, nearly to the front door, while Pug stayed at its edge barking like a maniac. My mouth was dry, and I was suddenly feeling afraid. Cheyenne snapped out of it sooner than I did.

“Pug! Pug!” she hollered. The dog kept barking.

“Goddammit — PUG!!” She clapped and whistled, and finally the stupid dog looked back sheepishly, licked her chops — and then resumed barking.

“Fine,” Cheyenne muttered, then marched over, grabbed Pug by the collar and awkwardly heaved her over to the front door. Our dog lacks self-control but is also easily made to feel guilty, so she went along reluctantly, her barks stuffed back down into peevish whines. I heard the door slam, and I was alone staring at the pool again.

That didn’t last long. My previous attitude — which I guess was bemused perplexity — had now given way to genuine unease, especially when I noted that the stone walls of the pool on its newly expanded far side were already festooned with anemones. Had they just been… waiting there, underground, for God knew how long?

I mentally slapped the thought away as soon as it arrived, and turned to follow my little family back inside.

— — —

I’ve always felt vaguely guilty about owning a house when a lot of my friends from college are still slumming it in urban apartments, but at the same time — don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, right? And this house had definitely seemed like a gift horse, at least when I got it.

Ok, fine, my whole life has been a bit of a gift horse for a while now. Upon graduating from UW with a bachelor’s in computer science, I spent several years hanging out in Seattle with a couple of school buddies. We each scrounged for about a year, eventually landed fairly solid tech positions, and settled into that urban millennial groove you keep reading about. We weren’t jet-setters, but made enough to afford under-utilized gym memberships, keep up with loan payments and support many a weed startup.

But then an uncle over on the east side — of the state, not the city — put my name in for an analyst position with Lockheed Martin, and even I was kind of startled by how easily I left Seattle behind when a better opportunity showed up. Richland is no bustling metropolis, but it’s a medium-sized town that’s anxious to prove itself, and honestly I’m not that hard to please. Since I’d had the good fortune to land a tech job with a military contractor, while also avoiding the draconian costs of urban living, it wasn’t long before I realized that I could easily afford a mortgage. And around the same time, I met Cheyenne.

She also worked at Lockheed, as a secretary in PR and Advocacy, though we actually met on Tinder. We slept together the second time we went out, and I was relieved to find her friendly but not overly cuddly or affectionate the next morning. She didn’t have big expectations, and neither did I, and things just continued like that. When the bungalow on Winslow Street eventually came across my radar, she offered to help with mortgage payments and join me there when her current lease expired. I liked the idea.

I think we were both aware of the fact that we were approaching something that would be “a big step” for most couples in a rather casual way, and I think we were both happy to be doing so. I made an offer on the place, it was accepted, I dipped a bit into savings for the closing costs, and she moved in several months later. Pug came along as part of the deal. Rehabilitating the tired front lawn became a pet project of mine that first spring, and I never got any indication that a little patch of displaced ocean was sitting right underneath it.

Now, sitting on the sofa and gazing absently into the dead gas fireplace, it occurred to me that I was feeling something I hadn’t felt in a long time — perhaps not since college. A sense of overwhelm; an inability to respond to something that nonetheless demanded my attention. My front yard was apparently falling into the sea, despite the sea being three hundred miles away. I glanced over to Cheyenne as she stood with her palms planted on the kitchen island, staring at its blank granite surface. It seemed she was feeling something similar.

“So, what are we going to do about that?” she asked.

Time to respond, I decided.

“Well…” I faltered. “I guess the first thing would be to call the… city zoning authority.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“You know, the guys who issue building permits, the surveyors, whatever,” I continued. “Tell them we’ve got an… abnormality in the front yard, see what they know about it.”

“You think they’ll know?” she pressed.

“More than we do, yeah,” I clipped back.

“I don’t think they’ll have any idea,” she replied, standing back from the countertop and wandering over to the fridge. She opened it and pulled out a grapefruit La Croix that I knew she would abandon someplace random, half-finished.

“I mean, if you want to pull out the shop-vac and just try sucking up the water, guess that’s worth a shot.” I surprised myself with that — sarcasm is far from my first language.

She glanced at me and took a slurp from the can, her expression inscrutable.

“Fuck it, may as well,” she deadpanned after a moment, striding in the direction of the door to the garage.

I sighed heavily.

Then a loud tack tack tack sounded from the window behind me and I jumped. Pug immediately started barking again; I heard Cheyenne fire an exasperated curse at her, and the garage door slammed. Swiveling, I found a dirty grey seagull perched on the windowsill outside. It appeared to be looking directly at Pug, who had settled for low growls for the moment.

The damnable bird cocked its head, then nailed the window with its beak again, hard. I had the sudden (absurd?) fear that it could drill right through the glass if it really wanted to. Pug erupted into more barks. Suddenly I was out the door, that brackish scent filling my head again, the stupid seagull flopping away with one of its species’ trademark honking caws.

“Fuck off!” I shouted after it, although it had already fucked off. Mostly. It drifted down in the middle of the road, padded around a bit on rubbery flat feet, then stopped and looked at me. It cawed again and fluttered its wings. I yanked a pebble out of Cheyenne’s succulent planter next to the door, lobbed it at the bird, missed by a mile and went back inside.

— — —

Cheyenne made good on her word and spent a solid hour attacking the pool with the shop-vac, after which point I finally decided to stop being a dick and go check on her. Poking my head out the door, I was shocked to find that my snarky suggestion had worked — the driveway and its surrounding gravel were soaked in seawater, while the pool itself was nearly empty. The kelp hung and flopped about in bedraggled heaps inside it, and the anemones had been reduced to puckered pimples on the rocks. And there she was, on her knees at the edge of the lawn: jeans sodden, hair in bedraggled blonde curtains, sucking up the last puddles at the bottom as the vacuum gargled in protest.

Eventually she started hitting wet sand and got to her feet. She met my gaze briefly — a look of coquettish triumph that left me feeling both cowed and turned on — and switched off the vacuum with a somewhat theatrical flick of her wrist. She turned to me and raised her eyebrows.

“So,” she began.

“So,” I responded, feeling a sheepish grin creep across my face.

“What do you think?”

“I think… that I’m impressed,” I replied. “I was kidding about the shop-vac.”

“Well,” she said, gesturing at the emptied pool, “this is what you get for making careless jokes.” She stepped onto the porch next to me, her face straight but eyes alight. She started wiping her hands together to clear off some of the muck, then suddenly smeared them down the front of my shirt. I leapt backward.

“The fuck babe?!”

She laughed openly. “Don’t underestimate me again,” she said merrily, ducking past me through the doorway.

“Hey, woah.” I trailed her in and grabbed her wrist. “Listen…”

What was I wanting to say?

“I’m…sorry for being bitchy.”

“Oh?” I could see her formulating another mischievous jab, but then her look softened. “Apology accepted.” She curled into my chest and looked up at me, eyes bright. The ocean smell clung to her. I liked it. I fished around for the door with one foot and swung it shut.

“You smell like low tide.”

“Mm. Delicious, I know.” She craned upwards and kissed me, kept kissing me, then worked her fingers into my belt loops and started tugging me toward the couch.

“Oh. Okay,” I laughed between kisses, and wrapped my arms around her. She kept stepping backwards, and I kept following. Her hand went for my fly.

“You sure you don’t wanna shower or…?” I began, but she stopped my mouth again.

“Mm-hmm.” Her arms locked around my back and I tipped forward; she yelped as we both fell onto the couch. It occurred to me to worry about the upholstery. Then it occurred to me to be surprised that she wasn’t worried about it. And then I stopped worrying about it.

[continued in Part 2]