Snail Night

By Devan Barlow

---

“Happy snail night, everyone!”

Mererid grinned and cheered along with the other team members as they changed into what she thought of as their snail suits, the rich green material shimmering with hints of turquoise and indigo as they moved.

Settled comfortably, she left the changing room with the others, looking forward to the water waiting just a few moments away —

“Mererid!”

Suddenly someone was hugging her, and a moment later she realized whose voice she was hearing. “Vicky,” she said, extracting herself from the embrace but forcing herself not to back up more than a few steps.

“I was hoping you were still here, I can’t wait to catch up!” Vicky enthused, her smile undimmed by Mererid’s restrained greeting.

“Yeah,” Mererid said, for lack of any better ideas, “well, we, um, have to head out now but…” her hesitance didn’t matter, as Vicky was somehow already deep in conversation with one of the other team members.

Sandra, the one to originally dub this monthly outing “snail night,” gave Mererid an inquiring look, but Mererid shook her head and said, “The snails are waiting!”

They full moon was high and bright overhead as they made their way down the beach to the cove. The shimmering fuchsia glow of the jellyfish light channels only extended a little ways onto the sand, and paled as they approached the water, but the night was clear and the reflected moon and stars in the water cast a cool glow upward.

The snail suits were composed of aquatic plant fibers keyed to their individual bodies, and could serve as short-term gills. As the sand under her flippers softened with surf, Mererid pulled up her goggles from around her neck. As they’d done every full moon before, she quickly closed her eyes to avoid being disoriented, and Sandra linked her arm through Mererid’s.

“Everyone ready?” Sandra called in her usual bright way. “Go!”

They all entered the water.

Even before Mererid opened her eyes, she was immersed by the intricate web of sensations she received from the pteropods, and a familiar calm washed through her. Through the lenses of her magnifying goggles, the pteropods swirled and spun in her vision in delightful clarity. She was thankful for Sandra’s familiar hold on her, allowing her to focus on the pteropods without having to navigate or worry about obstacles. The rest of the team became overly large, distant things, intermingling with brilliant masses of coral, dark strands of seaweeds, and flashes of bright fins.

Once the snail suits recognized they were fully submerged, they released the stores of berries kept in the thin channels articulating the team’s limbs. Dozens of tiny spheres, ranging from dark gold to blush pink, released from the team and drifted into the water.

The team’s plant-speakers had worked with the local trees to generate higher concentrations of carbon in their fruits, as well as working to carefully reintroduce tree species that were amenable to the same process. By releasing those trees’ berries into the water, they hoped to supply enough additional carbon to help the pteropods heal their shells, as the small aquatic snails were a crucial part of the ocean’s health.

Mererid never experienced distinct words in her communication with the pteropods, but rather a combination of sensations she had spent the last six years improving her ability to understand. Today she was gratified to find them increasingly calm with her and the team coming into the water this way, beginning to trust them. She also sorted through their impressions of which animals they’d seen lately. Since the pteropods were prey to so many species, they were best able to judge which species were declining. It seemed the other aquatic populations were continuing to strengthen, if slowly.

Grateful for her goggles’ magnification, she studied the cracks in the pteropods’ shells. As these waters had become increasingly acidic in the past, their shells had weakened as they were unable to get the carbon needed to stay healthy. One of the unexpected results of this process was the way their shells had begun to heal. As they built back up their carbon reserves, they didn’t simply heal over fractures or regain their previous thickness. Instead, new colors appeared in their shells, bringing to mind the various fruits the team used to release the carbon. It was the only way Mererid had of telling the snails apart, as their “voices” were a constantly-shifting series of intertwined sensations, and they were too small for any kind of tagging.

One she’d never seen before darted gleefully past, circled by a band of purple, almost as if it was wearing a belt… intrigued, Mererid followed, slipping out of Sandra’s hold. Unfortunately, even this normally-soothing time in the ocean couldn’t entirely take her mind off her earlier encounter.

Mererid had first begun studying with her local plant speaker’s community when she’d begun exhibiting usual symptoms of the gift. That was where she met and became friends with Vicky.

Vicky, however, had been hugely gifted, particularly with the mangroves many communities were working frantically to restore along their coastlines. Mererid had been barely capable of exchanging a simple message with any plant, much less narrow down which ones she was best attuned to.

Without meaning to, Mererid had come to be seen as Vicky’s much less talented — and much less interesting — sidekick. She developed a vague, constant sense that Vicky was doing her a favor by being friends with her. Though she had known she was falling further and further behind, it hadn’t been until Vicky had accepted an offer for a prestigious coastal restoration posting that Mererid had realized the truth. She had congratulated Vicky, and said she hoped they could stay in touch.

Vicky had only sighed. “I’m sorry.” Her voice suggested she wasn’t, really, but wanted credit for saying the words. “You’re just, well… I need friends who are important enough to understand the type of things I’m really dealing with.”

It hurt, a lot. But it would have hurt significantly more if not for the fact that the very day Vicky left, one of Mererid’s teachers drew her aside and presented her with a pair of magnifying goggles. She thought perhaps what Mererid was sensing were phytoplankton, too small to see normally.

Both Mererid and her teacher had been surprised when, upon first seeing the small snails and feeling an unprecedented connection, Mererid discovered she hadn’t been sensing plants at all, but rather pteropods!

Being able to see them, put shapes and movement to the sensations she’d been experiencing, was as invigorating as waking up from her first night of proper sleep after weeks of insomnia.

Though she had been the first in her program to have a connection to gastropods rather than plants, Mererid’s teacher had helped her translate plant-speaker methodologies to her work with the pteropods. That same amazing teacher had also helped Mererid find the posting here, where she was able to work on what she loved and finally felt like she belonged.

Except now Vicky was back in her life, convinced their friendship could pick back up in a place it had never, in Mererid’s memory, actually reached. Frustrated, she refocused on the pteropod with the purple belt, straining to swim faster as she struggled to get a closer look at it —

An unusual surge of movement in the water startled her, and suddenly Sandra was pulling her upward. Mererid’s heart thumped as she realized she was so intent on the pteropod, she’d been ignoring the warning on her goggle lens indicating she was descending too low in the water for her suit to work safely.

Sandra signed that it was time to ascend, and begin swimming up, pulling Mererid with her.

When they broke the surface, Mererid pulled off her goggles just as Sandra said, “I can tell the dev team you’re interested in testing the downwelling suit prototypes, but you know as well as I do they’re not ready yet.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, rather than scolding, as the two of them made their way back to the shore. Sandra didn’t comment further on what had just happened, though she only let go of Mererid when they were both firmly standing on the beach.

Then Sandra asked quietly, “What’s the deal with Vicky?”

Mererid hesitated, and Sandra hurried to fill the silence. “You seemed… not comfortable? With her being here? Look, if you need, I’ll tell the coordinators Vicky has to leave. You don’t have to give me any details.” Though the words were rushed, the intent behind them was as steady and supportive as when she pulled Mererid out of the water.

“It’s nothing…” Mererid closed her eyes, and saw once again that pteropod with the purple belt. Sandra has never treated you like Vicky did. She finally looked at Sandra again, and settled for the most truthful explanation she could think of. “She’s very bad at, well, being a friend.”

As they returned inside she told Sandra about her history with Vicky, finishing just as they reached their changing room.

Sandra frowned. “So then she comes here and acts like you were always super close.”

“She thinks I’m special enough for her now, I guess. That’s just how she is.” Mererid undid the braid she wore to keep her hair from tangling underwater, and began combing her hair, glad to have something to do with her hands. “I think I’m okay with her being here, if she’s helping. But I really don’t want to spend time with her.”

Sandra nodded. “I’ll try to keep an eye out, in case she hones in on you again like she did earlier.”

“Thank you.”

Mererid was glad she’d worn one of her favorite outfits tonight, a loose and comfortable dark blue dress. She and Sandra joined the others in the lab, where they were logging the seaweed, sand, and water samples they’d collected that evening. Mererid connected her goggles to her computer terminal to upload the night’s footage. Her first task tomorrow would be comparing it to previous months’ to track how the pteropods’ shells were progressing. Normally by this point after a pteropod visit, the combined physical and mental exertion meant she was already yawning, but tonight she felt unpleasantly alert.

By the time she finished uploading, she and Sandra were the only two left in the room. Sandra typed in a final note, then pushed back her chair and scooped up her satchel.

Mererid pressed the pad at waist-height near the door, indicating the jellyfish light network could ignore this room until someone pressed it again, and stepped out, only to find Vicky charging toward her through the lab’s front garden. Heedless of the carefully-tended kales she stomped past, all of her attention was for Mererid.

But, Mererid thought, this wasn’t the focus of someone wanting to keep her from diving too deep. It was the focus of someone wanting to use her.

Mererid stepped out of Vicky’s path, closer to Sandra, and noticed how Vicky’s smile immediately grew brittle. Sandra linked her arm through Mererid’s, like when they dove, and started walking. “I was chatting with the others in there and we’re all too wound up for sleep. We’re thinking snacks and watching the sunrise?”

“I’d love to,” Mererid said, and meant it.

They hurried to join the others on the rocks overlooking the sea, beneath a silver-hued moon just beginning to set.

---

Devan Barlow’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in various online venues and anthologies. Her fantasy novel An Uncommon Curse, a story of fairy tales and musical theatere, is now available. When not writing she reads voraciously, drinks tea, and thinks about fairy tales and sea monsters.

---

Return to Issue 13