Sunken

by Danielle Osborn | Dec 23, 2018 | 0 comments

My earliest memory is of my mother bathing, in a wooden tub moved in front of the fireplace. Dirty blonde hair pulled up on her head, her pale form outlined in an orange glow, steam rising up from the water and swirling around her face, as though she was some otherworldly sacrifice.

I sat on a woven rug over the floor beams of our one-room cabin, chewing wild mushrooms gathered from the forest outside. My mother stood up with the sound of sloshing water and reached for a piece of old bed sheet hanging on the mantel. On the stone chimney above was the framed painting of a pink sunset in an unfamiliar place. Painted in the middle was a tall figure rising from the ground, its arms held out, glowing boxes where its head and hands should have be. Below the painting, between my mother’s shoulder blades,

.

“It’s a lamppost,” she said when I asked. She was dressed then, in hand patched clothes and a tattered shawl around her shoulders, braiding her wet hair. She let me unbutton the back of her dress so I could see it again. I traced my fingers around its lines and curves.

“How did it get there?”

“In the old world, I had someone paint it with ink under my skin, so it would stay there forever.”

I pointed to the painting.

“Yes, Genesis, that’s the same lamppost,” she said.

“Where is that place?”

“It’s a city very far away called Venice. I vacationed there when I was young.”

“Is that one of your stories?”

“Yes.”

My parents’ heads were full of these stories. Images forever etched in their minds of a foreign world I had no memory of. They would one particular storie to get me to sleep at night, when I laid restless on a straw-stuffed mattress.

and leaked through the unpatched holes, accompanied by the sounds of wolves howling deep in the woods, lighting slicing through the sky and thunder claps I could feel in my chest. Nature regaining balance, flexing her muscles. Reminding us she was queen once again. You don’t own me anymore.

My father took another blanket from his shoulders to cover me with, while my mother smoothed my hair from my face.

“In a world before you were born,” my father would begin, “humans tried to tame nature to their will. They paved over the soil and clogged the skies. They cut down all the trees and killed the animals. There were too many of them, billions of them, and it was too much for the earth to handle. Soon nothing would be able to live on the planet anymore. Everyone was warned–”

“But some people didn’t believe it,” I said.

“Right, Genesis. Some people didn’t believe it,” my mother said, “so they wouldn’t do anything to change. The earth was hurt, and everyone was going to perish.”

“Until the sickness came.”

“Yes, until the sickness came. It killed almost everyone. Only the people with simple blood could survive. Your father and I were some of the few lucky ones. Now we live like this, taking only what we need from the earth, and it will always provide.”

Outside, the wolves were singing again.

As I grew older, I learned the rest of the story. 2030 was the endpoint, the year of no return, as the scientists called it. By 2030, there would be no fixing the climate, and no going back, unless drastic changes were made.

2025 was the year of the sickness. Nothing was changing, the earth was as polluted as ever, the temperatures even hotter, and the air even more clogged.

Then came the doctor. One of the CDC’s most renowned scientists. In a makeshift lab in his basement, he created the disease that would kill ninety three percent of the population. It attacked all antigens in the blood, so that only people with an O negative blood type, about seven percent of the population, were immune. People of “simple blood” as my parents called it. The lucky ones.

The doctor’s blood was not simple, and he died in the same airport where he released the disease.

My parents would never say if the doctor was right or wrong.

“What happened has happened, Genesis,” my mother said once as we were stringing up our clothes in the late spring breeze. “There’s no point in debating the ethics of it now. Will you hand me another pin?”

And so, like my parents, I accepted my life as it was, living off the land in the cabin at the edge of the woods. We gathered our food from the forest.

I pulled vegetables from the garden with my father and bundled firewood with my mother. We trapped and skinned what we needed. Everything in our cabin had its purpose, the hides, the rugs, the bathtub, the jars, the fireplace, the shelves, the handmade lock on the door. Everything was about surviving, leading our simple life as those of simple blood.

Everything except for the painting on the stone chimney.

I rarely showed interest in the old world. From what my parents told me, it was destined to fail. A place of greed and destruction and disaster. The planet was moving forward now, and there was no use looking back.

But there was always something about that lamp post that I could never quite pry from my mind. Something about that place far away where the sun always set pink.

Once I made my mother take the painting down for me, so I could get a better look. Beyond the lamp post, in the city square, was a building of white pillars and long porticos, carved statues of lost people guarding over it from the roof. A tall pillar stretching to the pink sky with a winged lion on top. Decorated gondolas floated in the water and further off, domed buildings rose from the sea.

I didn’t know any of these words at the time. My mother was the one who explained them to me, pointing to each thing formed so carefully by brush stroke. It didn’t seem possible that such a land could exist.

“Where is Venice?” I later asked my mother as we followed the foot trail, checking our traps in the woods.

“It’s across the ocean,” she answered.

“How did you get there?”

“In a machine that flew in the sky.”

My father and I were in the cabin, boiling drinking water, on the evening when I finally asked about my kingdom’s fate.

“What happened to Venice?”

“It flooded,” he said.

“The whole thing?”

“Yes. It’s underwater now. When the earth got too hot, the ice melted into the ocean, and the oceans got higher,” he said, pouring the bubbling water from the iron pot into a glass jar. It fizzled and cooled with a hiss. “Venice was very low and close to the sea. It was one of the first cities to go.”

“Is it still underwater now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you ready for landing,” Sawyer says.

I smile and slice another piece from the apple in my hand, leaning over the railing to watch the trail of the ship under the fading sunlight. After almost three months at sea, we’ll reach what was once was called Venice this evening.

“Yes, aren’t you?”

He shrugs.

“You’re really just here to measure the water levels? You’re not even curious about this place?”

“Venice, New Orleans, Bangkok. All the sunken cities are the same to me.  I can’t even tell the difference.”

“You’ve heard the stories though?”

“About people living in the clock tower? The church?”

“The basilica,” I correct.

“Don’t get your hopes up.”

“I’m not hoping for anything.”

It’s long after dark when we anchor just beyond St. Mark’s Square. The pale moon makes it difficult to see what’s left of the city. I think I can make out a tower sticking up from the water, maybe a few roofs, but I can’t be sure. The entire crew has gathered on the deck, hovering around the edges to try and catch a glimpse through the darkness of our awaited destination.

“Get some rest, all of you,” the captain says. “Tomorrow morning we’ll send out the first boats.”

The thought of what’s sunken underneath me, all around me, keeps me awake for hours in my bunk. Just before dawn, I rise, pull my woven bag from under my bed, and carry it up to the deck.

, as I take the hide canvas and handmade paints out from my bag. I perch myself on the ledge of the deck, balancing the canvas on my knees, and gaze at my childhood kingdom.

The ocean has swallowed much of the city, but not all of it. The gentle waves just barely touch the feet of the rooftop statues. They stand in a perfect line like ghosts walking on water. The winged lion has remained untouched, and it rises proudly on its pillar. Further into the square, I can see the pointed roof of the belltower, still green, and the arched domes of the basilica, like rounded islands in the ocean. Everything else is submerged in a blanket of dark blue.

I paint all of this as the sun rises higher in the sky, just like someone else did, long ago in another world, who sold it to my mother in the same square.

When the sunlight hits the water, I can barely make out a black shape, perhaps a lamppost, deep down in the sea. But it’s gone a second later.

I paint it anyway.