Snow Globe

The dark traveler hikes across the ocean floor, clutching the squirming bundle to her chest.

She’s wrapped in dark cloth, goggles on her eyes. Muck plumes around her footsteps. She goes slow; weights on her ankles hold her down.

There’s no sunlight here, three miles deep, but she moves in an orb of light. One hand holds her bundle; the other, a net bag of glowing siphonophore, like a child holds balloons.

The siphonophore is a bioluminescent creature, a great pulsing colony.

The bundle is the bundle. She keeps it close. Not to protect it from the deep. To protect the deep.

The bundle keeps on squirming. It feels heavy and the traveler is tired. She doesn’t know how long she’s been walking. Time is a line with no points on it. It’s hard to remember there’s a destination at all. Somewhere to cast her burden down. Somewhere ahead, she is expected.

The bundle twists, agitated, and she grips it harder. They’re not deep enough yet.

She comes to the ragged carcass of a whale, writhing with hagfish. The siphonophore struggles in its bag and she pulls it down to stroke it through the net. Its glow pulses under her hand. Marine snow, decaying flecks of animal matter, glitters in the little globe of light.

The bundle settles because the light is close, or because it smells the whale, or because she stopped moving. She allows herself to caress it. All this way she’s held it tight.

As she strokes the bundle through its wrappings, she begins to sink. Sludge creeps up her weighted feet. The mud is a half mile deep.

She remembers sun a little. Wild life, stretching far away before her. The world was so complicated.

It’s all black above her now. If she let go, they would all drift in different directions. The siphonophore, up. The traveler, down. The bundle, somewhere else.

Mud rises to her knees.

Great grey bulks slip quietly by. Sixgill sharks, twenty feet long, attracted by the carcass and the light. They circle, dumb and curious. Everything is slow down here. Thoughts, actions, consequences.

A sad-toothed mouth gapes from the dark.

The traveler barely has time to hunch over the bundle. Not to protect it. To protect—but the shark hits her, and another from behind. Jaws close, slow and tentative, almost gentle until they begin to thrash. They whip their heads from side to side and then the jaws are like a vise.

They can’t really hurt the dark traveler. But sediment rises in a great swirling cloud and it’s all mud and teeth and rolling eyes, and she loses her grip.

The siphonophore drifts up, cord trailing.

The bundle is torn away.

The dark cloud roils. Her hands, empty. If she took the weights from her ankles, she would stop sinking. She and the siphonophore would float up and away. The siphonophore would stop when it was safe, but she would keep going up and up.

But she is expected. Something must be delivered. She gathers strength and leaps, tears herself from the mud, weights and all. Straining with her dark-wrapped hand, she snatches the cord of the siphonophore.

The glowing beast squirms against the net. She searches for the bundle as she comes back down. A single shark swims crooked and pained out of the light. It’s dead by the time she finds it. The bundle is there, wriggling on the sea floor in a corona of shark parts.

Beyond it, the black horizon of the Litke Deep. She’s reached her destination. The deepest place on Earth. A hole, finally, that nothing can crawl back out of.

Shark blood wafts from the bundle as she scoops it up. It settles in her arm. She allows herself to caress it one more time. It must know her by now, she thinks. It must recognize her touch.

There’s a faint current here at the edge of the void. Silt washes over the edge, a soft waterfall glittering into the dark. Down in that abyss, the darkness shifts. Waiting, expecting. She lifts the bundle over her head.

She has the tether between her teeth; the siphonophore drifts above her. It’s dimmer than it was. The creature is dying. She’s trapped it for too long.

Her arms waver.

She lowers them; places the bundle at the edge of the dark cliff. It’s a relief to fail. Maybe it will fall on its own. Let fate decide, let luck decide, let god decide. Anything but her.

She looks up again, imagining the sun. Imagine turning to walk back to it. How long it would take. Something, after all, is expected. Something must be delivered.

She wraps the tether around her fist and steps off the edge. She floats down in the dim orb of the siphonophore’s light. Just at its edge are the folds of a great coiling bulk. A mighty knot. The gleam of enormous teeth. The tether slips free and the siphonophore ascends, unfurling from its net prison into a long bank of light. Back at the precipice, the bundle twitches. Muck plumes around it. It’s dark, and there’s nothing to hold it.