An enormous pelican landed on the railing separating the boardwalk from the Pacific Ocean thirty feet below. Breakers crashed against pylons with a repetitive echoing slap. I kept my distance from the edge, never wanting to get even the slightest ocean spray on my skin. I could tell the bird had something heavy in its beak from the way the pouch at its neck distended. The pelican stared at me as if to say we knew each other, as if to say they had searched for me across vast expanses.
Then the pelican threw up a statue of a three-armed woman at my feet.
The wooden relic skidded across the boards, coming to rest against my boots. I bent to retrieve the familiar effigy, wiping mucus away on my jeans.
Talia, my girlfriend, had the same statue sitting on her windowsill. Or, at least, a similar one.
I asked a hundred times where she got the carving, but she’d never told me, certainly never mentioned a pelican delivering it like a stork from those horrible where-do-babies-come-from cartoons. She liked to keep her secrets. I tried not to pry.
“This sort of thing always comes with a message, right?” I asked the pelican as the bird ruffled its feathers and spread its wings. Quests in fantasy novels canonically started like this. Odd fauna delivering the catalyst, some mystery sewn into the fabric of reality. A voice memo. A sonnet. A riddle.
The bird shook its head and rode an updraft into the sky.
“One more for her collection,” I said, turning my back on the sea, tracing the boardwalk to where it emptied into the city, wood becoming asphalt becoming steel track.
I hadn’t had the money to give Talia a decent gift in months.
Maybe this would save us? And wow, did I want us to be saved.
2.
Our relationship had been mostly flailing for the last year. Gasping for breath. On death’s door. We told ourselves we weren’t to blame. Everything was situational. It was the world. There had been another moon-tide flood, and while we weren’t living in a basement anymore, being trapped in tiny rooms got stressful, especially since no one wanted to go in the water. Not after last time. We knew something was in the water, that it caused the Change, and because of that, we told ourselves it was fine we fought more than we used to, why we never agreed on how to spend our evenings, why our shared interests withered. There was still streaming. Still shared meals. Our bills paid in tandem. A joint bank account.
Next month it will get better, we both told ourselves.
Next month.
Next month.
But next month might be another tide. Might be another sweep of that black viscous fluid. Might be another rash of disappearances when the water rose over thresholds.
But the weight of the statue in my pocket gave me hope as I slipped the key into the deadbolt. Talia was still working from home. I could hear the click of her keyboard coming from her office. She worked in web design, populating digital worlds for everyone else who didn’t want to step outside. The job paid well. More than my pharmacy delivery routes anyway.
Our apartment was small, on the third floor of a five-story flat downtown. One bedroom, with a living room/kitchen combo, seated above a tiny AI laundromat. If you looked out the south-facing windows, you could just catch a view of the sea. You could watch it. It could watch you.
I knocked on the office door.
“Almost time to take a break?” I asked through the thin divider.
“Getting there,” she said, her reply seeming to swim to me across great distances.
“I’ve got something for you.”
The sound of her keys fell silent.
“I think you’ll like it,” I said.
Then there were footsteps, the knob turning, Talia’s face in mine.
She had brown eyes, short blond hair held back in a tiny ponytail, and the jawline of someone who routinely did the facial exercises suggested by beauty influencers.
“Oh really?” she asked, a smile parting her chapped lips.
“Yup,” I said, unearthing the three-armed woman from my pocket. The statue was six inches tall and looked strikingly like my girlfriend.
Talia snapped up the carving, holding it close to her face.
“She’s got an extra arm,” Talia said.
“Doesn’t the other one have three?” I asked.
“No, just two. She’s the same though, but different. I…”
“Any chance you feel like telling me where you got yours? Because, well, do I have a story about mine.”
Her eyes darted from the statue to me, then back again.
“Fine. It’s not an interesting story. Just personal. I whittled it a few months ago. My therapist said it would be a good way to visualize my future self. See, boring. Where did you get yours?”
“A pelican barfed it on me,” I replied.
I expected her to toss the tiny woman across the room in disgust, but instead she gave her a sniff and frowned.
“Briney,” she said, turning back into her office, starting to close the door. “I’ll put it with the other one. Thank you.”
“Hey, wait. Can’t we talk about it? Isn’t this a little weird…”
“I don’t know if anything is weird anymore. The word’s lost its definition,” she said, easing the door shut. The rest of her sentences crawled through the thin wood. “Can you make dinner? I should be done in an hour, and I didn’t eat lunch.”
“I can do that.”
3.
Most days I had thirty to forty prescriptions to deliver around the city. Insulin to the Lofts. Coagulates to Bayside. Extractals to those who could afford them out beneath the Overhang. I always wished I had an odometer on my bicycle because the step counter on my phone never got it right. Miles and miles fell beneath my tires, but the stupid app tried to tell me I still needed to get my steps in. It should be telling me I needed to spend more time with Talia, out in the world, not anchored to our couch every night.
I always thought they’d eventually get drones to do my job, or AI, but it never happened.
As I delivered a parcel of antidepressants and antacids to a customer in the Siltmoring, I passed beneath the old trees that hadn’t been warped during the moon-tide. There was a scabbling of claws over bark, a repetitive squeak, wood shavings snowing down around me. I looked up to find a squirrel with three twitching tails in a bough just overhead, holding another statue, the same eyes of the pelican looking back at me from its little furry face. The rodent stretched its tiny arms, extending the statue as if I’d been selected for a great award.
“Do I get a message with this one?” I asked, hoping the answer might be different this time.
The squirrel chittered and dropped the tiny woman into my palm. She was changed. The wood was lighter. Older. As if her features had been sanded smooth from passing winds. And there was an extra extra arm, four where the last had three.
The squirrel scrabbled upward, tracing the trunk.
“Wait. Who is she? You have to give me that much. Is she the one sending these messages? Is she even real?” I asked.
The squirrel shook his tufted head and disappeared into the canopy.
Four arms. Why? They were so thin, angular, and bent. The sculptor had to be talented to keep them from breaking. She looked fragile, but she was so sturdy, so strong.
My phone chirped, letting me know I was falling behind schedule. The app knew where I was supposed to be, knew that I wasn’t there. Of course the apps were accurate when it came to earning them money. Of course they didn’t actually care about my own well-being.
Maybe someday I’d be delivering my own medication.
They probably counted on that.
4.
“Another pelican?” Talia asked, lying on the couch with a hand-knit blanket over her lap, a dog show on the projector. The green and blue mandala painting we’d done when we first moved into the apartment hung over her shoulder, all the repeating circles like a thousand eyes tracing the hybrid husky-shih tzu across the display.
“Nope, squirrel,” I replied, staring at the four-armed woman who I’d placed on the coffee table. She stood amongst a bowl of discarded pistachio shells and a pile of overdue library books. Our local branch no longer had fines. They said it was because of the floods. No one was expected to wade through sludge to return a dog-eared copy of Penguin Classic’s A Court of Thorns and Roses. “What does it mean? They seem like omens. Symbols? Clues maybe? What do you think?”
“I think there are other things for us to spend our time thinking about beyond some weird statues handed to you by nature’s delivery service,” Talia said, popping a fresh pistachio into her mouth.
“Like what?” I asked, surprised at her lack of interest in the little ladies. I dropped on the couch next to her, taking her foot into my palm and rubbing her arch.
“Where we’re going for our anniversary,” Talia replied, toes flexing beneath my movements. “They shut down the Gardens again because of all the washout and the rot.”
“That’s depressing.”
“What isn’t?”
“You and me, we’re not depressing.”
Talia flicked an empty pistachio shell at me and smiled. “I like to think we aren’t. So let’s figure it out.”
“We have time to plan another trip. A month is plenty. Let’s sit down and talk about it later. I want to figure out what’s up with the statues. Like, maybe it could be something big for us. Something special.”
She sighed, pulling her foot out of my grasp. “I’m glad your priorities are always where they need to be.”
5.
We met at an adoption shelter. She was squatting in front of a long-haired mixed-breed with stumpy legs, scritching the dog beneath its chin through the fenced grate. The dog yipped at my arrival, causing Talia to tip, her back falling into my knees and thighs. She reclined there for a minute, staring up at me, balanced against my body.
She smiled.
“Did you have your eye on this little guy too?” she asked.
“I wish. My apartment doesn’t allow pets. I just came to pet them for a bit,” I replied.
“And plan for the future?”
“Yeah, an apartment I can afford that allows dogs.”
“Me too,” Talia replied. “There’s got to be at least one out there.”
We spent the next hour wandering the concrete corridor, stopping before different grates, petting puppies, stroking the ears of the sad geriatric schnauzers we wished we could bring home. The hour turned into a date on Friday, into another date the following week, into a shared lease for a new apartment that still didn’t allow dogs, but also allowed us to save a little money in hopes the next one would. We kept searching for that home, kept stashing away what little cash we could.
You start relationships based on a shared dream, and ours was to own a puppy.
In our world, that shouldn’t have been unattainable.
But eight years later, it was still just the two of us padding through the halls, no dog toys on the couch, no claw marks on the hardwood.
6.
I snapped pictures of the ads flickering across the suspension poles along my delivery routes. A play about a woman who lets the sea swallow her. A beer garden on the roof of the Dome with a SimulatorBand that only played the Beatles, if the Beatles only played LoFi 8-bit beats. A glass hotel room beneath the docks, the danger of a sudden flood adding to the romantic appeal. I must have captured a thousand ads, all ideas for our anniversary, all solid options to replace the sadness of the Garden. There was one for the opening of a Puppy Cafe on the other side of town. That couldn’t be a let-down.
The deliveries fell away as I biked through the Flood districts, all those towering buildings with the first floor removed, reinforced stilts becoming shelters for displaced squatters. Glass elevators dropped to concrete platforms just like ours. The stainless steel girders looked like comical chicken legs, silly postmodern interpretations of Baba Yaga’s house for our drowning world. They looked fragile, though I knew they were designed to weather even the worst swells.
I pedaled around the nearest leg of my last delivery stop, screeching my brakes as a six-legged dog wandered into my path, all jowls and extra skin, almost as if it were wearing a coat of itself.
The dog sat, its tail swishing through a brackish-gray puddle. With its lack of concern for the water, the additional legs made sense. It shook, splashing droplets over my skin, which I frantically wiped away.
“Not another one,” I said, sighting the woman statue tethered to the dog’s collar. Five arms this time, the wood black and burnt-looking.
The dog nodded and dragged itself to my side. It barked once and pressed the carving into my leg.
“I know, I know,” I said, removing the knots that kept the small woman lassoed there. “Is the number of arms significant? They’ve got to be. Do you have a card to go with it? A little memo? A riddle? I really need…”
Then the dog barked again, as if asking for silence.
“Okay, what?”
The dog growled and walked off beneath the building, pawing around the drop elevator. He stopped to urinate on the doormat before moving on.
“This has got to be the last one,” I said as my phone beeped angrily.
I still had three more deliveries to make before I could go home and show Tallia the anniversary options. I was excited to show her what I’d found. I was excited for all the potential.
7.
At home, I found Tallia sitting cross-legged on a yoga mat, the three women statues ringed around her in a perfect triangle. She was at the center of a protection circle, an act of divination at hand. She had her work headset on, but her eyes closed. She might have been listening to the director of this or that company monologuing about updates, or she might have been finding her moment of mindfulness. I could never tell the difference.
I squatted and rearranged the statues, creating a perfect box with each at a cornice, the burnt woman finding her home with her sisters.
Talia’s eyes flickered open.
“Another one?” she asked, removing the headset.
“Yeah, would you prefer me to stop bringing them home?” I replied, sitting on the floor so we could be at eye level.
“No, they’re growing on me. I like to see the change. It makes me think about evolution. Makes me wonder about possibilities. That was my therapist’s point, after all.”
“I thought you wanted me to stop thinking about them and focus on the anniversary?” I asked, reaching out to pick up one of the carvings.
Talia swatted my hand away.
“Sorry, can you leave them? They’re in alignment. As to your question, I did, and I do. But you were right, there’s something mysterious about these little ladies,” she said, tapping the three-armed woman affectionately on the head. “They’ve got a lot to say. I just need to learn how to listen.”
“I took some pictures of things we could do instead of the Garden. Want to check them out? I must have found a hundred options.” I took out my phone and scrolled through glowing screens, tilting the shifting images towards Talia.
“That is too many options, my friend. Can you cull them down? A hundred’s overwhelming,” she replied, shaking her head.
“I thought we could look through them together,” I said, the mental image of the two of us sitting on the couch, blanket-draped, scrolling through my discoveries, wilting in my brain.
“We will. You just have to do the initial cuts. You know what I like. You can figure it out,” she said, hand moving over to the four-armed woman, as if implying that this, this right here, was what she liked.
8.
Talia went to bed before I could show her my choices.
She said she was exhausted.
I stayed up, contemplating the merits of the Puppy Cafe versus the biotech zoo.
I hated making choices.
I could barely reduce the number.
I could barely think.
So much was riding on one decision, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
9.
Over the next two weeks, I received four more women statues from unusually evolved woodland creatures, each carving with more arms than the last, but the pattern grew. Instead of six arms, there were twelve and then twenty and then sixty and then seventy-two. There was no formula for the additions, no pattern. The last looked like a hive of arms with legs barely visible beneath. It was horrifying. Monstrous, but I gave each to Tallia, each bringing a smile, even the grotesqueries, another cryptic reply about their mysterious ways.
She never asked about the date night ideas. Our anniversary seemed to have evaporated from her consciousness. I didn’t bring it up again. Instead, I decided I’d surprise her and just pedal the two of us over to the Puppy Cafe on the night of our anniversary. I researched the menu, planned our drinks, promised myself we’d swing for both desserts, even though that was pushing our budget.
It would be a special night. It had to be. You couldn’t put a monetary value on resurrection.
10.
An eight-legged tortoise gave me a statue of an eighty-seven-armed woman. The tiny lady rode in on the hump of the reptile’s gnarled shell.
A raccoon with three mouths gave me another with ninety-three arms.
A pigeon that could have been four pigeons dropped a hundred-armed woman in my lap while I sat on a street-side ledge by our apartment. I swore at the bird for hitting me in the nuts as it drifted out of sight. While I raised my arm towards the sky, the tablet screens on nearby utility poles flashed hazard red, a brief chirp emanating from each. I lay the statue down on the ledge, making sure the woman beneath was balanced, and walked to the flickering screen, accompanied by my few neighbors who lingered outdoors.
Seven of us stood around the flatscreen as an alert scrolled across the surface.
Higher than average tides to be expected in the coming week. Low-lying residents remain in your homes. Stock up on supplies. Water is still toxic. We are still uncertain of its effects on the human body. Don’t be caught unaware. Don’t be…
I turned away before the rest of the message could scroll on. I knew what it was going to say. The same thing it always said. The water’s unknown properties, that we all clearly understood, yet no scientific agency would place their name behind. I always wondered who was at fault, though I was pretty sure it was everyone…every single decision trickling down into the ocean, leaving those black slicks to cloud the puddles beneath our homes.
The timing of the warning was abysmal. Our anniversary was on Saturday, four days away. They never gave real timeframes. A warning could be a day out. It could be a month out. No one seemed to understand the tides anymore. Everyone who already had enough money to do anything about our current situation was already far enough inland that they didn’t have to worry about the rising waters.
Maybe Talia would have missed the warning, having missed them in the past.
Maybe the tide would keep off another day to let us go on our date.
Maybe the moon wanted us to stay in love.
Maybe, maybe, maybe…
11.
Talia always said she wanted to transition away from graphic design and web management, that she wanted to create her own art, not corporate splash pieces and ad fodder. When we first started dating, we’d spend late nights sitting at the kitchen table, creating wall art on repurposed canvases I found at the thrift store. Most were done in simple color palettes, greens and blues, repeated abstractions forming patterns in the design, near mandalas, trippy, but not quite. We’d hung them together, trying to understand what the feng shui of our relationship would be. We told ourselves that after a few years, we’d reevaluate our designs, adjusting color schemes for new seasons of life, simplifying designs, or making them more complex if our moods desired. But we never did take the old paintings down. They continued to hang, gathering dust, the designs no longer speaking to anything either of us felt anymore.
I told myself after our anniversary we’d take down the paintings and make them anew. Plan one nice thing, then plan another. That’s how you kept a relationship going. That’s how you made sure your partner was happy. The tide would keep off. The waters would remain at bay. The world owed me that much, after everything that had happened over the years, after everything that didn’t.
12.
The sky was a lumbering gray, the wind knocking angrily at our third-floor windows. The water had yet to lap at the platform our elevator shaft rested on. I told myself time was on my side. All we needed were a few hours, and we could have our night together, our beautiful memory.
I knocked on Talia’s office door, my white oxford tucked into my best jeans, a clutch of hothouse flowers held behind my back.
When she opened the door, her eyes were ringed with deep bags, her hair greasy. Over her shoulder were the dozen arm-laden women clustered around the floor, creating a more intricate summoning circle than before, a simple mimic of the mandalas that hung on our walls. Talia traced my eyes.
“I’m trying to listen,” she said, her voice muted, almost as if she didn’t want them to hear us.
“And what are they saying?” I asked, tilting my head as if to hear their whispering.
She shrugged and looked me up and down. “You’re dressed awfully nice for the night of the storm.”
“Well, we don’t technically know that it’s the night of the storm. It could arrive tomorrow. Or the next day. Things are dry down there. I checked. I was hoping you’d still want to go out to the Puppy Cafe. It’s our anniversary after all.”
Part of me wondered if she’d forgotten the date completely.
Talia’s eyes were on the window. Flecks of water coated the glass, the first rains falling.
“You really think it’s a good idea to go out? With all this on the way?” she asked.
“I mean, I’m sure it will be fine. Rain’s not the issue. I’ve been looking forward to this so much. You know, for us. I think it will really help…”
“Help what?” She cut me off. “What do we need help with?”
My mouth flapped for a moment before I could find the words. My eyes never blinked so fast.
“Well, help pulling things back together. We both know we’ve been distant. Things have been hard. With the weather and the tides. With all of it. We’ve been drifting apart. But I don’t want us to drift. I want to reset. To go back to the plans. You know, the puppy. The art. The future,” I said, words rushing out in a hurried jumble.
“And you think one date night, that could possibly kill us, will fix all that?”
“It’s a start. And we’re not getting killed. The tide isn’t here yet. They get things wrong sometimes.”
Talia suddenly turned her head back into the room, greasy hair swinging about her face, tilting her ear as if to listen to a distant voice.
“Oh no, it’s certainly here,” she said, pushing past me, stepping towards the door to our shared hallway and the stairs beyond.
“So you’re going to go with me?” I asked, following in her wake, snatching my raincoat from its hook, careful not to crush the flowers.
“I’m going somewhere,” she replied, not bothering to grab her own raincoat.
Together we rode the elevator to the bottom level, the flat concrete platform beyond still dry, though a small stream of water was beginning to swirl across the street. Talia stepped out of the glass tube, strode down the stairs leading to the platform, and hurried towards the edge.
“Hey, maybe I was wrong,” I said, looking at the rising water. The stream was slowly becoming a pool, slowly wrapping around our apartment building and its sturdy stilt legs. Leaves and trash and other detritus washed by. That pigeon that could have been four pigeons bobbed in the runoff, flushing its wings, enjoying the toxic bath.
Talia stepped off the platform, her shoes soaking through from the rising water.
When the tide came in, it came in fast.
My lungs struggled to pull in enough breath to deal with what unfolded before me.
“Hey, honey, we need to go. I wasn’t thinking straight. This is going to get bad real quick. We can wash that off. We can…”
“I don’t think it’s going to get bad. I think this is the only thing that will make things good,” Talia replied, the sound of surging waves thundering a distance off. “I don’t know if anything besides the storm and the women were going to fix us.”
She took another step from the platform, the water now completely washing out the street, black slicks of synthetic whatever creeping in on the surface. She knelt, letting the water splash over her lap, froth licking at her face. I ran to the edge of the platform, but froze. Everyone knew, but didn’t know, what the water would do. I couldn’t reach Talia without getting soaked. I couldn’t…
“You don’t really want to come with me. The women weren’t for you. You’d never hear their message. They could see it was over. How’d we miss it?”
The water rose and rose. It began to lap over the platform, forcing me back, to climb the small stairs to the elevator as Talia bent into the surging surf. I screamed her name, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She was off in another world, listening to someone else, all those tiny carved mouths. In a flurry of motion, she rubbed her hands up and down her arms, spreading the black water, staining her pale skin gray. Then her flesh softened beneath the touch, losing its rigidity, pink and raw where moments ago had been healthy and solid. There was the sound of tearing flesh, of muscle rerouting, of new joints springing forth. Talia had four arms, then six, then ten, then two dozen, multiplying on and on until her head was completely obscured under the mass of roiling joints and grasping hands. They all seemed to wave for a moment as more and more sprouted from her body. I screamed again, but there was nothing I could do. There was no rope to cast. No way I could sweep her from the frothing oil and hew her back to the woman I’d slept beside for so many years. She had become something new. Something I couldn’t comprehend. Something beautiful and terrifying and so beyond anything I could ever dream of becoming. There was nothing left for me to do. Though I was confused about so much, my recognition of finality was impossible to ignore.
I fled to the elevator, to safety, to our home that was now just my home.
The water rose, and Talia paddled off into the surge, hands and arms rolling over each other like a massive fleshy wheel.
As the doors closed, I tried to catch a glimpse of her face beneath all that wandering flesh, but I couldn’t see her anymore. She dwindled, growing smaller as she traversed the current, slipping down our street, water coursing, rising, sweeping all that wasn’t tethered away.
I tossed the carvings through our upstairs window, letting the flood take them, arm count dwindling until I was left with just the first statue of Talia’s envisioned future. I went to hurl it away, but hesitated. The woman’s face was Talia’s, as all the women’s faces had been Talia’s. I knew that, but until an hour ago, I didn’t know what the coincidence meant, how she was changing.
I placed the first statue on our kitchen counter. As a reminder. As a shrine.
Could I have taken that step with her into the flood?
Could I have let myself be changed?
We could have been monsters together.
We could have been divine.
Part of me wanted to think of her as something horrible to remedy my guilt over not following her, but the truth was, she had simply become something beyond my comprehension, and I wasn’t ready to give myself to the oily tide. I hadn’t had the time to imagine who I needed to be in our dying future, though I desperately wanted to.
I opened Talia’s desk drawer, unearthing the carving knife from inside. I didn’t have a block of wood, but there was plenty of synthetic furniture in the living room. My coffee table could spare a leg.
It might not be long before I followed after, because, let’s be honest, what was left for me? I’d have to see what the squirrels and pelicans and pigeons would bring.
I carved a sliver from the leg, then another and another. As the synthetic shavings fell away, I thought I could see a shape emerging. Something familiar. Something wondrously inevitable.
