SUMMER 2026, SHORT STORY, 3000 WORDS
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Briny air fills your nostrils, sunlight knuckles at your eyes, and the boarding queue finally starts to move. The two women ahead of you are phone-bent, swiping fiercely. They brush crumbs of broken glass off their shoulders as they speak.
“Look what he just sent me. If I die on this cruise, you gotta wipe my phone.”
“Gotta put nudes in your Hidden. That’s what I do. My Hidden nasty.”
You look past them and see the cruise ship. It seems the size of a city, deck after deck stacked lopsided into the aquamarine sky. The endless rows of portholes recall a compound eye, dissected and reorganized. The water lapping its hull is slick with reddish-pink chum.
“You good?” asks a voice you know is connected to the familiar arm lassoing your shoulders, to the familiar emanation of body heat and booze and sweat-decanted aftershave.
You’re nervous to turn your head, in case the face is one you’ve never seen in your life.
“I’m good,” you say. “This line’s just really fucking long, you know?”
Unknown lips nuzzle your neck.
There is a gap when you step from ramp to ship, a slice of sea just wide enough to lose an identification document or a memory. You choose one to jettison: standing in the garage of your childhood home, icy cement floor sucking the warmth from your socked feet, watching your dad scrub blood from the headlights of his car, your gut bubbling with the horrible certainty that he drove over your mom—they argued ferociously before they left together for the train station.
The blood was a deer’s; your mom called from the sleeper train to say goodnight, but something shifted in your perception of fathers and never shifted back. You fold the cornflower blue memory against itself until it can slip through the gap. It flutters down into the greasy water and disappears.
“Bet that feels better,” says the familiar voice. “Just save a few for tonight.”
The arm is waiting when you straighten up, shaped precisely to the curvature of your spine. Explosives are also shaped precisely.
Three dehumanized crew members welcome you aboard. They all wear the same flower-patterned romper and porcelain smile, but you think you will be able to tell them apart by the slight variations in height and body language. The tallest and most languid hands you a glossy pamphlet with a map of the ship and the details of its entertainment facilities. Your companion receives the room keys.
“We hope you’ll join us for bingo this evening,” the midsized and most restive crew member says. “It starts at midnight in the Grandiose Hall.”
“Elevators are ahead and to the right,” the shortest and most pensive says. “Have a wonderful cruise.”
“Thank you,” says the mouth at the height of your ear, hot breath grazing your cheek.
“Thanks,” you say, to prove you can speak for yourself.
The arm corrals you toward the elevators. The main atrium of the cruise ship is all polarized glass and faux-marble flooring, filtered light slanting across small pods of furniture, razorous black tables encircled by shapeless white chairs.
“Fancy,” your companion says, with no trace of pleasure.
It’s in the elevator that you finally see their face. The mirror-metal doors slide together, assembling two warped pink halves into a whole, and the whole is ruddy, puffy-eyed from crying, each feature cancerously soft. At least it’s familiar.
“Melvin,” you say, recognizing your ex at last.
His mouth slouches open. “Yeah?”
You tense for revelation. “Say my name, please.”
“Make me,” he says, because he’s an asshole.
The cabin is more of the same, decor immaculate and lifeless. You do not want to be alone there with Melvin, so you agree to meet him for bingo, promise you will not wander far, and you leave. The corridors of the cruise ship seem to slope, guiding you by gravity to a filigreed balcony overlooking the Grandiose Hall. Various slot machines and gaming tables form a constellation around the central feature, an ornate carousel slowly revolving.
The faint stinging stench of formaldehyde rises to your nostrils. You look more closely at the carousel, and see that the figurines are dead horses, impaled, bloated tawny corpses tacked to the mirrored floor like insect specimens. The sight dusts your throat. The cool remove you have felt since you woke up in the boarding queue is replaced by heart-hammering certainty: this place is a trap, and you need to leave before it’s too late.
You whirl back the way you came. Your eyes are swallowed by a flower-patterned romper; the tallest crew member has grown taller and is standing so close that your face nearly touches his abdomen. His languid hands move in small circles at his sides. His wrist joints crackle.
“Are you distressed or despairing?” the crew member asks.
“Need off the ship,” you manage. “Emergency.”
The crew member holds up three manicured fingers and counts them down, tucking them back to his palm with unnatural ease. When the third finger falls, the cruise ship’s foghorn sounds a wet sonorous bellow. It startles the hairs on your arms and beats fear through your gut and groin.
“We’re underway,” he says. “Passengers are not permitted to distress, despair, or disembark once the ship is underway. Don’t you remember the terms?”
And you want to say: I can’t remember my own fucking name. But maybe that’s your own fault. Maybe you folded it up and slipped it through a gap while Melvin cooed approval.
“Where can I reread them?” you ask instead.
He points to a laminated QR code mounted on the wall under glass. You reach for your phone, but what you pull from your pocket is a black slab of jelly-like flesh. It trembles in sympathy with your trembling hand.
You fight the sloping corridors and cliff-faced stairways, driven by a searing desire to escape the menacing flower-patterned romper, the phone left quivering on polished floor, the horse-corpse carousel, your ex Melvin, but above all the ship itself, which feels now like a ravenous abattoir. The signage is hieroglyph; you ignore it and chase a waft of salt-cut air instead.
If you can reach the deck, you will dive off it. The quay cannot be far, and your body has not forgotten how to swim. Your muscles are already reciting the cup and slice, the automaton ankle flutter of strong, smooth freestyle.
But when you pass through an immense rusty lozenge of a door, stagger to the rear railing, and look out over the ship’s foam-thunder wake, there is only horizon. You circle the deck, skimming one hand along the railing to ensure you miss no section of view. All views are sea, churning grey waves flecked with birds too small and colorful to be gulls.
Despair joins distress and scoops out your stomach. You throttle the railing with both hands, feeling the rust flake and scrape under your grip, then you slump to a crouch without breaking hold, so you are squatting on the crosshatch metal deck with your arms stretched orangutan above your head. The sea is sectioned into vertical stripes.
You realize the gaps between them are the perfect size to lose a beach-swollen paperback book or a memory. Because you are imprisoned regardless, you choose one to jettison: parked with Melvin on the edge of a sales lot, navigating the jagged dregs of a molly-and-ketamine comedown as the sun comes up, illuminating each car’s frosty windows so they look like they’re full of some ethereal gas or chambered ghosts.
You were a fucking mess, says Melvin, who heaped the spoon for you. You embarrassed me, okay? His voice becomes a faux growl because he sees his anger is too much, has to mock it soft. Don’t you ever do drugs again! His arm worms behind you, sliding along your spine. Looove you.
You saw how easily you could leave him and decided to leave him. Now you fold the cornflower blue memory into origami, thrust it through the gap, and let the wind pluck it from your fingers.
The sky turns dark.
The sea turns dark.
A clock chimes midnight. You turn around and go back inside.
Passengers are streaming into the Grandiose Hall, and there is clearly no dress code. You see scrubs and uniforms and hospital gowns and birthday suits, and when you finally see Melvin you see his bleach-spotted sleep shirt and faded sweats with the hole in the crotch. You attempted to gauge your own attire, but inclining your head is difficult, and your reflection in glass and mirror is hopelessly indistinct. It’s possible you also look like shit.
“There you are,” your boyfriend says. “Let’s grab a good table.”
The staff redecorated while you were up on deck. The carousel has vanished, leaving only the faintest formaldehyde scent-tendrils behind. It’s been replaced by a circular stage where the shortest and most pensive crew member is attaching a flesh-tone microphone to the collar of his romper.
He stands between an enormous wire cage of ping-pong balls and a wide plastic pipe that seems to transpierce not just the stage, but the whole ship. You can hear the gurgle of water far below.
“Testing, testing, éna, dýo, tría,” the crew member croons. “Everyone ready? Everyone remember how this works?”
Some passengers laugh; Melvin guffaws as he pulls your chair for you. A cornflower blue bingo card and dauber await at your place setting. The dauber is made from a strange silvery wood, blood-warm under your fingertips.
The crew member reaches for a ping-pong ball. “Fifteen! One-five!” he calls. “Fifteen as in my dog died when I was fifteen and it was my fault; I left the gate open even though we heard coyotes just the night before.”
You think about Monstress a little bit every few months; now you think her all at once. The soft white cloudburst of fur hurtling to the door to greet you, the damp scraggly smell of her after a walk in the woods, the way she licked your wrists and chin, the way she bellied out whining at the foot of the couch, insistent something had rolled beneath it even when all toys were accounted for behind her.
You stamp with the dauber.
The crew member reaches for another ping-pong ball, and when he speaks his lips are mistimed with his voice. “Seventy-four! Seven-four!” he calls. “Seven-four as in July 4th, I sat under a blanket with my neighbor to watch the fireworks, and he didn’t touch me but he said something just bad enough to stick in my head for two decades.”
You know this one: the pink-and-navy quilt, the grass that was either wet or just cool enough to feel like it should be, the gravel-truck rumble of your neighbor’s voice and his exact words, which were under the covers with a forty-year-old man, how’s it feel?
You stamp with the dauber.
The crew member reaches into the wire cage. The memories come thicker and faster: fifty-three as in the fifty-three dollars I stole from my grandmother’s top dresser drawer, eight as in I pushed my sister off the edge of a picnic table and she needed eight stitches, twenty-four as in I spent my twenty-fourth birthday pretending to be sick so I could drink and cry and masturbate alone.
You stamp-stamp-stamp.
So do the people around you, and before long there’s a bingo: a man in shrunken pajamas scurries up to the stage, and after the crew member checks his card with exaggerated care, he is permitted to drop it down the wide plastic pipe. The first bingo triggers a wave of them. Passenger after passenger stumbles flushed and laughing to the stage; card after card flutters out of sight as the dark sea burbles far below.
“Look how light they are,” Melvin says as another woman wanders away, her face wondrously blank. “That’ll be you. That’ll be us.”
“Nineteen! One-nine!” the crew member calls. “Nineteen as in I was nineteen and my mom threw a fork at my shoulder, not my head or anything, just my shoulder.”
Bingo.
Melvin walks you up to the stage like a proud parent; you can’t remember if either of yours were. The bingo card is living origami in your grip, folding through a parade of shapes: dog snout, wine bottle, handgun. The crew member has to smooth it out against his small flower-patterned thigh before he checks it over.
“Exquisite!” he says, and hands it back. “Go on, then.”
You step toward the tube, which is wider than you thought, big enough to swallow you whole. When you peer over the edge you see a dark so absolute it tugs at your eyeballs, makes them ache slickly in their sockets. Melvin stands across from you, his eager face hovering over the void. There is a thumb-sized, scarlet-rimmed hole under his jaw that you never noticed before. He plumbs it with an anxious finger.
“Toss them all,” he says. “You’ll feel so good. So light.”
Your boyfriend’s other fingers are curled around a wad of stained paper. The part that isn’t dark with blood is cornflower blue.
“That’s mine,” you say, surprising yourself.
Melvin blinks. “No.”
But it’s true, so you say it again. “That’s mine. Let me see it.”
He gives you a tight smile, shakes his head. You hear a little bit of bone rasp against bone, and you finally see his exit wound, his crown of matted hair and pulped scalp. It makes your hand jump to your own head, just a sympathetic reflex, a mirror neuron reaction—but your fingers find a bloody crater in your temple.
“Do we have an issue?” the crew member asks, thinly cheery. You see his two taller counterparts sauntering toward the stage.
You look at the memory in Melvin’s fist, and even though you don’t know its contents you know, by a ragged absence in your cells and mitochondria, that he dragged it out of you by force. You think back to the passengers in hospital gowns, to the women in the boarding queue brushing broken glass off their shoulders.
“Asshole.”
The word is insufficient, but it matches to him well. He gives a stuttery, startled laugh. “Excuse me?”
“Murderer,” you say, and this one matches to him so well that his whole body lurches.
He extends his fist, poising it over the gurgling dark, and the fleshy tension in his forearm, the spiral of veins and hair, puts phantom pressure on your windpipe. “I’ll get rid of mine, too, once you’re done,” he says. “Promise. It’ll be a fresh start.”
He opens his fist, and the bloody memory plummets down the tube. The crew members are converging now, the patterns of their rompers all thorn and strangling vine. You look at Melvin’s tear-streaked face, then at your bingo card, at the void-black ink swirling inside cornflower blue cubes. The tube is greedy for it, sucking and rasping.
You scrunch the card in two, in four, in eight. You crush it down, mold it into a tiny, aerodynamic pellet. Then, in memory of Monstress, you stuff it inside your mouth and chew furiously.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Melvin asks.
You are climbing onto the slippery plastic lip of the tube. You are leaping before anyone can stop you.
The fall is forever, then it’s over, and you hit the cold dark water with a sound like two gunshots. You pinwheel, losing up and down. Currents yank your limbs. Bubbles detonate against your bare skin. Something gargantuan thrums above you, battering you downward. Your ribs are a vice hemisecting your chest, your thrashing arms are useless, and you did not think you could die twice but you were wrong, wrong, wrong—
Air.
Your timing was lucky on the first breath; the second time your face breaches the waves you suck down mostly foam. But as the cruise ship churns away from you, as it turns from a city-sized leviathan blotting out the stars to a ghostly lantern in the distance, the sea calms and surfacing gets easier. The water is buoyant, even for salt.
You choose a direction and start swimming to stay warm. The stroke feels good: your hands cup and slice, your feet flick and flutter, your body carves space. The water is skinned with wet paper memories. Some cling to you as you swim, uncomfortable but no longer unbearable, and you suspect that with light to see by they would be cornflower blue.
You swim, and find you can’t get tired, not even when you decide to test your butterfly and cavort through the water in slashing, wriggling rhythm. Some ways of being dead are better than others; every muscle in your body feels smooth and endless. You could swim forever, but as light seeps back into the sky and dawn streaks the horizon with filaments of red, you see shore.
No quay, no dock, no buildings: just a long strip of pale gray sand, dotted with moving figures. When you get closer you see the fishing nets and pool strainers, the tools they are using to pull memories from the sea. Behind them, raised up off the sand in a silvery wooden cradle, you see a half-built boat sealed and plastered with multicolor strips of paper.
You swim until your knees scrape sand, then slosh your way to land. One of the people with a pool strainer waves you over, and even though they’re wearing a mask with no eyes or eyeholes, they recognize you well enough to pull a damp cornflower blue memory from their jumpsuit pocket.
“Here,” the woman says. “You dropped this.”
You read your name, then read it again, and when you’re sure you won’t forget it, you walk to the lifeboat and smooth it into place.
Rich Larson was born in Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and is now based in Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as 250+ short stories, some of the best of which can be found in his collections: Changelog, The Sky Didn’t Load Today and Other Glitches, and Tomorrow Factory. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages and adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS. Read for free at richwlarson.tumblr.com and support him via patreon.com/richlarson.
