‘Devilfish’

Photographer - Tobi Brun

Devilfish

An enrapturing chill swells across your body as your eyes open to an endless blue world. The salty Salish waters envelop you and curiosity strikes intensely as a pressure pushes you from below. You break through the twinkling surface and feel a sudden relief as oxygen fills your lungs. Your delicately fresh eyes spot tall black spears circling towards you before submerging once more. Clicks and whistles fill the sea and their curiosity turns to a happy greeting of squeals and splashing at the surface. Their size triumphs over you, but you don’t feel threatened. They greet you as a new friend, and you begin to recognize each click and whistle as their own.

Your mother takes you to meet the salmon, and taste their rich, pink meat for the first time of many. A friend says there used to be many more in our home, but the sea has gotten warmer and the salmon only smaller. Your cousins take you to the floating patches of kelp and play in its slimy buoyancy. They grab a piece in their mouth and chase you with it. Squeaking from laughter, you pick up speed towards the surface and feel the sudden chill of the wind for just a short moment of being airborne. In that moment, you see a whole different world that rolls in hills and mountains. A lush evergreen ocean. You crash back down into the sea and share your excitement in ecstatic clicks that shared a new meaning of happiness. They tell stories of the animals who live in the evergreen ocean, that they don’t like us but we respect them all the same. As the sea grew quieter, your new family leaps into the sky countless times, and you marvel at how much higher they can go.

The orange glow of the setting sun sunk over the horizon as you and your new family float still atop the waves. Glimmers of the star sparkled over the surface of the quiet sea as you watch your first sunset over your new home.

Is every day this beautiful? You ask.

Yes, they all reply.

You dive quickly and ascend even quicker. The surface breaks and the force of gravity pushes you back down towards the sea, as if to say: Not yet. A quiet splash traveled through the air as you came down, followed by the multitudes of thunderous crashings by your family. Flying through the air again, and again, squeaks of joy and pride fill your home, your sea. You are one day old, and this is the best day of your life.

A few hundred sunsets pass over, and you are still minimal in comparison to the sizes of the others. Each day that has passed, that will pass, is filled with discovery and a forever emboldening curiosity. Every new day you feel yourself leaping into the sky a little bit higher than the days before.

As the seasons change and the sun sets at its latest, the islands are where you call home. They always were home, that was known without being told. As you circle the islands through the days and nights in search of the salmon, another family that looks almost entirely like you passes by, but their language is nothing you can understand. They look empty of the joy you share each day. Your mother notices that there aren’t as many as she remembers. You pass in different directions with little acknowledgment but shared solemnity. This new feeling of a dampening inside nearly overwhelms you, but it subsides in an instant as you find new salmon to chase. The sun sets over your sea as another day ends, and you choose that like every other day, this one is another favorite. This will be your final favorite day. The rising sun shone over the evergreen land to the west as a new day danced over your home. The infinite colors of the sea floor were especially bright today. Everyone greets the new sun with skyward leaps. From a distance, a low hum emerged through the sea. This was not a foreign sound to you, you recognize it as families from the evergreen. You click to find your mom, but an explosion louder than any family breach rocks your sonar into a deafening ring.

White bubbles of air float upwards around you as you cry in shock. The new members of your family cry for their moms in the same sea-splitting tone. Your mother appears from the surface and urges you to take off. Everyone follows as you push your tail through the sea with intensifying pressure. More explosions rock the sea around you. The mothers urge you to stay away from the surface for as long as you can. You feel your heart pound beneath the fat of your young body and a new feeling engulfs you: fear. You need air, you and the other small ones can’t stay under as long as the others. You break the surface and take in the cool air for an instant, but you are thrown with the violent force of another explosion, this one brushed your fin. You return to your mothers side, but the sea grew shallower, shallower, and shallower as the hum of the machine rose above you. A small cove lay ahead of you and wide nets sprung out from the machines, blocking off where you came in. There is nowhere to go.

The often silent sound of the sea became a violent shrill of terrified clicks. A net is thrown down in front of you and the other little ones, separating you, your friends, and your mothers. The fright became an indecipherable terror as you hear more screaming cries ring out through the sea. Desperate to be back in their mothers grace, you and the other little ones swim deep to sneak through the netting. You gnaw and shake through the rope, but can’t squeeze through. You move back and observe the older family members on the other side of the net make their futile attempt. Through their fright, four of the little ones attempt to charge through the netting. They twist and twirl and shriek, and the ropes catch around their fins. Their mothers feel them gently with their fins until they go limp without air.

The mothers nudge them with their snouts, but they loll in the netting. The life in the little eyes dim as quickly as they once glowed. You rise for oxygen, and in that moment you break the surface you feel a net cast around you. As you are pulled away, you see the animals on the water machine hoisting your little friends out of the sea. You push against the force that is pulling back, but the force exhausts your little body. Small bodies of your friends rise from the sea, and they are slowly hoisted up. You watch them plunge a blade into their small bodies. An incision opens along their small snow-white stomach, staining it red. The animals begin to fill rocks into your friends' lifeless bodies. Their blood began to drip into their home like the river the salmon ran from.

Their bodies are encircled with chains and an anchor, and thrown back into their home with a dull crash. Sounds of the machine animals' laughter infect the sounds around you. You dive to help bring them back to the surface, you think they just need more air, but the net yanks you back harder. The smell of their blood fills the water around you, and you cannot escape it. You want to fight, but you can only watch as they bathe the mothers and cousins and siblings in their family blood. The machine begins to tug you faster, and your family becomes a blip on the horizon. You call their names, but your pleas are lost to the sea. After many pulverizing moments of swimming against the machine that tugged you along, you cry once more, only to again hear nothing in return.

You turn and swim with the machine that chose you to come along. You feel yourself lifted into the air. The force of gravity screamed at you for the prolonged skyward flight, and you felt your weight crush against itself. You are placed in a small pool. White concrete surrounds you in a slope. There are no new friends to meet or places to explore. The only view to the outside was a small rectangular window, where the animals using the machines stare at you in unintelligible sounds. You swim in a circle for endless sunsets. You call for your family, and a little one you recognize responds from a neighboring pool. Are you okay, you ask them. I want to watch the sunset with my mom again, they reply. A shuddering crash from their pool shakes your little sea. Another one, and another, until you smell their blood from across the pool. You feel them crush their skull against the concrete prison walls, each crash followed by an echoing crack, and deeper thicker blood pooled out with each thundering shudder.

A quick, painstricken shriek follows, but you can only listen as the cries grow fainter as the stench of family blood grew inescapable. The sun sets over you once again, and the silent stillness of the pool seemed to shrink its walls in on you. You watch the animals from the machine carry your friend's body out later that night. You’re bigger now. Bigger than your mom was the last time you saw her. You’ve been moved to different pools throughout your life, made to do tricks for fawning animals in crowds.

They laugh and yell the same way they did on your last day home. You remember sharing a pool with one who looked almost like you, one with a voice you recognized from the passing family you shared solemnity with. You wonder if your family passed others like that. Each night you watch the sunset pass over your sterile concrete tank, and you hope that one day you can watch its orange glimmering glow over the sea with your family one more time, and you think that may be your favorite day of all.

Ben Gates is a fan of orcas, dinosaurs, and the outdoors. Born and raised in the Seattle area, he is no stranger to the heavy raindrops that shed their tears before the North Cascades which have towered over him all his life. To look at mountains so big, Ben sees their history, their potential to be a story so grand, it towers as high as the Cascades. He hopes to one day capture that story, but for now, he is a student at Western Washington University, pursuing a degree in the English creative writing department with a Film Studies minor.