Ocean Diet
by William Stieglitz
Alexa, having a high tolerance for salt, did not have much difficulty drinking up the entire ocean. She hadn’t meant to swallow the whole thing, just to lower the water level enough to catch up with her parents, who had gone in deeper than her eight-year-old body could stand. She knew she could tread water too, but that was too much effort in water this swooshy, so drinking the ocean really was simpler.
It started surprisingly tasty. The salt and seaweed she slurped reminded her of the kale chips her mom would tell her not to eat because they were her special diet food, but that Alexa took nibbles of anyway when she wasn’t looking. The small fish were slimy and unappealing, but then there was tuna and herring and the tangy treat of other flavors she didn’t know. She slurped it all up so easily, the big fish and sharks and crustaceans and whales, without needing to chew. It was all part of the liquid, and the liquid could be swallowed, so naturally everything small enough to fit in the liquid could fit down her throat too. She didn’t even realize until after that last slurp that she was standing on dry sand, the water around her gone, the water in front of her gone, all the water in front of her gone. The seafloor lay spread out like a desert, all the fish and plant life inside her, nothing before her but her parents, bewildered.
They took her to the doctor right away. He put his stethoscope over her heart and told her to breathe, but could only hear the rumble of brine. When he told her to, Alexa opened wide. With his small doctor’s light, he could see wave crests lapping just under her tongue. Finally, the doctor had them wait outside his office for what felt like forever (it was ten minutes) before inviting them in.
“Your daughter is perfectly healthy,” he told them. “It seems she ingested a larger than normal quantity of ocean water while at the beach. While most children her age accidentally swallow between 0.4 and 2.2 milliliters on average, she ingested approximately 1.3 billion cubic kilometers. This is largely inconsequential. With a healthy diet and exercise, she should be just fine.”
The parents weren’t especially satisfied, but Alexa thought he did a good job, especially since she got a lollipop at the end. They tried to live life like normal, which was surprisingly easy for a while, until they went out for seafood.
“What do you mean all your fish items are unavailable?” the father asked. The waitress apologized, but the fisheries weren’t bringing things in anymore. “Fine, I’ll have the crab then,” the father said. They were out of crab too. They could get him a cheeseburger if he’d like. “Who goes out to a seafood restaurant for cheeseburgers?”
They left only having salads, and ran into streets full of protesters in fishing gear, carrying signs like “bring back our ocean” and “save the whales (and all the water around them).” It occurred to the family other people might need to know where the ocean went.
After explaining, a few people were still angry, but most were satisfied knowing the ocean was safe and sound, albeit inside an eight-year-old girl. There was still the matter of fishing, but that could be resolved too. The fishers would take turns each day lining up in front of Alexa, casting their lines into her mouth and leaving when they filled their quota. Alexa didn’t like it too much—her mouth ached from staying open too long, like when she went to the dentist, and she didn’t have time to go to school. At least she could have fish sticks again.
Alexa tried to take good care of the ocean inside her. She got fish food from the pet store and downed the flakes so the smallest fish would have something nice to eat. The big fish were always snacking on them and she figured the small ones deserved a treat too. Alexa let the air breathers like the dolphins and seals fill up on oxygen in her lungs before returning to her stomach. Some days, especially when there was a storm, the waters would churn hectic inside her. She would have a stomachache with all the sharks and other big things bumping up against her. She’d sit still and steady them until the storm passed, reading to them from her picture book. That always helped when she was scared. At night, she fell asleep to whale songs.
Sometimes, when her parents were asleep and the pull of the moon on the watery body inside her kept her up, she’d sneak off to the beach, where confused seagulls pecked at dried sand in the dark. Alexa would stand where the shoreline had once been and try to imagine laps of icy foam against her toes. Someday, when she was older and didn’t need another world inside her, she would spit the ocean back up. Send back all the creatures, the coral and crustaceans and salted seaweed, in a deluge that would bring every taste back through her mouth and fill the hollow she left. The world would want the ocean back. As for the fish, she didn’t know if they cared, or even noticed. They had gone from one container to another, the world within it the same to them, even if it filled a different space. She would send it all back someday, when she was less alone. But for now, she would stare up at the moon and feel it tug her almost off the land.
