At the bottom of the sea, she fell in love with the one thing she was supposed to let go.
A companion comes down without a heartbeat, and asks if there's coffee.
That's how they arrive at The Still—broken, sent down once the person who loved them is gone. Oyin takes them in. Sits with each one until it's said what it needs. A name. A song. A language nobody who remains can speak.
Rai came down that way two years ago and never left.
Oyin is sixty-eight, and the walls of her own mind are starting to give the way the ark's did, long ago. She did not plan to fall in love again, and she did not plan to want one more thing before the end: to rise, once, through five hundred feet of black water, and see the sky.
A cozy, literary sapphic science fiction novella. About grief, memory, and a warm room in the dark. Bring tissues. You'll be held.
