[Issue 2025.74]

‘Sentinel’, Lauren Ferebee

Art © 2025 Barbara Candiotti

---

The morning after I dreamed about Hannah’s mermaid, three dead seagulls washed up on the shoreline. I took note of each one, their bent bodies limp on the sand, then lifted them by their feet, feathers dripping, to take into the lab. An omen, I might have called it once.

There was a snowy brightness to the air, alerting me that I’d lost track of time again. I weighed the birds, considering the recent length of days. It could be close to Christmas now, in which case it was time to fire up the truck and take it in to the outpost, see if Hannah had sent mail.

The birds were trash-dead, like most of them. Their stomachs stuck out like crumpled paper, stuffed with plastic, a cruel parody of fullness. You’d think the chemicals would kill them first, but we’re resilient, us little meat and blood breathers. We adapt without knowing it, until one day all the shit in the world just gets too much inside us and we stop. There should be a better prize at the end for surviving so long.

As I carted the birds out to the decomposer, a notice fell off the door. Like its predecessors, it warned of my upcoming eviction. The End of the Sentinel Program, it proclaimed, like a government-sponsored apocalyptic tract. The end was coming, but then again it always was, some end.

I lifted the decomposer lid, smelled chemical death, a sharp too-sweetness like burning plastic. The birds disappeared into a sheeny muck, and I tossed the letter in after them, its featherless white wings quickly sinking.

I’d watched, like they asked me to. I’d measured the inches of the Rise. I’d measured Hannah the same way, until she was tall as the resort town ruins, until one day she was gone. And I would be gone soon too if the people that put me here had their way.

---

Flurries fell patchily in town, obscuring The Wayfarer’s sign, which glowed with Christmas lights in the shape of seahorses. It’d be a slick road back if I didn’t decide to stay the night. As I kicked open the old door, the scratchy sounds of “Strangers in the Night” signaled the only true miracle December was likely to bring this year: the repair of a centuries-old jukebox in the corner. The Wayfarer’s windworn proprietor, Rebecca, raised her head and waved a white flag my direction. A letter.

One cursory glance around revealed the usual folks: a couple of hardened ecologists who’d made a career studying seaside ruins, scattered contractors who maintained the Habitability Perimeter fifty miles inward, and of course, Rebecca, slinging shitty beers behind the bar. Few people were moving in these days. There used to be more, before the Rise made it abundantly clear that it would keep rising.

Rebecca tossed a letter my direction. “Merry Christmas.” She leaned in expectantly, probably hoping I’d open it there, but I tucked it away into the deep pocket of my fishing jacket, right next to my hipbone. She eyed me curiously, then turned away. That was the good thing about bartenders. They were never too curious.

A man turned on his barstool next to me, and I realized he was a stranger, his neatness telegraphing a recent military background. His wavy hair was too long to be regulation, but he had soldier eyes: sharp, haunted, and forever searching for danger. His were dark blue. A hundred years ago someone might have said they looked like the ocean.

“I hear you live on the line,” he said, studying me. Rebecca and I glanced at each other as she scooted a beer my way.

“She brings by fish every now and then and we fry it up and have a big fuckin party,” Rebecca told the stranger.

The man raised his eyebrows. “It’s safe to do that with the fish?”

I smiled, anticipating twenty questions. “I know good from bad.”

He leaned in, studying my face. I wondered if he saw any danger there. “How much good is there still, really?”

I saw from the set of his mouth it was a genuine question. “Look, I’m not a prophet or any kind of preacher,” I said, “I don’t have the stomach for telling people how the world is.”

He smiled, a smile that was surprisingly bright. “Isn’t that your job?” he asked. “Isn’t that your whole job?”

“And what’s your job?” I asked. “Now that you’re not in the service?”

If I had surprised him, he didn’t show it. “You should know,” he said. “It was in the notices.”

The notices. I’d never imagined that those anonymous harbingers, each of which I’d re-molecularized into soil, might translate into reality. The idea of leaving seemed so unthinkable, I’d thought I could stave it off by pretending it wasn’t happening. He must have been at my door this morning, taping the latest missal to it. Some Christmas activity, evicting strangers. Historically, it hadn’t gone well.

“Don’t shoot the messenger. I think they should let you stay,” he said, reading my face.

The ecologists were dancing now, spinning in slow circles to an acapella version of “Hallelujah.” I’d never seen them dance and none of them were any good, but somehow under the dim lights and the music, it seemed all right to not be any good, to just be moving. Their arms swooped and swung in imprecise but enthusiastic movements. They made me think of the birds, how they would have moved when they were still alive and battling the coastal wind.

“Do you dance?” he asked me.

I thought about it. “I have a daughter,” I said finally. “I used to dance with her.”

“Well, I’m going to dance,” he said. And he got right up and danced, silly and strange and nothing like I expected from the person sent to oust me from my home. I felt a twinge and wished he had asked me to join him, which was not what I expected from myself.

---

Twenty years ago, I smoked. Now I just stand outside buildings and pretend. Tonight I felt for the letter in my pocket, touching the smooth paper, thinking of the eviction notice I’d tossed in the decomposer, how I watched it sink.

“You open your letter yet?” Rebecca asked from the doorway. I shook my head, looked out at the falling snow. The outpost seemed more like early civilization than late, it was so sparse and simply made, a few buildings, some dirt roads. What remained of the Anthropocene cracked and decayed beyond it in the darkness.

“That guy’s here to move me off,” I said. “Been getting notices for weeks.” If I had a cigarette, I would have ashed it. Instead, I flicked my fingers through snowflakes. Rebecca brushed snow off an old ratty lawn chair, sat in it.

“Might be good for you, a new beginning.” I nodded out of politeness. It was the kind of thing you just said yes to, even if you didn’t agree. A new beginning, sure, it sounded good. I touched the letter again. It sounded better than running away.

---

I got home a little after midnight and fell on the icy steps to the house. I banged my leg so bad I ended up lumbering into the house like a drunk bear, my knees hovering above scratchy industrial carpet. Underneath the house’s manufactured heat, a deep cold lurked.

Some nights I bothered going to my bedroom first, pretending I slept there, but tonight I just crawled straight into Hannah’s. Everything just as she left it, except the letters under the twin bed, opened, read, and stashed there like sad and broken birds.

I climbed onto her bed, felt the familiar sense of relief being surrounded by her former life. Her two corner windows framed the dark and unfathomable sea-deep, made it finite. The puffy tenderness of my knee foreshadowed a deep bruise in the morning. I pressed at it, wincing.

The truth was, I couldn’t let Rebecca see the letter because I would have to lie to her about it later, as I had so many other times since Hannah left. Even away from me, I knew Hannah’s rhythms: two or three years in a place, cheerful and full of news, and then I’d get one that just said Mom, I’m disappearing. And she would, for a while. She’d go silent, then pick up the correspondence as though nothing had happened.

The first few times I received the news of her disappearing, I’d tossed my house keys at Rebecca and gone hunting. But I’d found myself incapable of really interfacing with the world beyond after so many years alone. Cities made me panic. I hated the pace of life beyond. When I did manage to find her friends, her old addresses, they were surprised to learn she’d vanished, had no idea where she’d gone.

It was as though she had never been in the lives she lived at all, as though she fabricated them for me to find long after she’d left them. There is nothing quite like having a daughter who kidnaps herself.

I had shrunk my hopes to one: that someday she’d come home. And that one, given my pending eviction, was slowly fading too.

I let the white paper flutter unread to the floor, where it joined its brethren under the bed. Like I did every night, I propped up pillows and stared at the square of the sea in Hannah’s window until it submerged me, and I slept in darkness.

I woke gasping to a sharp rapping on the door. I stumbled to my feet, my knee cringing at the sudden movement and limped to the door. Outside, the ex-military evictor from the bar shivered at the door.

I scowled at him as I opened it.

“I’ve never seen the ocean before,” he said, teeth chattering. I was silent. It was too early for this, whatever it was. “It’s big,” he added.

“Well,” I said. “Go stare at it for a couple of days while I pack. Don’t die of exposure.”

“Is it true you’ve been out here for twenty-five years?” he asked. I squinted at him. It was the kind of question that needed coffee for an answer. I invited him in, but he said he’d meet me on the back porch. People get like that about the ocean. They see it once, and they can’t let it go.

Whatever genius designed our mobile little house had neglected kitchens altogether in favor of a lab, so I was treated to the photographs of the three dead seagulls up on the wall while the water boiled on a hotplate. The coffee was in an almost-clean beaker. Everything tasted like saltwater.

I found him on the back porch as promised and sat next to him, our breath clouding the air together.

“I have these dreams,” he said. “About what’s down there. Old houses and all the things inside them that float around, like a graveyard. But I’ve never been. I’m afraid of it.”

I stared at the meager snow on the ground. “I don’t dream about anything,” I said finally. “It’s all gotten swallowed up.”

“Is it true,” he asked me. “Is it true that there are whole towns under there?”

I nodded slowly. “I’ve seen them. I’ve seen… all kinds of things. Some you wouldn’t believe.”

“You’re one of the last ones left,” he said finally. “Most of the others are dead or missing.”

I snorted. “Sorry, that just sounds like a threat. Like you’re here to kill me.”

He stood up, worried. “No, no, actually, the opposite. Curious how you’ve kept yourself alive.”

I froze. I thought of the many nights I’d spent awake in Hannah’s bed, watching the mobile spin above my head, listening to the rustle of the letters as the cold outside air swept through cracks, imagining death.

“Huh,” I said. “That’s an interesting question. I’ll have to think about that.”

---

His name, I learned, was Paul, and he had come from Texas, a water guarder from one of the last reservoirs. He was a contractor now, a private security guy, though, he told me, he still worked for the government.

“I guess the difference is,” he said, “that now I can wear my own clothes and I can quit anytime I want to.”

“Are those big differences?” I asked him. He shook his head. I’d brought him into the lab, though I supposed leaving him on the stairs to freeze to death looking at the ocean might have been the smarter move.

“None of this stuff belongs to me.” I waved around at the glass containers, the fridge, everything. “So, I’m not sure what we do with that.”

He shrugged. “They didn’t send me with any boxes or anything.”

“I guess I have some under the house, if they’re still any good,” I said. “But it might take a shovel to find them.”

We spent the better part of the morning digging the old regulation tubs out from under the house. Most of them were saltwater-rusted, but they could still hold things.

“There’s one in here that’s really heavy,” he said. My heart dropped. “You can leave that one,” I said, but it was too late. The lid was off.

A million pictures of mermaids with sharp teeth and rainbow oil-skin stared back at him. “Jesus,” he said, stepping back.

---

Hannah’s belief in mermaids started early, maybe because she was lonely. At five, she came in one morning, her eyes wide.

“I saw something with sharp teeth out in the water,” she said. I thought it was a fish. “No, Mom, no, it had a face like me.” She seemed half-pleased and half-terrified at the thought. I went along with it, since I was the one who had brought her out here, made her the kind of child that needed imaginary friends.

She never had a name, Hannah’s mermaid, though pictures of her soon decorated our house: a rainbow sheen over her skin that Hannah claimed was old oil, hair tangled with algae, eyes round and indistinct like a fish. Even I started to think that I saw her sometimes when I’d go into the water. Sometimes Hannah would wake up gasping like she was drowning, long after she’d stopped talking about the mermaid. I’d catch her singing songs I’d never heard, staring out the window at the ocean.

I think most people, Rebecca included, assume that Hannah left because she was restless or bored, but it wasn’t that. Hannah was haunted. It was my fault for bringing her here, raising her in a place that people weren’t supposed to be in. The earth had resoundingly been reclaiming it from us for years. And it had taken her too, my bright-eyed girl. She didn’t have any land in her. She washed like the sea from place to place. She refused to be caught.

---

I didn’t talk about Hannah to anyone, not even the few people who knew her, so the words felt difficult. “I had a daughter,” I said. Paul nodded. “She isn’t dead,” I said, reading the sadness on his face. “She’s just lost out there in the world, and she won’t come home. Not that this is a home.”

“What is this, then?” he asked me.

I considered, thinking of the way we’d creep the house back up the beach as the waterline rose. “It’s a shell,” I said. “Like what turtles have. It’s just enough to keep surviving.”

“You could go find her,” he said. “Go live with her.”

I thought of Hannah’s last day in the house, the way she cried and begged me to come with her. “No one is supposed to live here,” she had spat at me. “This isn’t a real place, it’s full of ghosts.”

I could have gone then. I could have listened. “You know how it is,” I said to Paul. “You know how it is for us. Our generation. You protected the water until it was gone. We can’t leave.”

“We’re guardians,” he said.

“We’re grievers,” I replied, closing the box of mermaid drawings. He caught the lid before it went all the way down.

“That’s not who I am,” he said. I looked into his eyes, that old blue of remembered ocean, and took his hand, so I could close the box. There were calluses etched right where his fingers connected to his palm, like he had been carrying heavy cargo a long way.

“Who are you?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said, holding onto my hand. “But I’m not willing to put that kind of sad word on it yet.”

I laughed. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, you’re an optimist. Great.”

That night we sat amid half-packed tubs and ate freeze-dried food. Mostly the day had been spent in silence, him in the lab, me in the bedrooms, going back and forth to the composter with things I didn’t want to bring with me.

“I guess they’re usually ready to go then, the others,” I said. “You don’t have to pack for them.” He stretched out on the ground and sighed.

“Most of the old posts were abandoned a long time ago,” he said finally. “Actually came upon a few already out at sea. Those reports you do, those logs, they got rid of everybody who did anything with them years back.”

I thought of the three birds and a sharp pang hit me, though I had suspected something like this for a long time now.

“You must have known that,” he said, as though he could read my thoughts. “You must have at least wondered.”

I shrugged. “They kept paying me to be here, so here I was.”

He sat up on his side, gazed at me. I looked away. It had been such a long time since I’d felt the weight of another person’s curiosity.

“Why are you helping me?” I asked. “Why not just tote the whole house away, put me out on my ass?”

“You’re the last one,” he said. “I don’t know what happens after you.”

That makes two of us, I thought.

---

The hauler arrived early in the gray morning, a house-sized hole on its back. By then I’d stacked up what little I cared to own in my truck bed. I hesitated over the drawings. They were a ridiculous thing to think of bringing, but I couldn’t leave them.

I sat out on the beach holding them in my lap while I watched the hauler take the house away, Paul instructing and guiding it. In a week or less, the shore would reshape itself as though it had never been here at all.

Once the house was gone, Paul sat next to me in the sand. For a long time we watched the waves crest the ruins of resort towns, now home to whole ecosystems of new life.

“She said it was just ghosts here,” I said finally. “When she left. But it wasn’t. It isn’t. There’s so much life here. So much death, yes, but so much life. Who will watch it? Who will know?”

He stood up without answering and offered me his hand again. I took it and stood up, letting the box of drawings fall in the sand, releasing its strange and colorful contents to the briny wind. I stumbled a little, and he steadied me. He didn’t let go.

I looked at him then, really looked at his face, and in it there was a kind of earthiness that I had long since forgotten, like his whole being went far down into the ground. Without thinking, I reached out and touched his cheek, almost expecting it to be made of bark, or dirt. Instead, I felt the fine grit of stubble across his cheek.

“You’re right, this isn’t a place for ghosts,” he said, leaning into my hand. “But it’s no place for humans either. Maybe it needs to live and die on its own terms for a while, like we do.”

---

That night, I saw the mermaid. I’d driven the truck down near the water one last time, after having a few at Rebecca’s. Being landlocked made me nervous. Paul said it would pass, that I’d get used to the feeling of endless flat surfaces, an unmoving horizon, but it hadn’t happened for me yet.

The mermaid looked less human than Hannah’s drawings, though I could see how she’d mistaken it for a creature like her. It didn’t speak at all, only sang in a low, almost invisible vibration. They must have been here for years, watching us measure and collect and tell stories about what we knew.

The mermaid came up near shore and I walked out partway to meet it, but it kept its distance like I might be dangerous. I held up my hands. A moment later it did the same, revealing webbed fingers, delicate, translucent skin. Gills rippled on its chestbone like waves. So vulnerable, I thought.

A sadness rose up in my gut almost like I was going to vomit. There’d be no one to witness this, not for years. Perhaps that was right. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, things have to heal themselves alone. And other times you need a witness to heal toward, someone or something that will watch as you become whole, seek solid land even if at first it rocks under your feet.

The mermaid waited and I did too. It was winter and the water was cold, and the light vanished so quickly. It was the kind of darkness I remembered from my childhood, a long road in the country on a winter night. I ached for that place, that time.

I opened my mouth and a sound came out, maybe a song, a low sad vibration traveling toward a pair of glittering eyes, which suddenly vanished, leaving me anchored in nothing except my own two feet and the water quickly rising around me.

I turned and walked toward shore.

© 2025 Lauren Ferebee

[Issue 2025.74]

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