Float
Content Warning
abandonment, body dysphoria, dead animals, drowning, grief & loss, mutation, natural disasters, refugee experiences, tobacco use
by Rachel Ashcraft
My ma says I did cartwheels in her uterus. Ever since then, I’ve been floating and free only between gaps of waiting. The desert makes you wait. Dries you out, cracks your skin and your lips. Keeps you for itself.
When John asks my first memory, I tell him it was underwater. I show him a photo of me, curly brown hair full of soap, big grinning cheeks, gums pink and toothless in my family’s bathtub. I awoke here in this hazy bathtub water, suspended and free and weightless. In John’s arms there was still a weight. I don’t think he understood why I had to leave. There’s a truth in the polaroid, an embryonic reconnection to what I was before or as I know now, would one day become.
In Arizona people have pools, but not my family. There is always a pool though in my memory. The house with the pool is haunted by too many eyes. A deer’s glass eyes follow me from where it is mounted on the wall and a classmate’s dad. A wiry man with a ponytail spits tobacco into a Styrofoam cup. He looks small to me in the middle of the room, all these dead things watching him.
I slip into the pool. My hands stretch out. My head is shoved under the water. I want to thrash, but my limbs stay calm. There is pressure against my head, little kid fingers in my hair. It’s so blue and clear and quiet under here. I know this feeling. I grip at it. My fingers tingle, my nose feels numb. I open my mouth. I draw the water in, but I can’t pull it into my lungs. I imagine gills in my throat, see it expel in jet streams out from me. My head breaks the surface. It’s bright and loud. Water streams from my mouth.
“Don’t do that,” an adult admonishes. “She won’t be able to breathe.” The skin at my neck itches from the chlorine. It itches and itches and the teacher puts band-aids there to keep me from scratching. Under my nails are scales. I wipe them on my shirt and for most of my life, I think I dreamt it.
• • •
I’m a thing that came from the water. I belong here. Everyone else has forgotten, but I haven’t. I swim out to meet the thrashing man and by the time I get to him, his movements are weak. I drag him towards the shore. One arm over the other. My arms burn, I can barely see, the sunlight beating in my vision with my heart. But the water doesn’t betray me, pushes us up onto the sand. This is where I met John. I closed my mouth over his and pushed air into his lungs and he coughed up Lake Michigan all over my legs. I saved his life. They write an article about me in the paper. I think it must have been a slow news day. Turns out we’re the same age. For a while I think he was meant for me because he doesn’t remember how he ended up in the water, almost as if he’d surfaced from below. I used to believe in signs like that, now I think he probably just hit his head.
• • •
In space I recapture that feeling. I’ve left John below as well as everyone else. There’s solitude, my body magnified, and I’m made to listen to all the gears whirring, encased in my suit. The illusion of solidity comes apart. This air carried with us from earth that I am always tethered to passing through my lungs, the carbon dioxide filtered from the suit. I float secured for a moment; catch the stars out of the corners of my eyes through the open window of the shuttle. They burn a little brighter freed from the hazy atmosphere of earth. They’ve never been this clear. So few of us have seen a thing like this.
The lessened gravity on Mars buoys me and all around is red sand. I collect the soil and spend the next five years studying it.
• • •
Earth is more water now than it’s ever been. I know it always and always will be my planet, but I don’t tell this to anyone, not when people are being displaced, not when some choose to stay and their bodies wash out into the sea. I will die when this planet dies, I think, when it’s obliterated, but not when there’s still water.
We leave the planet for the final time and something shifts in me. My skin grows strange, shimmers in the dim light of the transport vehicle. We helped colonize mars. Forty percent of earth’s population are now Martians. My hair is white, but behind my ears I can see the scales. There are nubs along my throat that flutter with each breath I take. On Mars we pull our water from the air, and I feel like I’m drowning.
I steal the ship, but can barely drive it. My webbed fingers slip over the controls. They pursue me for a while, but apparently decide to save their fuel. I slip into the water chamber and wait to return home. Arizona is no longer a desert, what used to be the Pacific Ocean abuts it. I gasp at the rank air, smelling of fetid rotten things, and look at my own body as much an aberration as the rest of the planet. I slip into the tepid water and pull it in through my mouth, it bubbles up and around my head, and I dive deep. Everything that will die has died and no one returns home anymore. I think about them on the red desert of Mars. I wonder where John is. I crave the things in the water around me, the things left behind, because they thrive with their strange mutations and sometimes the brave ones come close and swim with me. I no longer look to the shore where my old ship rusts.
About the author and the piece
Rachel Ashcraft tells us that this story racked up at least 17 rejections before coming to us. Rachel is a librarian in the rural midwest of the US. She has short stories published in Grendel Press’ More Than a Monster Anthology, Apex’s Strange Locations, Even Cozier Cosmic, Malarkey Books and elsewhere. Follow her at rachiea.bsky.social.
©2025 by Rachel Ashcraft. All rights reserved. May not be used for A.I. training.