The Last Daughter of Salt (Fiction)

***

Fishermen knew the lake had died two years ago. The official reports came later, but fishermen always knew first. Nothing hit the bait. The old spawning coves had gone quiet. The big lake trout that once haunted the depths had simply stopped appearing.

Between irrigation runoff from upstream farms and the steady creep of invasive species, the ecosystem had collapsed in slow motion. Native fish populations had dwindled for years, before finally vanishing.

Still, the lake was beautiful. Sunrises and sunsets painted its surface in copper and violet. Marsh grasses whispered along the shoreline. Cattails swayed in the morning breeze. Willows and poplars leaned toward the water and cast long shadows where a person could sit quietly for hours. From a distance, nothing looked wrong.

Asa knew better. For the past three years he had been checking the multiparameter sondes he’d anchored around the lake. Every month he hiked out, pulled each instrument from the water, downloaded the readings to his phone, replaced the batteries, and lowered it back down.

Temperature. Dissolved oxygen. pH. Conductivity. Turbidity. Each time he returned to his office and collated the numbers, the same story emerged: the lake was dead.

Today was the last round of collections for the season. One more sonde to retrieve and reset. After that, Asa could head back to the office and add one more neat column of data to the growing pile of confirmation. Lately, the numbers had stopped getting worse—but that was only because the ecosystem had bottomed out. “Well, at least that’s a plus,” Asa muttered to himself. He shook his head and laughed quietly. “There I go again. Glass half full.”

It was a bluebird day. The sky was impossibly clear in the way only the western sky could be. High desert light washed the landscape in sharp colors. Every rock and blade of grass seemed outlined in crisp detail. And, appropriately enough, the bluebirds had returned.

One darted past him now—brilliant flashes of cobalt against the pale sagebrush. Asa paused to watch it land on a fence post before launching into the air again. He’d come to think of them by their Diné name, learned from a colleague years ago. Dólii. Asa liked the sound of it. The word felt older than English. Older than the Bureau of Land Management. Older than the lake itself. Diné believed some birds carried messages. Asa wasn’t sure he believed that, but he liked the thought. The Dólii seemed to be harbingers of spring.

Asa was nearing his final sampling point now—a rocky promontory that jutted into the lake. He always saved it for last. It was the best spot along the shoreline. The rock was warm in the sun and overlooked the open water. It was the perfect place to sit quietly and let the wind move through the reeds.

But when the promontory came into view, Asa stopped, and swore to himself, “Well crap.” Someone was sitting on his rock. And the sonde was anchored just off the edge of the promontory, which meant he was going to have to interact with this interloper—a woman. Conversing and socializing was not Asa’s strong suit. Especially with women.

Oh well, he thought. Let’s just get this over with.

The woman sat cross-legged at the edge of the rock, gazing out over the water as if she’d been there a long time. She wore a loose gray wrap and simple sandals—nothing like the khaki and hiking boots Asa usually encountered out here.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” he said.

She turned at the sound of his voice. Her eyes were green, clear and steady, with a depth that held his attention a moment longer than he expected. A dragon pendant rested against her chest, catching the light just enough to draw the eye.

“My name is Asa,” he said, more cautiously than he intended. “I’m a biologist with the Bureau of Land Management. I don’t mean to disturb you, but I need to collect data from a sonde that’s in the water right there.” He pointed.

The woman gave him a wry look. “I am aware,” she said quietly.

 “Do I…know you?” he asked.

The woman studied him for a moment before answering. “Call me Tia,” she said. “Until you remember.”

Taken aback, Asa blinked.

“Please, go ahead and collect your sample,” Tia continued calmly. “We both know it’s pointless, but we do what we do.”

Asa hesitated, then stepped to the edge of the rock and pulled the sonde up from the water. He clipped his phone to the sensor and downloaded the readings. The numbers appeared on the screen. Exactly what he expected. Low oxygen. High conductivity. Biological collapse. He sighed.

“You in the eco biz too?” he asked.

“In a manner of speaking.” She turned her gaze back to the lake. “In another life I wrote reports very much like yours. Though my fieldwork was…somewhat larger in scale.”

“Oh yeah? What kind of scale?” Asa, unaccountably drawn to Tia and her peculiar speech sat down beside her on the rock.

Tia smiled faintly. “The ocean is a bit harder to walk around.”

Asa blinked. “Right,” he said.

“But not anymore,” she continued. “Eventually I wrote too many reports nobody wanted to hear. The people funding the research decided the money could be spent elsewhere.”

Asa laughed and said, “Yeah. I’m probably not far behind you. Nobody likes paying to hear bad news.”

“Exactly.” Tia stretched her legs out in the sun. “When I lost my job, someone did me a favor. They dropped me on Kauaʻi. Closest place they could legally abandon me.”

“Could be worse,” he said, easing into sarcasm.

“Much worse.” She closed her eyes. “I was a bit lost at the time. Went for a walk. After a long and rather miserable hike, I ended up at Kalalau Beach. I was exhausted, hungry, and very irritated with the universe. And that’s when I met Manu-o-Kū.”

Asa frowned and wondered where the conversation was going.  “That’s a bird, right?”

“White tern,” she said. “But not just any bird. I was sitting there arguing with myself when the tern started talking. You ever notice storms follow you? It asked me.”

“I assumed I was hallucinating,” she said. “So I went with it and answered: they don’t follow me.

And he told me, The last three research vessels you worked on sailed directly into one.

“That’s coincidence.” I said.

“Sure, and tectonic plates are just enthusiastic rocks.” he responded.

Asa chuckled. He’d had a number of spirited imaginary conversations with prairie dogs over the years. “So what did the bird want?”

Tia looked at him. “For me to remember.” She leaned back against the warm stone. “That I wasn’t just a scientist studying the ocean. I was the ocean.”

Asa raised an eyebrow. “Sounds like you had one hell of a dehydration problem.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

“You’re the original ocean, Tiamat, Manu-o-Kū told me. Chaos. Salt. The first waters.” Tia paused before adding, “It sounds crazy, I know. It’s not every day that someone tells you you’re a Babylonian sea monster.”

“That’s one hell of a revelation,” said Asa. “Especially coming from a bird.”

“And he had yet more to say. He told me, Monster is a little unfair. You’re more of an ecosystem. I asked, if I’m a goddess, what are my superpowers? And he said, Wisdom. Persistence. Immortality.”

Tia smiled, perhaps registering Asa’s look of disbelief. “It sounded like the trifecta of boring to me at the time,” she said. “Manu-o-Kū finally told me to stop arguing and look into its eyes.”

“And did you?”

“I did. And everything came back. The splitting of the world. The loss of my beloved Apsû: you.”

“Me?” Something tightened in Asa’s chest. A sense of familiarity with that name. Apsû. A flash of blue caught his eye. A Dólii landed on the rock beside them. The bird tilted its head and held his gaze. The wind moved across the lake. The reeds whispered. The bird’s black eyes seemed impossibly deep.

And Asa remembered.

Not in words, in tides. He felt the slow movement of ancient oceans. The rise and fall of continents. Storms older than human history. The weight of salt. The endless turning of planetary systems.

Tia watched quietly as understanding settled over him. They sat together on the warm rock. It may have been a moment. It may have been ages.

Finally, Asa spoke. “So what now?”

Tia considered the lake, then said softly, “We wait. The world is resilient.” She gestured toward the marsh. “Even here. Life is already beginning to reorganize itself.”

Asa looked at the water differently now. He could see it: tiny systems shifting. Microbial communities rebuilding the base of the food web. Slow, but real.

“The Diné have a word,” Asa said. “Hózhó. As best I understand it, it means harmony. Balance. The way things should be when all parts of the system are working together.”

Tia nodded. “Marduk and his followers built an empire of noise and extraction. But empires burn fast.” She smiled faintly. “Already his dominion is weakening. His acolytes are on the fast road to extinction.”

Asa watched the bluebird launch back into the sky. “Some will leave,” he said. “Escape this dying system and infest another rock.”

“Perhaps,” Tia said. “Maybe they will learn something.”

“And the ones who stay?”

“Some already understand,” she said. “Wind and water. Birds and currents. People and land. As long as those relationships remain, the system can heal.”

“What’s our job then?”

Tia leaned back and closed her eyes. “We help the ones who understand.” After a moment, she opened her eyes again and smiled. “What was created is good.”

Asa looked across the lake. The surface rippled in the wind. A bluebird wheeled overhead. And somewhere far beyond the horizon, a white tern rode the ocean wind.

“We have time,” he said. “And we have each other.”

Matt Gardner lives on Colorado’s Western Slope, where he enjoys hiking with his dog, Tilly. After a 35-year career in industrial maintenance, he retired six years ago and now spends his time writing, exploring the outdoors, and enjoying life with his wife of over 40 years, their three grown children, and six grandchildren.