Salt Memory

A promise from the deep, but at what cost.

A few months ago, we announced we were opening for flash fiction submissions of up to 1500 words. We’re excited to announce that starting now, we will be publishing a flash story and a short story every month! Two stories, each month, delivered straight to your inbox.

Without further ado, here is Incensepunk Magazine’s first flash fiction story:

By Nicholas Packwood

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The ferry from the mainland dock had been delayed by the usual October chop, and when I finally drove the last mile along the inlet road the light was already going flat on the water, the kind of light that turns everything to pewter and makes the buoys look like mistakes left behind. I wore the coat my mother had ordered from the catalogue in 1969, charcoal wool with a lining that never quite warmed, the same coat I had on the day the telegram came about the boat. The sleeves were still too long. I kept them turned back once, twice, a habit that no longer required thought.

The facility sat on a reclaimed spit of land just past the old cannery, a low block of poured concrete and smoked glass that the syndicate called the Reclamation Centre. No sign out front, only the discreet plaque with the interlocking cross and double helix. Inside the air was filtered and cool, the way they keep it in places where bodies are meant to last. A woman in a pale blue smock met me at the desk. She carried a tablet and spoke in the measured cadence of people who have memorized the script.

Your father’s retrieval was completed last month, she said. Water cases are always partial. You understand.

I understood. The syndicate had been advertising for years: full restoration for the buried, the consecrated, the tidy; something else for the ones the sea had kept. My father had gone down in the straits in ’71, hull split by a freak wave off the cape. No body recovered. The sea had done its work for fifty-odd years, scattering and polishing and claiming what it wanted. Now the syndicate, half megachurch and half venture capital, had fished out what DNA and bone fragments they could from the wreck they finally located. They had grown him back. Not whole. Never whole.

They led me down a corridor lined with identical doors. Behind each one, I supposed, another arrangement like this one, another family paying the monthly fee to keep the miracle running. The linoleum was the colour of weak tea. My shoes made the same small sound they had made on the meeting-house floor back home, the one my grandfather had built with his own hands when the Friends first came to the Nova Scotia coast. No pictures on the walls here. Only the faint smell of ozone and something metallic underneath, like blood left too long in salt water.

The room was smaller than I had expected. A single bed, chromium rails, a window looking onto the inlet. The man in the bed wore the regulation gown, pale green, tied loosely at the neck. His hair was the color I remembered, iron gray shot with white, but the skin on his hands was mottled and thin, the way kelp looks when it dries on the rocks. He turned his head when I came in. The movement cost him something; I saw the flicker in his eyes.

You came, he said.

His voice was almost right. The syndicate had matched the timbre from old ship-to-shore tapes, but there was a lag, a catch, as if the words had to travel through water first.

I sat on the metal chair. The coat felt heavy across my shoulders. Outside the window the tide was going out, exposing the mud flats where the gulls walked in their stiff, preterite way. I thought of the Inner Light the way we had been taught to think of it: not a thing you could buy or sell or engineer, but a steady burning that needed no witness. My father had carried that light the way other men carried a compass. He had never joined another meeting after he left the coast, but he had kept the silence inside him even at sea.

They tell me the pain is part of the process, he said. Salt memory, they call it. The body remembers what the sea took.

He lifted one hand and let it fall. The fingers did not quite close. The syndicate had warned me: water resurrections were never complete. Nerves misfired. Cartilage calcified in the wrong places. The pain was chronic and proprietary; it belonged to the contract. Pay the installment or the reclamation reverses, cell by cell, until nothing is left but the original absence.

I asked him if he remembered the boat. He nodded once, carefully.

The wheelhouse at dawn, he said. The light coming low across the water, the way it used to when we rounded the headland. You were small then. Your mother kept the lamp lit in the window.

He was reciting what they had fed him, the curated memories the algorithm had stitched together from logs and letters and whatever fragments the sea had not erased. I could hear the corporate rhythm underneath, the same rhythm the woman in the blue smock had used. Nothing here was free.

I thought of the burial ground back on the Nova Scotia coast, the plain stones set flush with the grass so the wind could move over them without obstruction. No resurrection there. No syndicate. The dead stayed dead, and the living stayed silent, waiting for the light to speak in its own time. The sea had taken my father without ceremony. That, it seemed to me now, had been the mercy. The unburied were not owed back. They owed nothing.

He watched me the way he used to watch the horizon, patient, measuring. The light from the window fell across the chrome rail and made a thin bright line on the floor. I saw how the arrangement would come apart: the payments would lapse or the syndicate would raise the rate or the biotech patents would shift and the body would begin its slow unraveling. The pain would increase. The memories would fray. In the end they would switch him off the way you switch off a navigation light when the ship has already gone down.

I stood up. The coat sleeves slid down over my wrists again. I did not turn them back.

I’m sorry, I said.

He did not ask for what. He only nodded, the small careful movement that cost him. The gulls outside lifted all at once, white against the gray water, and for a moment the light sharpened, the way it does just before the weather turns.

I walked back down the corridor. The woman in the blue smock was waiting with the tablet, ready to explain the financing options. I told her I would not be signing. She looked at me the way people look at someone who has just refused a gift they did not want.

The ferry was already loading when I reached the dock. I sat in the car and watched the inlet recede, the facility a low gray smudge against the mud flats. The coat was warm enough now. The sea kept its own accounts, and my father, wherever the light found him, was still free of the ones men made.

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Nicholas Packwood is program coordinator for Screenwriting & Narrative Design at George Brown Polytechnic in Toronto where he has taught in Game Design since 2009. His writing has appeared in Canada's National Post, the Montreal Gazette, the Manchester Evening News, and the Canadian Literary Review. Peer reviewed publications include works in Space & Culture, Santé/Culture/Health, and Reviews in Anthropology.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.