More Than Microscopic

By Erin Darrow

Frothing waves cascade and collapse, dancing like pale ghosts under moonlight, burying the bodies of my ancestors in a seaweed world I'll never know. I inch closer to the sea and wonder if any mer remain. Water laps at my toes and I lift my voice in a tentative tune.

No mermaid murmur, no siren song, no sense of someone waiting underwater to summon me home.

A home my nana fled, abandoning bleached coral cemeteries and garbage gyres in the swollen sea bloated by glacial melt and rising mercury. She sang her spell and metamorphosed to survive on land.

Never let them hear your song, nana made me promise. “Them” being humans.

Out here, the moon and stars are my only audience, twinkling like glowworms on a cavern wall.

The ebbing tide calls my faint magic forth and power tickles my lungs, demanding to be freed. I crouch, sweep my hands into the water, and inhale. One smooth note resounds. Warm magic flows through my pulse, my body, my breath.

Answering my call on a swift surge, a milky blur appears on the dark water's surface. Thousands of tiny translucent specks of verdigris —phytoplankton— swarm toward me like buzzing bees to sticky-sweet honey.

They murmur a muted melody so soft I can only hear it with my hands and feet immersed in the brackish shallows like a radio antenna tuning into their frequencies. Vibrations tickle my skin, and I can't contain a burst of laughter.

I crescendo my cantata and our melodies tumble and blend together. Spurred by our song threaded with mer-magic, the phytoplankton bloom and flourish, becoming more than microscopic. The water turns deep turquoise, and the plankton burst into bright luminescence, shimmering on black water, and my heart blossoms with them.

If I don't let them go, they will wither and die and no good will come from our song. Carried offshore, they will become the living lungs of the sea breathing oxygen into its salty veins, sprouting coral reefs, and seeding kelp beds.

 I lower my faltering voice and begin a farewell coda. Brushing verdant, lacy plankton from my fingers, I sigh. They disperse offshore, unbound from each other, and from me. The plankton's absence leaves me adrift, a lone seahorse without sea grass to anchor me.

I climb from the water and sand grains stick between my toes. I stop, dampened coat hem dragging me down.

I'm not alone.

My heart drums a syncopated, vivace rhythm against my rib cage. Desperate to run away, my body disobeys and clings in place like a barnacle on a rock.

Pale moonbeams and blue-green foxfire torchlight illuminate an approaching silhouette. Their frame is dwarfed by a large backpack. Anything could be in there: feijoa jelly sandwiches and Anzac biscuits or hidden cameras for recording half-mer and nets for trapping me like a trout.

“I heard you singing,” they speak low and soft as if afraid of spooking me.

Torrential terror swirls beneath my calm surface and coils in my belly. Never let them hear your song. Did I break my promise? I wish I could close myself in a clam shell and hide inside like a real pearl. I stuff my hands into my pockets and glance seaward, feigning nonchalance.

The stranger shifts on their feet, gripping their pack straps in their hands. “It sounded really nice.”

I gently clear my throat, but my voice crackles anyway. “Oh.” Out of my depth, I add as an afterthought, “Thanks.”

In unison, we ask each other, “What are you doing here?”

Clearly, we both expected to be alone out in the wops far from Owaka. The closest town is hardly more than a corner dairy and a fish shack running on tidal power. A place where people stop, not where anyone stays.

The stranger chuckles, softening the tense crinkle in their brow. “I'm studying the beach.”

“At night?” I blurt.

They respond before I can backpedal. “I was keen to get here earlier, but my bike got a flat tire on the way.” They smile and shrug as if their enormous pack weighs less than a feather. “On the bright side, I got to see bioluminescent plankton. I didn't know there was any here.”

“You saw?” Trepidation trembles in my voice.

Their smile flashes dazzling white. “Yeah! Brilliant, wasn't it?”

“Yes.” I breathe easier. Perhaps they didn't sense the magic beneath my song and don't know my truth.

They tilt their head and dark curls sweep aside, revealing pounamu piercing their earlobe. “Are you from around here? Do you know this beach well?”

“I'm only here a little while. I've been ground-truthing for a few weeks.”

“Oh!” Their eyes light up with interest and they launch into breathless chatter. “So, you know the area well if you've been surveying here! I'm in re-wilding. Do you think this would be a good beach for kororā?”

“I'm not really sure what a good kororā beach is like.” I admit, uncertain what little blue penguins favor in a home. “I mean, I've never even seen one.”

“Most people haven't.” They rub their chin. “I'm from the aquarium in Dunedin. We have two pairs ready for release. I'm scoping out good habitat. If it works out, I reckon we'll have a colony here someday.” They glance at the white-capped black sea and sweep their hand through the air, painting a picture only their glittering eyes can see. “I can imagine them waddling to and from their burrows in the hills, over sand and out to fish. Back where they belong in the wild.” Their shoulders droop, the air buoying their spirit deflating. “Instead of an aquarium.”

“Well…” Their enthusiasm is contagious, sparking a light in me. To ease their sinking spirits, I spring into a light, hopeful tone. “Seabirds roost here, and sea-lions come ashore with their pups. Maybe the kororā could make a go of it.”

And if I have anything to do with it, they will. My plankton blooms replenish every beach I tend, leaving them in better condition than I found them.

“Thanks,” they say, turning back to me, their smile easing my trepidation. “With the last rats and stoats finally gone, I have high hopes. I'm Sina, by the way. I use they.” The easy warmth of their greeting chases away the last of my lingering fear.

“Pearl. She,” I offer. Even my name isn't sure where I belong. My mother called me a happy accident, a sand grain in the mollusc of her womb, ripening into a luminous pearl. So, she named me after the stone —her surprise sweetwater Pearl— perhaps cursing me to never quite belong anywhere but the brackish in-betweens. Never wholly human and not fully mer, like the ebb tides, I am always in between.

“It's good to meet you, Sina.” The truth tastes sweet on my salty lips. I spend so much time alone, traveling to survey and sing, talking to someone with such an open, caring spirit is like a bright sunspot on a cool drop of dew.

I leave Sina unloading their pack and pitching their canvas tent in the bush above the high tide line. Their sunny demeanor leaves an impression on me like a footprint in warm sand.

At the forest's edge, I glance back. Muted foxfire light filters through Sina's tent canopy and paints violet smudges on my closed eyelids, sticking with me as I leave.

Back home on my sailboat, the gentle sway of the Catlins River fails to lull me to sleep. I toss and turn in bed, my duvet rustling as dissonant as my turbulent thoughts.

The promise I made to my nana stutters like a string plucking staccato and snares like a syncopated drum in my chest. How do I weave my mer-magic in secret and keep my promise to my nana while Sina is here?

The future Sina imagined with passion warms my heart like glowing plankton blooms and I know I cannot quit, not now. The truth glares before me like a sunburst in the sky: to help Sina and the penguins, I might have to break my promise.

Still, I try to hide.

The next morning, I creep to the beach beneath a pale grey sky and whisper a pianissimo melody. I sneak glances at Sina's tent, waiting for them to emerge uninvited to listen.

They never appear to brighten the dawn. A pebble sinks in my stomach as if I had hoped to reveal my secret to someone like them even as I feared giving myself away.

I waver, caught between tides of wanting to sing a solo to coax plankton forth and itching to hide like a clam in a shell. A thin gossamer of phytoplankton sprinkles the water, uninspired by my lackluster effort.

Back in my sailboat, disappointment and guilt sour my elderberry tea. The honey I add fails to sweeten the tartness, but I drink it anyway. After I eat breakfast, I head into the bush to ground-truth.

Long flax fronds flare in clusters and swooping ferns unfurl tender leaves fluttering in the faintest breeze. Friendly pīwakawaka, tails frosted white, trail behind me in search of insects. At the top of a hill, I pause and slide a Touchstone from my bag. With a swipe of the screen, it glows to life, a sallow imitation of the plankton's luminescence last night.

A three-dimensional satellite image of trees sliced by a blue river and edged by blue sea sprouts from the screen: a bird's eye view of the Catlins River mouth and surrounding bush where I stand. A series of flags pop-up: my coordinates to ground-truth today.

I pace to the randomly selected points. Once there, I confirm or refute the AI's eco-identification.

Bush, tree, rock, river, sand, sea. Over and over, I move to a point and log my observations.

But standing in a half meter squared pixel plot, there is so much that can't be seen from orbit. Satellites only see the surface, not what's underneath. There is so much to see in a small stand of grass and reeds, a sighing forest, the languid river, the rustling sand.

A rainbow glitters in a single drop of dew clinging to a leaf. Blades of grass tremble and dance on a breeze so soft I barely feel it brush my skin. White and gold veins crisscross grey pebbles like million-year-old fingerprints.

Korimako sing winsome serenades and miromiro chirp and chatter. I smell fresh dewdrops on spongy moss and salt on the sea breeze. Kōwhai leaves caress my cheeks as I duck beneath their branches.

I record impressions and wonder if anyone will ever read them. I wonder if anyone else cares about these small beauties that color the black-and-white monotony of daily routine.

Every day, I record the truth of the world around me even when I can't embrace the truth in myself. Like a sand grain in a mollusc shell, calcium carbonate concretions build around me, a Pearl, hiding myself away.

It isn't all bad. Ground-truthing takes me all over Aotearoa New Zealand, allowing me to sing my spell at beaches to spring phytoplankton into bloom. And it's part of a bigger picture. The data are used to quantify fresh water and share it fairly, to prioritize and monitor reforestation and restoration initiatives, and to study shorebird populations.

By mid-afternoon, I log the final point and submit my data. On my way home, I run into Sina huddled in a coral coat. The concretions harden around me, seeking to protect the fragile grain of sand within.

“Pearl!” Their gleaming smile peels away one layer of calcite. “Are you busy?”

“No.”

“I'd like to see satellite images of the beach over time to assess the habitat conditions. Can you help me?” Sina oozes optimism like honey dripping from a beehive.

Unable to resist their golden glow, the offer slides off my tongue as keen as a child accepting lollies. “Sure. Come with me.”

Sina jaunts along behind me, coral coat flapping around their knees like wings, reminding me of a pīwakawaka's erratic dancing flight. I wonder what it would be like, to be so wholly yourself, to flit like a lively fantail showing off white-fringed tail feathers instead of being a Pearl, a speck of sand cloistered away inside a shell.

“This is incredible!” Sina wonders, eyes glued to the image like a hound on a scent. “How far back does it go?”

I swipe the timeline available for the region. “The 1980s, but the images from back then are pretty rough.” I scan back to the old images to show Sina what I mean.

A grainy, two-dimensional snapshot appears, entirely unrecognizable. Patchwork farmland, tracts of forest, blurry grey towns and ribbons of blue rivers replace the landscape we know today. Owaka sits more than five kilometers inland. So much blue swallowed green and yet my grandmother still had to come ashore and leave the expanding sea behind.

“Whoa.” A cloud crosses Sina's face, and they hunch over the table, studying the old world. “I knew this area flooded, but seeing this is…” They're struck by a rare loss for words.

“Yeah.” I swallow the dryness scratching my throat.

Sina drags their fingers across old world images, examining the snow-white spine of the Southern Alps and the turquoise glacial lakes pressed into the earth like thumb prints. Today, the mountains are stark without white blankets and ice is but a memory carved in the rock like words written in a diary. Erratic boulders mark the recession like gravestones.

In a hundred years, hundreds of meters of ice melted and swallowed coasts around the world. A blue planet made bluer. Amid the destruction, the world morphed into something different, more beautiful, like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon.

Wind farms sprouted up like fast-growing trees and multi-coloured solar panels decorated slopes and roofs, rotating their faces like wildflowers chasing the sun. Lunar leaves with the finesse to capture the moonlight's energy sparkled to life. Forests and jungles reclaimed towns and cities, crumbling concrete with roots and vines.

Like my nana, people migrated. They moved underground or up mountains, seeking respite from the heat on the very earth their ancestors had abused. Humans began to live in harmony with the land, and each other. Cruel as a breath to drowned dead lungs, change came too late for my family.

The kettle hisses, interrupting our silence. I pour steaming water into our mugs and the heat thaws the cold frosting my heart.

“Thanks.” Sina cradles the chipped mug of cinnamon-tinged licorice tea in their hands.

I set mine aside and move the satellite images forward in time. Colours shift like layers of paint on a canvas: olive to pine green, gold to brown, and blue, ever-expanding blue. The images increase in clarity and detail, focusing with the acuity of a microscope.

“Tell me when to stop.”

“There!” Sina yelps.

The display highlights Sina's cheeks with a reflected sea-green blush as if they float underwater on a sunny day. Their golden-brown eyes glow like polished amber, captivated by the imagery.

“Can you zoom in on the beach?” Sina asks, startling my attention back to the Touchstone.

The coastline cuts along the world we know now and there is comfort in the familiarity. The wedge of beach sandwiched between sea and forest, sliced by the river, widens as I bring the sloping dunes into sharper relief.

“Now move forward?”

I cycle through each beach slice and era Sina asks for. When I finish, my mug is empty and Sina is on their feet, staring squarely at the thousands of pixels stacked together to project the landscape onto the table.

“This beach is perfect. I think it's going to work!” They're brimming with so much buoyant hope, I think they might float away like a kite on a breeze. “The river deposits plenty of sand to keep the beach intact. I climbed the dunes today and went into the forest. There's heaps of good nesting habitat for kororā burrows.” Their lips curl into a broad smile, their cheeks blossoming.

Another calcite layer flakes away and my stomach swoops, unsteady as storm-swirled sand. “Glad I could help.”

“I'll be back with the first penguins soon.” Sina shrugs into their coat and rushes to the door, pausing to ask breathlessly, “Will you still be here?”

“I will,” I affirm. Another promise to keep.

The next few weeks pass under misty, grey rainfall and low, sullen clouds. The flat imprint left by Sina's canvas tent fades and I fall into a slow serenade. Tethered to the moon like the sea, the tides shape my days.

Night after night, I sing beneath veiled starlight and through silver streaming rain. Phytoplankton hum and glimmer, gleaming radiant green upon the water, and never linger long enough before they leave. I fill the hollow high tide and lonely low tide with ground-truthing walks through bush and dunes, recording data point by point.

Reeds. I verify a coordinate.

Rain drips off my hood and into my eyes, onto my nose, down my cheek. I wallow in the unfairness and injustice of it. I should be as impermeable as the scales of a fish or the oiled plumage of a seabird. I should live in the water and wander the waves. Instead, rain plasters my hair to my forehead and trickles into my gumboots to dampen my socks, sinking me into misery.

I trudge to the next point but stop in a puddle. Sina's green bike cuts across the beach below, towing a wagon carrying a blanketed crate.

The slow serenade conducting my week slides into a chorus con brio, a spirited and lively tune taking me into a new tempo. I shove the Touchstone into my bag and scramble down the dunes, sliding on wet sand to the beach.

My hood flies off in the flurry and my cheeks grow warm despite the cool rain dampening my face. Sina holds a finger to their lips curled in a smile and points at the blanketed crate.

The kororā squawk, announcing themselves before Sina sets the crate down and lifts the blanket. Four kororā blink grey eyes in the waning daylight. Rain beads on their indigo blue plumage and rolls off their moonbeam white bellies. One stamps pale pink, clawed feet, and flaps tiny wings as if raring for freedom.

Sina pauses with one hand on the latch. The depth of love in their gaze threatens to swallow me whole and my breath catches in my throat. The same joy and warmth that fills me when my phytoplankton bloom radiates from Sina.

After the crate creaks open, penguins waddle onto the sand and teeter side to side, holding their wings out to steady themselves. Sina shoulders their pack and nods their head at me to follow them uphill, leaving bicycle and crate behind like monuments in memory of their efforts. We creep into the dunes and take cover behind a stand of beach grass, watching the penguins explore their new home.

The sun descends over the ocean and clouds part to unveil the moon while we observe the penguins. Mesmerized, time ceases to exist. Until my alarm sounds the ebbing tide and awakens me from a dream.

“I have to go,” I whisper. Before Sina can ask why, or where, I sink back from our grassy hideout and take flight from the scene like a startled seabird into the sky.

Leaving Sina and the penguins behind, I race across the dark beach to the river mouth. Ebbing tidewater laps at my ankles and magic arcs through me like a rainbow coloring a gloomy sky.

I sing a soft alto and phytoplankton caress my skin. Their chorus sends bubbles between my fingers and toes, and we build a reprise together. Gleaming turquoise plankton dust the water's surface and glow incandescent, mirroring the starry sky. We are one chorus, one song of the sea.

I peek at my skin, half-hoping for scales shimmering paua blue, seastar orange, or coral rose, but my feet are still soft human flesh.

My tone falters into dissonance and the phytoplankton slide into a diminuendo, claimed by the ebbing tide. Their light fades and I am left in the winter night with cold feet, numb hands, and a lonely heart. The song is always too short, the bloom always over too soon.

Footsteps scuff the sand behind me. I turn around, heart in my throat. Sina stares at me, foxfire torch illuminating their face in a blue-green glow.

My promise is broken, my shell cracked and hulled apart, and I am laid bare on the beach. An uncommon, uncultivated pearl unhidden.

“Pearl?” Tears mist Sina's brown eyes, shining like rainwater on rock. “How?” They gasp.

I am grounded by the truth. I can shutter myself away beneath concretions of calcite and become a hard stone or escape the confines of my shell, exposing the tenderness beneath.

“My mother was a mer,” the words stream from my lips, unstoppable as water rushing from mountains to sea.

“That was magic?” Sina asks, astounded.

“I'm not supposed to let you see,” I caution. I should lie, I should hide, but I stand still, the truth beading on my lips like raindrops on feathers.

“Why? It's beautiful! You sowed life with your song!” Sina sees me and my truth. “You're re-wilding our world, too!”

Beneath silver moonlight, a current tugs us closer like the moon tugs on the tides. We collide together like unstoppable storm waves breaking against the shore. Warm rain-dewed lips caress mine, swallowing my bated breath heavy with hesitation. At Sina's touch, I am carried on clouds through misty grey to the searing sun.

Hands linked, we trek back to my boat and throw off our dripping coats and boots, ignoring the puddles growing on the floor. While the windmill whirs and heats the kettle, I tell Sina everything —my grandmother, my mother, their migration and metamorphosis, my song awakening the plankton— and I am unleashed. No longer bound by secret, the truth tastes like freedom on my tongue.

I pour hot water into our mugs: one chipped, one whole. Steam rises from the kettle, and I gravitate toward Sina like the sea pulled by the moon.

I am soft sand in their hands, rough but yielding, willing to be coaxed into something new. I will crumble apart and erode someday when I leave, but just for now, I am wholly myself.

Their soft murmurs, their warm lips on mine, are drops of sunshine on a flower sweet as spring honey.

Our tea, untouched, grows cold. Together, we are warm tucked beneath the duvet.

Spring summons yellow kōwhai flowers dangling like golden bells, tempting tūī with sweet nectar. Sina and I have shed the warm, winter duvet from my bed like molted feathers and replaced it with a light linen quilt to line our nest.

I've found someone whose spirit and song calls to mine like symbiotic coral and algae building a plentiful reef. Together, we bloomed and built a home for plankton, for kororā, for ourselves.

In their burrows, the first kororā eggs have hatched. The final points of my ground-truthing are logged. I wade into the water at the ebb tide and my phytoplankton bloom and coalesce into a turquoise tide before I begin to sing. They no longer need me and my magic.

My stomach sinks like a stone and my heart stutters and writhes in my chest, a victorious dancer fluttering near a cliff about to fall a thousand feet.

“I have to leave.”

The realization rises, a swelling tide surging up the river. I am stuck in between, pushed and pulled by two opposing currents. One seaward, one landward, always and forever in between.

“You have your kororā to look after,” I tell Sina. My stomach tightens into a stubborn knot, and I bury myself beneath a hardened shell. “I have my plankton and ground-truthing. We've done so much here, but there's still more to do.”

“I know.” The light dims in Sina's eyes as if a cloud veils the moon. “I love you, Pearl.” The words pierce my heart, an anchor in the sand, and tear into me. Sina wades into the water, heedless of getting their feet wet; as wild, wondrous, and themself as they've always been. “You're the flower to my honeyeater, the sweetest nectar I've ever tasted. You're the storm to my sunshine and together, we cast a rainbow into the clouds.” Tears pool in their eyes and spill onto their cheeks. They press their forehead to mine, holding me in their arms. “I don't want you to leave, but I know you have to go.”

Words are trapped in my throat, frozen on my lips. I fear if I say it, I will shatter like wave-broken shells smaller than the plankton I sing to.

Sina's salty kiss draws the words from my lips like a mer-song aching to be released from my lungs. “I love you, too,” I whisper, and I belong. I am home.

But it doesn't change a thing.

It's agony to leave the beach where my heart was whole, firmly planted in place like the roots of a rimu tree. As if whittled away by hands caving wood, my heart is in pieces.

My hands shift on the wheel of my migratory home to steer further away from a place, and a person, which were as much a home to me as the brackish in-betweens.

My lip trembles, my chin wobbles, and tears prick the back of my throat. I feel as though someone has scooped out my heart and left a stone in its place. I never meant to take their heart and break it, or mine, but I have to leave. I have a hundred songs to sing and an endless ocean to heal. Sina has more kororā to rear and release.

I close my eyes and imagine them lying beside me this morning, their face reflecting blue of curtained sunshine and sorrow.

“We can talk via Touchstone,” Sina offered wistfully, their lower lip puffing out. “We'll see each other again.”

“We will,” I promised, smoothing their pout with a kiss I wish I could hold onto forever.

A Touchstone isn't the same as real touch, true and tender. We both know it, but we told each other these lies like a bedtime story meant to comfort a child. To ease a fraction of our pain like a balm on sunburned skin.

Though I am alone again, I sail on the winds of Sina's love, gusting into my life like a gale. I am buoyed by the bloom of phytoplankton summoned by my song.