Reef Mind, page 1
REEF MIND © 2025 by Hazel Zorn
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Published by Tenebrous Press.
Visit our website at www.tenebrouspress.com.
First Printing, September 2025.
The characters and events portrayed in this work are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Print ISBN: 978-1-959790-41-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-959790-42-6
Cover by Becca Snow.
Interior illustrations by Echo Echo.
Edited by Alex Woodroe.
Formatting by Lori Michelle Booth.
All creators in this publication have signed an AI-free agreement. To the best of our knowledge, this publication is free from machine-generated content
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For Aaron.
Your loyal friendship brought out the writer in me.
Thank you, for your encouragement.
“There’s terrible evil in the world.”
“It comes from men,” said Holly. “All other elil do what they have to and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals.”
—Richard Adams, Watership Down
MATT
I DON’T KNOW what I’m supposed to do with you. I’ve never been good with children, but I have to do something. You’re my fault, after all, every monstrous bit. I wonder how long it would take to break your tiny neck. Would it snap like a frail bone, or shatter? I imagine a lightning-shaped crack bisecting your face as my strong hands crush your throat. Maybe not. I’ve seen rocks bounce off you. Your skin is deceptively strong despite its porcelain appearance.
Your smile is a wooden thing trying to mimic flesh. The rope tether around your waist is always stretched as far as it will go. I won’t let you touch me. Your little sneakers and your red jumper are strange birthmarks, like a plastic toy that’s been painted, because what you grew from doesn’t understand clothes.
You’ve stolen from me. My eyes, for instance. It’s unsettling. It’s not how a real father would feel. But what is particularly gruesome is your resemblance to her. The dark, wavy hair that frames your face. The shape of your lips.
You have no right.
***
There were so many deaths in those days. Gruesome, awful ones, too. There were no more doctors to call, no hospitals that weren’t overgrown with psychedelic anemones and stalked jellyfish. I grew up with faith in social structure. There was always someone to call. A doctor, a senator, an expert.
Amanda was one of the last to get sick. There was talk of infection spreading before that, perhaps caused by bacteria in the ocean. We knew things were warming up, after all. I admit, living in such a beautiful place made me carefree. I retired early and was determined to relax in paradise. That was how I saw La Jolla: paradise. There was nothing the place could do to offend me. Not even the teens and tourists overtaking the stairways to the beach, or the bum surfers, or the resorts driving up the price of housing. The sun and surf altered my brain. I used to tell Amanda it turned off the asshole in me.
Most mornings Amanda would do her nails in nothing but her sports bra and boy shorts, while the overhead fan kept the cool sea breeze circulating. I try to remember her like this, because I can’t think of the way she looked at the end of it. We lived in a one-bedroom apartment above an ice cream shop with a beach view. It’s overtaken now, our old place. In a way it became Amanda’ casket, with the exception that people are usually dead in those.
Amanda was a good woman. She was a lifeguard in the day and a CPR instructor at night. She even taught dogs how to surf. Humans enjoy water, you see, but it can kill us. We are not made of stone. We have beating hearts, and lungs that fill with air. A big wave can overtake even the most experienced surfer and drive them to the bottom so they don’t come up.
Amanda and I had a commonality. We were both burdened with the frailty of human life. We carried that constant vigilance in our postures. We met in a bar. Pretty standard, I know. She was still in her lifeguard wetsuit. I thought she looked built: all muscles and square angles. Her short height gave her a look of compressed strength. She sat next to me and ordered a real drink, top shelf whiskey without ice. My look made her laugh shyly. “I deserve this. I just saved a kid from a riptide.”
I had a feeling. A good one. So, with a half shrug, I mentioned that I’d once saved an entire family from a burning building. Two kids, one an infant.
Her face froze. The little bit of cleavage that showed above the zipper of her wetsuit seemed to rise to her chin, hunched as she was over the bar. And then her mouth, those sunburned lips, quirked up. “Are you trying to one-up me?”
“Absolutely,” I said, reaching into my pocket. The St. Florian medal from my firefighting days gleamed against the dark wood of the bar top. Our eyes met, sparked, then kindled with laughter. I wish I could remember that night better. It turned into early morning, our glasses empty, talking about everything.
There are a lot of people you can connect with in life and have sex with. But the desire to be exclusive only ever happens rarely. It is as if all of the good things in the world are mediated through one specific person. I didn’t want to miss another moment of Amanda. She became my life.
One thing I want you to understand is that she’s not your mother. You don’t get to claim that. I don’t care what you’ve mimicked, what you stole from us. Your kind wear our skins like a battle trophy. That’s how I see it. It’s kind of sick, especially considering that Amanda couldn’t have children. She wanted them, though. That’s what I find so difficult right now.
Would she want you?
I was so happy that I admit, I ignored the signs. Little things were going wrong. Odd things. And then quarantines went into effect on every coast. The National Guard shut down the highways. I was determined that I wouldn’t leave, pretending I had a choice. I don’t think the people inland would have taken me in. Only people with places to go, family to be with, tried to escape.
Some people did escape. It got so bad that parents left infected children behind in hotel rooms. Horrible people. People with no sense of duty. That wasn’t me. I had EMT training. I volunteered to ride in the ambulances, because medical personnel were fleeing too.
I remember one of those children, abandoned in a bathtub on the fifth floor of a beachfront motel. He was curled up on his side with his hands crossed over his chest, fitting neatly in a square of window-shaped sunlight. The smell made its way to me first. Thick brine and urine. It scoured the inside of my throat with an unbearable itch and made me cough.
I’d stopped in the doorway and realized I dreaded approaching him. His size and his near nakedness made him more difficult to look at. He wore swim shorts decorated with colorful fish. The short arms and round fists, not quite baby-like but not completely those of a gangly child, were covered in blotches of color. Sores.
Even with the fitted mask on my face, the protective gloves, I grew anxious as I picked him up—limp, but breathing. The sores on his skin were alive. From them grew villi, waving fingerlike, turning toward me to point in judgment.
***
I told Amanda she should stop going into the water, and she laughed me off. “The water is coming to us. I don’t think we can get away from it.”
As La Jolla emptied of tourists in the weeks before the shutdown, we were inundated by eager marine biologists as a substitute. They got into fights with the Ecological Reserve teams, arguing that preservation didn’t outweigh safety. They claimed that an unprecedented and explosive coral bloom had caused the sea level to rise. Tourist agencies tried, ridiculously, to compare our newly submerged streets to Venice.
I started to see the columns of coral slicing the skyline from our balcony. They were growing where the beach used to be. To call it rapid growth was an understatement.
It felt like an invasion. The construction of a new city, edging us out.
AMANDA
I GUESS I had a son once.
I was thinking Robert. Or Declan. Or perhaps Paul, after my grandfather. It doesn’t matter. It’s possible to love someone without a name. That black-and-white image of my son’s little body hugging itself will never leave me. A tiny little t
I could not bear the brunt of the absolute misery and pain all women are expected to endure. It broke me. My sob was a sharp exhalation that made my whole body contract. The fluorescent lights burned my eyes, blurred, the brightness breaking containment and overtaking the ceiling. No baby looks natural as a corpse. As I was wheeled away to surgery I suddenly understood my parents’ divorce, my father’s struggle with drinking. As I reflect on this now, I guess it’s not strange that I met both of my husbands in bars.
I took up surfing because I think I craved self-destruction. I couldn’t kill myself, but I figured I’d give Mother Nature her best shot. I know that’s stupid. We’re all stupid. We all think we’re in control when we aren’t. We say things like, your baby got his wings in Heaven, or everything happens for a reason. People want to force optimism all the time because they feel like they have to. But the only right thing is a half shrug after a finger of scotch, when the lights are low, when honesty becomes easier. That’s when people finally say fuck this.
That’s the thing about Matt. Matt didn’t try to say the right thing. Matt just wanted to have fun. There was a sense of bravado about him that charmed me. The midwestern hero, I guess. He liked good beer, but nothing too fancy. He owned only a ten pack of white t-shirts and various swim trunks. He’d had two big disappointments in life that didn’t cut him deep. I suppose it’s because he grew up in some suburb. A place where everyone knew one another and kept the rabble away, a place that told you to check off some boxes and everything would go right in life. He was comfortable, like a soft bed I could land on after I’d lanced my boils and bled away the grief.
He positioned himself as the solution to my life’s sorrows. It was arrogant in a cute way. Depressed, baby? Try my risotto and tell me you’re not better. Anxious? How about I make you a drink? Or maybe you’d like the stronger medicine between the sheets. Doctor Matt at your service! It really was a tonic to all the hurt. I wanted to forget the country of pain I’d come from, the one that seemed to demand my citizenship. Maybe I could live the last chapter of my life in peace. Maybe I could be happy.
Maybe.
AMANDA
ONE EARLY JULY, two surfers vanished at Windansea beach and were never found.
At the time, the ocean was rolling with lackluster-to-middling surf, which meant an easy day for a lifeguard. The surfers were the only two in the water, straddling their boards, one with his hands on his hips. Their wetsuit-clad backs were black beetle shells. Doubtful they’d get a good set.
How much time passed? A few minutes. Maybe five. I had turned my back, asked an assistant to put my duffel in a locker. I know I put on sunglasses. My mind had the same feeling my eyes did when a grain of sand got in them. The sun was as hot and close as a surgery lamp. It was too quiet, maybe. I looked out over the sea, the calm but moving blue water that stretched out all the way to the horizon. There was nobody there.
I didn’t know what to do. I wondered if I’d really seen those surfers at all.
The rest of the day passed by without incident. I turned away some teens who couldn’t prove they knew how to surf. Pallid things, and awkward in the water. Not Californian, I was sure. The air grew cooler as the sky darkened. I donned an oversized hoodie and found a group of people passing around beers on the beach. Matt was there, happy to see me off work. The bonfire made everyone look orange.
“Did anyone else see them?” Matt asked, when I told him the story.
“Who?” asked one of my lifeguard colleagues. “Nobody went surfing today.”
“How can you be sure?” Matt was defensive.
The lifeguard shook his head. “Quiet day. A few teens messed around in the shallows and that’s all.”
The itch was back, the one in my brain that I couldn’t scratch. I shrugged. “It was an easy day.”
“Babe?” Matt turned to me.
“It was a quiet day.” I looked out to the dark ocean.
I found that I believed what I was saying.
***
I don’t know when I saw them, but it was after the incident. The itch in my mind spread like the prickles in a limb that had fallen asleep. A group of flounder passed by my window, and then I went to the beach to see the coral towers. High as skyscrapers. Across the shore, calcium carbonate growth spread as tree roots do, long fingers digging into the sand and clutching at the ground. A drowned giant trying to pull the dry land down with him. Nobody stopped me, alone, walking into the locus of the strange invasion of our land.
I felt like something—the sand stirring, or the wind blowing—had a sense of me and my movements, observing me with inquiry. So much so that I laughed and said aloud, “what is it?” The reply was felt, like a wet cloth had been laid over the world, and all that remained was a muted and embarrassed silence. I walked on like a chastened child.
The skeletal structures were blooming, stalks growing and putting out limbs, algae colors carpeting columns and shelves. I was drawn to a field of crinoids. Their limbs waved innocently in the air. Living feather dusters. Beautiful, if I was honest. Ethereal. In the center of those flowering structures were white replicas of human faces; the same two faces repeating over and over, their eyes shut and their mouths whispering silently. It was them.
As a knee-high child, I recognized the back of my mother’s legs in department stores; now here I had the same feeling. The surfers from that day. That quiet day.
Their lips were mouthing something I couldn’t hear. A headache started behind my eye, a dull pain that seemed to be intensifying. I backed away from their faces and the pain receded, distance unspooling like yarn. Queasy, I ran back to our crumbling civilization.
I never told Matt where I’d been.
***
“He can’t stay here.” The boy’s mouth was open in a silent scream, his eyes squeezed shut. The translucent fingers all over his skin flicked the air in agitation. “Matt,” I tried again, speaking louder. “He’s in pain here.”
Matt was difficult for me in those days. I tolerated him and his denial of things, his inability to see the world for what it was. At that time, the hospitals were not an option. Raided, then abandoned. We’d agreed to stop going out. An agreement he’d broken, due to some sense of misplaced nobility. And now he’d brought the outside into our lives.
“I can’t take him to the rec center, Amanda. Do you know what they’re doing to people there?”
I did. Burning their bodies. The black smoke tainting the air with the greasy smell of melted fat and skin, making me gag. I kept my voice even. My patience was in short supply. “He can’t be here. In our apartment. He—” here I stopped myself from saying belongs—“he should go to the beach.”
He railed at me, then. Didn’t I know that there was no beach anymore? It was colonized by an invading force, if anything. Really, how could I say such a thing? I may as well feed this kid to a lion. What was the matter with me? How could I give up? As we argued, the little boy’s arms and legs thrashed in an uncanny sort of fit. His open mouth flickered, a purple light lit deep in his throat. It threw my shadow back. Matt gasped.
I didn’t see him pick up the hammer. I blinked and the image changed, like a skip in a film. Now it was time for him to feel the shame he was attempting to place on me. I realized for the first time since the coral invasion—amid the not-quite present infection stirring strange thoughts in me—my husband’s exhaustion: the bruised look under his eyes, the tremble of his jaw. In his eyes I saw his amazement about the world now, that everything he knew was over, after months of mystifying changes ending in this horror he’d brought into our living room.
Matt looked close to tears. His arms fell to his sides. Do something, he urged me. Do something. I heard the clatter of the hammer falling to the floor when I turned my back. I looked at the boy on the ground and felt that pain behind my eye again. Something was probing me, like a surgical instrument tentatively testing an unknown piece of meat, studying, wondering where to cut. I disguised my grimace by putting my hand over my mouth and bowing my head.
