Valentines Week 2025
First-place Winner
BY ANNE LICHTENWALNER
Copyright is held by the author.
IN THE warm, amber dim of the Seattle aquarium, a small woman with kelp-coloured hair gazes upward. Masses of fish weave through the water above her head. This central tank, incurving glass walls creating a bell of air at the base, smells fusty, of damp and low-tide. Perch hover along the walls of the tank, noses bulbous and finely speckled, nuzzling up to a long-limbed man in a wetsuit, neoprene hood and scuba gear, suspended in a watery grey fog of fish food. Kay watches his gloved hands release white scraps in slow motion, courting the sharks, the foil-skinned tuna. Inside the mask, his eyes are holding conversations with the fish.
The aquarium makes her feel more alive than usual. Here, she is insulated from traffic blare, the viaduct’s expressway rumbling above the waterfront. She cranes her neck as a halibut, big as a barn door, flies through the water above her, a dorsal fin shimmering along the white belly’s edge. Kay looks again for the diver, but he is gone. She wanders off down the hallway, catching her reflection in a pencil of light: her mouth is hanging open. She has forgotten herself again. First things often strike her like that, but this is her third time here.
Kay walks on from the central tank; next is the canary rockfish, Sebastes pinniger. None of the other fish seem so uniform, so safe in their school as these. Their pupils, gold-rimmed and elliptical, seem to follow her. A livid lateral line slashes each red-gold body; each has a large black spot on its dorsal fin and each is exactly the same. One darts towards Kay’s fingertip where it rests lightly on the glass; Kay does not recoil, but immerses herself watching the easy moves of fish among fish. She is keeping count, seeking reassurance. The rockfish have been exactly the same three times in a row. She can move on.
The dim, cool halls of the aquarium pull her along, each glowing tank a touchpoint. Kay stops in front of a tank full of tiny gobies, their transparent fins strumming the water. There is a spotted prawn goby, Amblyeleotris guttata, a hotdog-shaped, big-headed white fish with tiny fluorescent filigrees around its gills. It lies on the sand floor of the tank and tumbles a teaspoon of coral sand into its mouth, shivering its lips until the grains fall, like marbles or offspring, from its gill covers.
Kay lingers, watching for a different fish, Synchiropus splendidus: the mandarin fish, a dragonet. Less than an inch long, with the face of a rainforest frog, hiding behind dark lobes of coral, it is marbled bronze with fine dots of orange and erubescent eyes. Green and orange reticulations interlace over its blue body. It is missing, today: she will have to return again to find it. When she first glimpsed it, the richness of its colouring jolted her, as if in the confines of this place, so calming and comforting, a sharp voice was calling her. Unsettled, that first visit, she’d immediately fled homeward, to the steam grate on University and Western.
Now, on her third venture into the dark halls, she can read the fish, the movements of heads, mouths and gills; their placement in the water. She envisions how the pale grey blur of her face must appear to the fish, only one blur of thousands each day in the dark hallways.
Kay stretches her arm to the next tank, anchors a finger to the glass and pulls herself to it. A Pacific lobster, big as a cat, its carapace a web of black over blue, yellow and spots of orange. Two spiny antennae, twice its length, sweep backwards from its head like rats’ tails. At the ends of its slender legs, bottle brushes. Flat, fringed swimmerets gesticulate as legs and mouthparts explore in slow motion. Kay sways. The entire animal is so impossible. The squeaking sound as the tips of the lobster’s legs touch her fingertips through the glass strikes her as melancholy, and make her stomach coil with grief.
A tiny shiver flickers over her back. At edge of her vision a tall shadow is moving away from her in the hallway’s water-filtered light. She is suddenly exhausted and turns to leave, to walk toward home, where the traffic noises nail her down, where if she wakes herself screaming, no one can throw her out because she is already there.
***
The keeper, Don — still feeding, always feeding — stands above the rows of tanks that illuminate the dark hallways of the aquarium. Behind the tanks, a black sheet of plywood conceals the linear benches on which he stands. An angular, tall man with durable bones and friendly, outdoorsy lines in his face, he is head and shoulders above the level of the water but can’t be seen from the hallway. Don is not usually visible to aquarium visitors — although he watches the crowd daily through narrow cracks in the plywood screens behind the tanks — only when immersed in the main tank, floating with the fish in his neoprene skin. This suits Don very well.
When he was six or so, Don fiercely wanted a kitten. He imagined it as toy-like, but magically alive- you didn’t have to wind it up, couldn’t predict exactly what it would do. When he found one in a culvert behind their Bremerton apartment, he hid it in his jacket; it clung and purred in tiny, soft, wet explosions. Later, he rescued turtles, squirrels, many cats. Whether he willed it or not, he believed he was a magnet for the helpless and directionless; not a savior, just somehow involved in the process.
Don would rather live right here, in the aquarium, but he and the current cat share an economy studio on lower Queen Anne Hill. He works from 5 am to 7 pm, sometimes seven days a week. For a while the aquarium’s board of directors, fearing burnout, forced him to take a couple of weeks off yearly. Don tried snorkeling in Thailand, living cheaply in a hut on the beach. One morning, while he snorkeled over a reef near Phuket, he was startled by a growing shadow approaching through the silty blue depths of the Andaman Sea. A blue dome, enlarging at the edge of his vision. He felt his heart walloping his ribs as the shadow grew closer; even his fear was startling. It was suddenly just a grouper — but big, maybe the size of a Volkswagen Beetle — approaching, dreamlike, over the dappled sand. Its head and humped back passed right under him.
After, he lay on the beach, missing the fish he knew. In his neoprene suit, he was immune. He could stand on the catwalk above the aquarium tanks, pouring tiny shrimp into certain death, but he was not really a part of the equation. Not himself actually prey, or actually a predator.
Now, Don ladles brine shrimp into a tank of huge, translucent jellyfish, vividly cross-lit against the tank’s black walls. The shrimp fizzle in tiny directions until swept into the diaphanous gullets of the jellyfish; the jelly’s bells contract, trailing and flipping fine pale fringes in long, even, peristaltic pulses. Even after ten years of working here, Don is fascinated by how the shrimp move in the currents of their captors. “Not much for personality,” he tells the jellyfish. “But high points for style.”
Today is Kay’s fourth visit; her world is expanding. She has made it to the jellyfish tank, stands there only a few feet below where Don stands, pouring shrimp. The rhythms of the luminescent jellyfish have transfixed her; she seems not to hear his disembodied voice.
Don has noticed her before. Unlike kids, who rub their noses against the glass, she merely touches a fingertip to each tank as she goes. She is methodical, talismanic about her touching. Perhaps she heard him talking to the jellyfish, but Don knows she can’t see him. The light of the tank pulses across Kay’s twin braids of red-gold hair, dyed algal green at the ends, and reflects off her eyelashes.
Evenings, when the crowd is gone, Don walks with sprayer and rags through the cave-like hallways, wiping the glass free of nose marks and smudges. Tonight, off at the end of the hallway he can see Kay, still transfixed in front of the jellyfish, head cocked as if listening to them. When he looks again, she is gone.
It is days, or maybe weeks later, the next time Don sees Kay. He finds himself following her. He gets close, inches behind her as she watches the spiny lobster’s gesticulations, the oscillations of the fruit-coloured nudibranchs’ tiny antennae. She takes too long, seems to have too much to think about at each tank. Don follows, trying not to notice that he is learning her habits and predicting how long it will take her to reach the jellyfish, how much work he can get done before he can perch, hidden, above the jellyfish tank and watch her as she stares, mesmerized. And speak, again, if she is alone.
Many times over the next months, late in the afternoons, Kay drifts around the corner to the jellyfish tank. Few others visit so late, especially on very rainy or very fine days. Don stands hidden above the tanks and talks to her. He is surprised at how much he has to tell her. He tells her about the aquarium, about how it feels to be there alone, first thing in the morning. How the eyes of the fish are luminous in the dark, those that troll still trolling, those that sleep still drifting, hovering in their rocky parking places. He does this in a deep, soft voice.
She never seems to hear him, she never watches anything but the pulsing jellyfish, their lacy protoplasm, their exultant repetitions. Never moves her eyes from the velvet backdrop of water and dark. Don watches how she holds her mouth pressed shut, then opens her lips briefly- like a fish gulps water at the surface- then presses her mouth straight again. So she is humming! Her voice is small and high, agile, flowing around the melody. Her eyes are wide, the whites lit by reflected light, pupils large with the ambient dark; the blue of the slender iris concentrated and tart.
***
All week, people crowd the aquarium, stand pressed close to the glass. Hot breath, oily noses, or perhaps the wet chin of a child, leave the glass sticky by evening. As ever, Don is last to leave, cleaning the tank windows, checking the locks, the mechanical room. He feels anesthetized as the compressors hum, as if the floor might tip and tilt with the waves, as if the diesel smell of a trawler engine might filter through the close, mudflat smell of the aquarium. The place seethes and settles down for the night around him, at least a thousand fish brains, at least a million fish thoughts needling through these fusty hallways. As he cleans tonight, he finds himself looking for the particular imprint of Kay’s fingertips, but she hasn’t been back for a month. He walks past the jellyfish, the formal, diaphanous white moon jellies, the bright orange sea nettles tumbling over their own reflections.
His only warning is a slim drift of music in the air. Don almost steps on Kay, who is sitting cross-legged on the dark hallway floor, in front of the jellyfish. He lurches, startled, but she doesn’t look at him. Her hands lie flat and limp on the floor. Don is afraid to touch her, afraid not to, frightened of her absorption. He opens his mouth to turn loose calming words, but then he sees her lips move, that she is singing, her eyes fixed on the tanks. He bends close to hear, like a priest in a confessional, eyebrows lifted and face half-turned away, privy to a dialog that may not be intended for him.
Her voice is high and small, her mouth moves quickly, compactly. He really doesn’t know this song, or does he? “Myripristis chryseres,” she is singing. “Myripristis pralinia, Sargocentron diadema, Psuedanthias squammipinnis, Pterois volitans, Synchriopus splendidus.” He passes his hand in front of her face, and her eyes neither follow nor break their gaze. He straightens back up, folds his arms, and waits. She goes on and on, doesn’t repeat herself. It is a mantra of the entire aquarium, a hymn to the entire inventory, in Latin.
Don listens, stomach growling. He needs to finish the lights out, the locking of doors. He walks outside to finish his rounds. The winter sun is going down over the Puget Sound, a tawny stain in the clouds to the southwest. The aquarium is at last quiet, save wind and water-slap and the overhead din of the Viaduct’s traffic. A few of the fur seals have molded themselves to rocks for the night. Sea otters bob, dark slips and streaks on the silver surface of their pool. A final seal hauls itself out of the saltwater, slick and doglike, spine slung between shoulders and pelvis, and melts onto a rock. Don stands watching the animals bedding down and the animals watch him.
There must, he thinks, have been people who evolved as the keepers of beasts: who survived and reproduced because they could attract and keep, not just kill and eat, wild creatures. Some ancestor of modern man who slept far from the fire, so the wild servals or civet cats or dingoes might creep in close to huddle against his back for warmth. Someone who held a half-eaten bone for hours, waiting and waiting for a wet nose to sniff- hysterical with caution- and finally give in to hunger. There were no distinguishing marks, thinks Don, except that dogs might single you out for devotion. Animals would always watch him, give him their eyes if he came into view. Even the fish seemed to focus on him. Perhaps he was one of them, though the wild beasts in the wild frightened him. He is likewise frightened of this singing figure, this small woman whose presence makes him talk, hungry to fill the space between them. He shivers, then goes back inside.
The light from the jellyfish tank dances on her face like the aurora borealis. Kay’s eyes meet his as he approaches. Her mouth is still. Don reaches down and takes her hand, lifts carefully. Standing, she fits well into the denim web of his arm. Her shoulders shake with hard hiccups. When she stops hiccupping, will she purr against his shirtfront like the kitten? Where will he take her next? He is completely incapable of caring for her, but he cups his hand over the top of her head; her hair is orangey strands, silky like fur. How would it feel, her hair, if suspended by warm currents? If she lay in his arms like the jellyfish, pulsing in the watery light?
***
Anne Lichtenwalner is a retired veterinarian living in the Northeast, after a career spent in the Pacific Northwest, the Caribbean and Maine. She is kept in line by her hard-working Border Collie, Bernie. Her writing deals with women’s identities and autonomy, but animals seem to sneak into every story.