The Waves Hear Every Promise You’ve Made
BY FEATURED WRITER: Chloe Clark
Chloe Clark, Untitled 1, digital photograph, 2021. Courtesy of the author.
THE WAVES HEAR
EVERY PROMISE YOU’VE MADE
CHLOE CLARK /SEPT 2021 / ISSUE 9
The stretch of road that snakes between land and Lake Superior was always shifting between sight and secrets—that’s how Kara’s son had described it, when he was young, on one of their long drives up to the cabin, and it had stuck in her head ever since. She thought of it again as she broke free from the darkness of a tunnel and the lake was suddenly there beside her. It shimmered under the sun, all light and vastness.
It had been years since she’d been to the cabin. There was always a reason not to go: research she had to do, a paper she had to write, all those things she had said she would do. Dev would tell her to go, would remind her how much she missed the lake all year round. Mom, he’d say, in that way of his that made the last “m” sound so long. You need to be by that lake. It made some kind of universal sense then that she finally was going again when Dev was thousands upon thousands of miles away. An aquatic biologist Kara had known for years had called her about what was going on at the lake, said that she should study it. The lake was churning with things that should not have filled it.
The biologist explained what they were seeing. Fish that hadn’t been seen in decades in that area, a plant that was believed extinct. Kara had wanted to call Dev and tell him, ask him what he thought, but he was outside the distance of quick messaging. In space, every message comes with a delay. To communicate to Mars, a message might take seven minutes or more before it reached its recipient. When someone was further, the delay became longer. To message Dev, it would take seven months to reach him. She still send vids to him, though. When he was young, she'd told him she'd always tell him the truth. No matter how hard the answer. If he asked, she'd always give the world to him in words. On her vids, she never said as much as she might have. She’d film the garden, talk about what she was researching. But nothing immediate. Never anything about her day, the cup of coffee she’d had where the barista formed a flower in the foam.
The car dinged to let Kara know she’d been driving over four hours with no breaks. She noted a sign for a restaurant that she always loved was coming up in fifteen miles. They served perfect slices of pie, fruit spilling from the center, buttery crust that coated the tongue with salty fat. It would be the perfect stop. She could stretch her legs at the lookout point, watch the lake from afar to start.
She pulled into the exit, thinking of pie. Her favorite was the blueberry, served àla mode. They always warmed it up so the ice cream would melt and turn the plate top into swirls of creamy purples when it mixed with the blueberry. The blueberries were local, picked in the woods in huge buckets. Kara asked once and the waitress had told her that it took a quarter of a bucket for one pie. We heap those berries like they’re climbing towards heaven, she’d said.
Kara always got a different pie, taking her time to choose the perfect pie for the moment, but Dev always picked the frozen key lime. It’s always summer when you take a bite of this pie, he said. But it had only tasted sour to her, too sharp for her tongue.
The waitress greeted her with a smile, but no recognition. The years had been enough to erase a regular’s memory. Kara ordered pie, French fries, and coffee,feeling hunger only now that she had allowed herself to stop driving.
“On vacation?” the waitress asked.
“Research. I’m studying the lake.”
“It’s been restless, lately,” the waitress said.
“Restless?”
The waitress shrugged. “The waves seem higher, faster. At night all you can hear is the crashing.”
“Have you noticed anything else? Anything being brought in by those waves?”
“My son said the rock picking has been better on the shore.”
Dev had always been focused on his feet. In every trip to the lake, he gathered agates and firelights, letting them weigh his pockets down. It made sense, later, when he went for his doctorate in geology. Kara smiled, “I’ll have to be on the lookout for some nice stones, then.”
She ate her pie in the silence of the restaurant. Off-season, the customers were just a few locals and herself. In summer, she knew the place would have been swarming with vacationers. When she finished her pie, she left a large tip, waved a goodbye to the waitress, and stepped outside into the cool of the dusk. The breeze from the lake always made even the hottest days and nights feel bearable. Breathable.
Kara walked the thirty or so feet to the lookout point. The lake stretched on and on, so far that she couldn’t see the end of it. She had often wondered if early explorers had been stunned by the water, by the expanse of it. If they’d thought it was another ocean they were trying to find a way across. The waves did seem larger, she thought, but she wasn’t sure if it was only the power of suggestion which made her think so.
The last two hours of the drive passed quickly. The lake was her companion as the sun set and was replaced by the moon. When she reached the driveway to the cabin, nearly hidden amongst the trees, she felt her shoulders relax. It still felt like coming home, even after all the time she had been gone. She’d asked a neighbor to check in, to let her know if there were any issues she needed to know about before she arrived, and noticed that they’d left the porch light on her. It was a small human kindness, lighting her way in the dark.
Inside the cabin had a hint of dust in the air, a sense of things left too long to settle. She took sheets from the closet and threw them into the wash—a machine that had been cutting edge in its day and now looked purposefully retro. A fresh bed felt necessary after the long drive.
“Mom?” said a voice from behind her, and she spun around, but it was only a memory of his voice, when Dev would wander into her room as she wrote. When she was working she never had time for anyone, but she always had time for him. She’d tell him. He’d ask questions about what she was working on, and she’d explain the answers. How pollution affected the ecosystems, how a frog might go extinct because of the way we treated our water, how lakes could house so many secrets. He’d said that he wanted to know the stories of other planets.
She went out to the porch and began her nightly watch on the stars. Dev had left for his mission nine months before. A geologist was an important element on planetary missions, he’d explained to her. You want someone who understands land formations, can explain them clearly, knows what samples to collect that will actually be helpful for study. She’d been proud of him when he’d been selected, joyful even. It was only later, closer to his mission that she’d fully understood that her son would be gone for years. After he’d left, she’d made a point to watch the sky every night. Even if it was just for a few minutes, she could imagine that her son was not so far away, that he was within the distance of her seeing.
That night, she heard the lake in her sleep, the waves crashing over and over. There was that peak and lull, the great churn that sounded like a giant pile of dried beans, picked over and being rinsed inside the drum of the sky.
Chloe Clark, Untitled 2, 2021, digital photograph. Courtesy of the author.
In the morning, she felt rested and restless, ready to get out and see what was so strange with the lake. She called Meg, the biologist, to meet her after breakfast. Kara hadn’t thought to buy groceries on her way up, so she drove into town early to get supplies.
At the local grocery, Kara spotted the headline of the local paper, Bones on Shore. She grabbed a copy.
“Weird thing that,” the cashier said, nodding at the headline.
“Yeah?”
“Read it this morning. Someone found a pile of bones washed ashore. Like a whole pile. Some animal bones, maybe some human.”
“That is very odd.”
The cashier nodded, again. “That doesn’t happen, you know? Bones don’t wash ashore in bunches. They’re singular things.”
Kara suppressed a smile at the thought of lonely bones, that they had minds that kept them on their own. “Lake being odd this year?”
“Maybe it’s the moon,” the cashier said.
When Meg’s car pulled up to the cabin, Kara was already waiting outside. Her walking shoes that were perfect for scrabbling over wet stones. Her bag held a notebook, a camera, and a few sample bags for collecting mud and water.
“Long time no see!” Meg said, as she stepped out of her car. Meg was short but had the long limbs of someone much taller than herself, which gave her the eternally youthful appearance of a growing teenager stuck in a gawky phase. Her hair was shorter than Kara had ever seen it, but it suited Meg’s face.
They had a brief hug and Kara wondered if she looked much older to Meg. If the years had been less kind to her own face. She’d never been able to tell herself, really.
“How’s Dev? I’ve been following the mission.” Meg said. “Well, what the news puts out, anyway. I know they shroud those things in ten pounds of embargos.”
“I think he’s good. But you know, can’t do much messaging.”
“Imagine stepping down on a new planet. What a mindfuck that must be.”
Kara nodded. “New rocks to explore.”
“And speaking of new things to explore, you’re not gonna believe this lake, Kara.” Meg shook her head, as she stared out at the trees.
Inside the cabin, Meg brought out her laptop and showed Kara data on plants and animals. “None of this should be here.”
“Why not?” Kara could tell why a few things seemed off, but she found it was always best to play at knowing little in the hopes of learning the most.
Meg pointed at one of the names on her screen. “Well, for starters, this species of fish got fished out of the lake about fifty years ago. There haven’t been any sightings of them for at least thirty. But that’s just one odd thing, right? Like that alone wouldn’t raise my weird vibes. It’s a huge lake. Things can hide from humans.” She shrugged slightly, as if mildly agreeing with her own words, before clicking onto a new tab. “But, then we started finding plants that have gone extinct. A type of algae that is a completely new find. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. These kinds of things don’t just happen all at once. One anomaly is discovery. Twenty is science-fiction.”
Kara looked at the plants and animals listed. Beyond fish, there were even a couple of birds she recognized the names of, a turtle that she knew had gone extinct, and a small rodent she’d never heard of. “What does everyone think is happening?”
Meg laughed. “No one knows a damn thing. The university is bringing scientists from all over, trying to keep the news from making too big a deal out of it, and basically not getting anywhere with anything. There’s no reason for any of this.”
“And what can I do?”
“You’re the best limnologist working. I assume you could throw some knowledge of lakes out there and solve it in a day. Oh, it’s a change of the tides. This happens once every thousand years. Something like that.”
Kara laughed. “That’s definitely not how lakes work. And also definitely not the way limnology works. It takes time to understand the ecosystem of a water source. And even then, nature has a way of surprising us.”
They walked to the lake from the cabin. A patch of shore was only a couple hundred feet away. As they approached, the lake sounded so loud—booming more than crashing upon the shore—that Kara wondered if it actually was louder or if all the talk of strangeness had infected her hearing.
“It’s loud as hell, right?” Meg asked.
“Yeah.”
As they got past the line of trees, the lake opened up before them. The froth of the waves was like snow. Kara had never seen it so thick. The leaves on the trees were barely moving, no strong winds that might account for the tumultuousness of the water.
For a moment, Kara didn’t want to go any nearer. It was barely a fraction of a second, but a fear had gotten through—something wild and primal. She pushed herself to walk forward, closer to where spray from the waves hit her. The stones on the beach glistened. She spotted a smooth circle of quartz and instinctually crouched to pick it up. Dev would love it. She stuck it into her pocket and went back to studying the water.
“How long has it been like this?”
“Weeks, that people have noticed. But, I do wonder if it was a progression and it only was noticed once it was so extreme,” Meg responded.
“That’s how it usually happens,” Kara said.
She had a distinct memory that Dev had grown quieter on a hot day, when they’d gone hiking. She hadn’t thought about it until he was silent, and she’d turned around, seen the flushing of his face, the way he seemed to be taking breaths that were too shallow. Signs of heat stress. She’d asked him later why he hadn’t said anything, why he didn’t stop her from continuing the walk. I just didn’t think it was anything until it was, he said.
Kara reached down and touched the water. She had always been shocked by the cold of it. How could anything live in such cold? As she stood back up, something white caught her eye. The bone was large enough to have belonged to something enormous. She reached out and snatched it out of the water. The size of the bone in her hand could have easily belonged to a bear. There was a deep scar on one side, etched into the bone. She felt down the ragged groove. When the fur industry had been giant, she knew that occasionally whatever wasn’t used of the animal was thrown back into the lake as if it were a waste pool or a makeshift graveyard.
“They’ve been finding a lot of bones,” Meg said. “All different kinds of animals, some human.”
It made sense that there would be both. Kara had once read there were likely hundreds of bodies in Lake Superior. The depth and the cold made recovery difficult. Nearly a quarter of a century before, she’d dived a wreck there, and because of the frigid temperatures, the ship had been preserved nearly perfectly. It felt like the world itself had filled with water to the sky instead of the ship having sunk.
That night, Kara couldn’t sleep. She had studied water samples after returning from the lake, but everything looked normal. It was only lake water. She had researched if any lakes had done anything similar, but there was no evidence of anything quite like this before.
She considered continuing to look over research texts, but found herself typing in the name of Dev’s mission instead. She traced flight trajectories with a fingertip, studied the faces of the crew who flew beside him, read about the planet they were going to. She wondered if there were lakes there, living or long past gone. Craters where once life might have sprung. Dust and rocks and memories. What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?
When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed so deeply that she couldn’t remember where her mind had taken her. A crash from outside woke her, making her heart feel like it had thrown itself against her ribs. It sounded like a giant pane of glass falling to the ground. She sat up in bed. The first hints of pinkish light were creeping through the window. Dawn or just after.
Kara rushed outside with the hurry of a mother who has always leapt from bed when she heard a crash, a cry. The body always imagines the worst even when the mind tells us it's fine. No one was hurt. Everything would be okay.
Outside, the trees were filled with the sounds of the world waking up, squirrels leaping between branches, birds starting to chirp. She moved towards the lake, expecting catastrophe. Maybe all the trees that decorated the shore had fallen en masse or icebergs were floating in the water. At first, she just saw the waves. The lake looked the same as it had the day before, tossing and furious, but nothing broken.
She scanned the area for some sign of disaster. It took her a few moments to realize what was missing. There had been a dock about a hundred yards from where she stood. Now it was gone. For a second, she wondered if she just hadn’t noticed the day before that it had been removed. But then she saw that it was now on the beach, broken against the rocks, as if something had flipped it up in one fast motion. She walked to it, slowly at first, and then jogging. Bits of wood littered the pebbles. The dock had been tossed with such might that much of it was shattered into tiny pieces. Only a few of the boards were still in mostly one piece.
Kara looked back at the water, at the waves. They seemed to raise a little higher as she stared, as if in warning.
Kara assumed Meg would be sleeping and she’d get the answering machine, but Meg was awake and sounded like she had been that way for hours.
“It’s all of them, actually,” Meg said, when Kara told her about the docks. Her voice still holding a stun within it.
“Huh?”
“All the docks, all along the lake. People are calling in. Some think it’s vandals and call 911. Like a person could rip up a dock and throw it like that.” Meg laughed, or almost did. The sound caught in her throat as it was coming up.
“That doesn’t make sense,” Kara said. Meg didn’t respond. The statement stood in the silence, in its obviousness.
Kara ended the call and paced the cabin. She finally stopped in Dev’s room. A drawing he’d made of the lake. It was just a swath of blue and the shore so full of detail, all those glistening pebbles. Lined up on the windowsill was a series of rocks, a quartz, an agate, a firelight. Each one weighted with the promise of the history it held. She lifted one up and carefully wiped the dust away.
Her phone buzzed with a message, startling her. Meg had sent a link to a news story, a video someone had posted of the ocean when they went out for a morning surf. The ocean churned, wave after wave after wave so fast that they blurred.
Kara set down her phone and walked outside. She went through the trees, the birds all calling back and forth to one another, and to the lake. It sounded so loud, it was like she was standing in the orchestra pit of an aquatic symphony.
Kara wondered what messages would reach Dev. Whether they’d see news stories and know what was happening,if any of them would know what it meant. Maybe Dev would stand on another planet and see a lake. Maybe the light bouncing off the water would make him think of home. There could be that, at least.
The stones were wet and cold, but she sat on the shore, watching as the waves rushed the shore. They carried bones like meteors crowding out the sky at night. In the light, if she let her eyes unfocus, it could have looked like it was only water stirred by storms.
Chloe N. Clark is the author of Collective Gravities, Your Strange Fortune, and more. She is a founding co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph. Her forthcoming books include Escaping the Body and Every Song a Vengeance.