edited by Amanda Helms
Content note (click for details)
This story contains a homophobic slur, misogynistic behavior, threats of violence towards queer people, and elements of body horror.The day I gun my motor, slip my Walkman in the back of my jean overalls, and roar off the dock, Ronald Reagan foots the bill. It’s not the first time the Navy has slipped me some cash, and I don’t want to hear shit about that. These days, every other word in deep ocean research is ‘Typhoon Class Sub Detection’ or ‘US Naval Significance’. You want funds; you play the game. Don’t blame me because my words are clever, as clever as the hair I cropped to tell the boys at work I’m different enough from their wives to be a scientist and to pull an extra dance or two from the ladies at Maud’s.
The ocean waves roll as I put some distance between me and land. Water splashes up, since the ocean doesn’t let anyone close without getting them wet. My boat’s small enough to woman alone, just me and the growling engine. Nice and all, but nothing compared to what lies below.
I deployed deep ocean photometers a good month ago. They’ve got eyes on what I’m here for: light levels in the aphotic zone, where the only readings are from glowing bodies in the deep. I’ve observed the flashing organisms myself down there, more times than I once dreamed. With the Navy scrambling to find the Challenger’s star-worthy remains as they rust away underwater, it’s a damn good time to look down.
My automated reel drags the photometers from the deep, links of heavy chain breaching the surface one by one. I strain to maneuver the rods of complicated sensors and dripping metal. The Navy wants to explore the possibility of spotting Soviet subs by tracking the light levels of disturbed creatures, those that flash blue to confuse and hide and hunt and speak. To the right eyes, a Typhoon Class sub is subtle as Liberace at the Radio City Music Hall. The Navy wants those eyes.
And I’ll do anything to get below.
***
If anyone is dumb enough to think the ocean is ours, they should see the shit we’ve got to wear to go down deep. The WASP is a tomb of bright yellow with a fortified glass head and heavy claw arms that require a strict weight-lifting regime for me to maneuver (to the pleasure of the ladies at Maud’s). Jim Fletcher, one of my colleagues in Atchley’s lab, has to help me in. Though the supervisor will have checked the whole thing twice over, he and I catalog each vital control one more time. You can never be too careful.
The WASP is no fancy submersible. I’m an extra heavy photometer with arms, dangling from a chain. They lower me slow, all the way to the seafloor. I’ve learned from these trips that anticipation sours to anxiety to panic in sweet seconds, so I breathe calm and easy and don’t allow any drumming of fingers. Once touched down, I switch off the WASP’s lights. Step one to being welcomed into this world is relinquishing your sight. This is the place the sun doesn’t go. Act like it.
The disturbed seawater is bright around me.
Patterns differ down under. Some creatures flash; others trail light in bright lines behind them. Blue is the color of choice, and it comes in neon, though tiny organisms sparkle like snow caught in lamplight.
Surface checks in on my radio, and I talk back, but my focus is on the luminous deep. I laugh as I document it, camera shutter clicking. NASA may have spent the past few years asking who’s brave enough to touch the stars, but the stars don’t know shit about this impossible lightshow, far below the edge of their sight. The Navy, obsessed as they are with my sensors, knows even less of the life that glows, life that’s boneless, aliens of the crushing dark. The question isn’t whether there are unexplained phenomena down here: it’s who will discover them. The right answer is me.
With time, the lights fade away. The beings living here have accepted me, their translator come to study a language of light. In the utter darkness that remains, I draw my first full breaths since landing. Here, I am limitless, mobile and flowing, edges uncertain. Free as in the moments after a dream, when you have forgotten the shape of the skin that confines you.
Something heavy thumps against the glass of the WASP. The whole body rocks. I slam my crushable shoulder against the hard exoskeleton keeping me alive, spit out a swear, switch the lights on. Going around banging the WASP off shit is a good way to die.
But my headlights don’t snag on debris or rock. Instead, two eyes press against the WASP’s glass. Puffy things, with pinprick pupils and blue irises hardly distinguishable from the surrounding white. She hovers, and I count fingers and arms amid a cloud of long hair. Everywhere there is skin, there are also cracks, gorges that slice through her but don’t bleed. A broken porcelain doll of the water.
She opens her mouth, and I lean forward, as though she’s about to speak, and I’m about to hear through glass and metal many times reinforced. But just as quick, she abandons my metal shell and vanishes from my intruding headlights. Sense knocks me hard, and I lurch forward. My finger jams against the controls and plunges me into darkness.
My breaths are ragged. I force my chest out, my lungs open, even as I curse myself to high heavens. If my physical reactions fail me now, it’ll be a twenty-minute lift while I hyperventilate.
I know the rules of the deep sea, and yet I broke them. That thing—that organism—no, that girl, for it had been a girl, too humanoid for anything evolved for the aphotic zone—came to me, and I stole her only way to speak.
My disruption brought the lights back. Though my stowed finger throbs, I clench my hands to fists. The woman is among them. Now unsilenced, she’s a shattered goddess of the sea, each fissure of her skin lined with blue, a mosaic of light and woman. Though eyes won’t matter to her down here, not like on land, I’m certain she can see me. I’m certain this is on purpose. A great reveal, rather than an accidental meeting.
A human body at these depths breaks all we know of bone and pressure, blood and air. But she exists. She wants me to know of her. I take a photo. Then she’s gone, disappeared somewhere the WASP is too clunky to follow.
On the ride up, I leave my thoughts with her in the dark.
***
In the lab, I colorize my photos and find I’ve captured a viperfish, an elusive and haunting predator. First ever clear shot of one. It’s a great victory; a popular article in the bag.
Yet I barely care, because in another photo is the woman, light sparkling down her hair, her arms, her torso. She’s not a ‘what’ but a ‘who,’ the owner of a story even more complex than the organisms whose lives and lights I’ve spent years pursuing. The discovery of my career, no doubt, and yet I show no one and lock her away in my drawer. When alone in the lab, I run my fingers over her like she’s a lover. My fingertips tingle each time I do, little electrical signals I can explain no better than my hiding her away.
***
The night after Reagan walks out on Gorbachev’s offer to disarm, I stare down a glass of bourbon, unsure whether I’m celebrating or in mourning. News that the Navy wants me to continue pursuing my research due to the continued chance of war comes the next morning. I’m back out at sea a week later with ever more sensitive photometers, a hydrophone, and a radio that tells me through static that a world without nuclear weapons is a Soviet dream. The girls at Maud’s wave their cigarettes and cackle at anyone who thought Reagan would put us over the biggest weapon he could make; I shut my mouth and accept any new funding the Navy sluices my way as a positive of the continued threat of destruction. I wish we could just go back to dancing, so Pattie Smith can tell us all how “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” It’s a new feeling, to have solid edges in the dark.
At least I still have my research. This time, a hydrophone will record audio as my photometers work their magic. It’ll record the roar of boats, the songs of whales, the vibrations of undersea volcanoes. Most of what I care about doesn’t make noise, but I put some pretty words in my proposal about how far the sounds of Soviet subs can carry, and Jim will appreciate the data. Truth is, it feels like civic duty to eat what funds I’m offered.
***
In October, my research makes Popular Science, my picture of the viperfish in full color. My name’s under the photo but not in the article. Instead, the work is prescribed to Dr. Tedd Atchley, and though they interviewed both of us, all I get is a brief mention as a “student,” my skills a testament of Tedd’s brilliant tutelage. I know better than to complain. The article’s predictable anyway, and my photo isn’t even on the cover, which is instead dedicated to the completed retrieval of material from the Challenger. That’s the most exciting news they’ve got, the remains of a dead starship dragged from the sea. I buy the magazine because it makes me laugh. They have no idea what’s down there.
When I retrieve my new photometers, they tell the story of light and darkness, disruption and calm. At times, there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of organisms aglow. Flaring, pulsing, the flashes of light a thousand meters under the sea. If the Navy wants to search out Soviets, I’ve got their launchpad. It’ll keep me good and funded for a long while, able to pursue my own research, to return to the depths.
I even feel satisfied, until I listen to the hydrophone recording, and amid the whales and motors and volcanoes, I hear a human voice. She’s a crackle, a hiss, a prickle on the back of my neck and a chill like a finger down my spine. Though I listen a thousand times, I catch only a single word: “witch.” But there’s more. She says more, and I simply can’t understand it.
That doesn’t stop me from trying, though. I wade through the cool, dry air of the university archives, unsure of what I’m looking for in the records of murdered women until I find the names of those drowned rather than burned. I hear the harsh whisper of her carrying voice—again defying logic, again defying biology—does this mean she’s got lungs?—as I run my finger along the names of drowned witches and grasp that I may have the picture of one in my drawer. To reach me, she must have traversed riverways and floodwaters, careful movements obscured by the cover of water and darkness, until she’d found a place so teeming with both that she no longer needed to fear unwanted discovery. In those depths, she lived and changed and, eventually, called to me.
The only time the deep sea provides an answer like this is when it knows it’ll create a thousand more questions. They’re ablaze within me, ravenous and demanding and infinite.
Like the witch’s photo, I don’t share these results with my lab.
***
I’ve got a new supervisor for my next trip down in the WASP. This will be my last: the Navy’s grown quite fond of us by now, and we’ll acquire a submersible soon. It’s not so much a step up as a giant leap.
“You ever done this before?” I ask. The supervisor is a rugged man with uneven, freckled skin, toasted by the sun. His beard twitches whenever he speaks, which it does a whole lot now, as he takes offense to my question. Jim and I exchange looks. Arrogance is idiocy when it comes to the deep sea. But the suit is already dangling from its crane, and I get in the same way as always. We start running through safety checks—once, twice, and then we’re in constant communication as the WASP lowers, lowers, lowers.
I’m down 200 meters when I notice the water around my boots. It’s an immediate violation, this touch of cold seawater within my metal haven. “WASP to surface,” I gasp. Panic squeezes my lungs. Something slips along my fingers, and I’ve no way to check if it’s water or fear. If too much gets inside, the whole suit will collapse. 200 meters has nothing on the planned 1,500, but we’re not talking negligible pressure.
The lift is a slow reckoning. Water climbs, climbs, climbs, like it too is rising to the heavens. It’s calf-height by the time I break surface, and streams plummet from the WASP as I emerge into air, raised by hook and cord and crane and gaping like a netted fish.
I give the supervisor a solid smack to the jaw once I’m out. It takes Jim holding me back to stop, arms looped around my shoulders until I’m finished struggling. The soaked bottom of my pants slaps against my numb legs.
“He could’ve killed me,” I snarl. I’m trembling. Jim stares like I’m a rabid thing who’s played possum until this moment. Later that night, when I discover a crack running from my ankle up my calf, I’m not so certain he’s wrong.
It’s a canyon, wide as my index finger, healed over like an ancient scar and yet new. I run my finger along it, this way the seawater has changed me. A man damn near drowned me, and I cracked like a witch.
Alone in my corner of the lab, I stare into where the woman’s eyes should be and wonder just how deep she’d gotten before she began to glow.
***
In the darkness of Maud’s, where music booms and ladies come out to dance, we don’t speak with words. Our language is simply that of gleaming eyes; a flash of a grin; a slow, deliberate touch. We’re nothing fancy in this place, accepting of all from heels to sneakers. Myself, I’ve got dress shoes on, with a nice leather jacket. It was the right choice to come here tonight, to bask in the familiar darkness when I’m at my most unsettled.
I’ve just clucked my tongue at a poor song choice and kept on dancing anyway when the shouting begins. Male voices. We scatter by instinct, no more than bioluminescent shrimp under a scientist’s prickling gaze. But understanding dogs my heels. For all the threat of submarines and death stars, the Soviets have never been the country’s closest enemy.
Girls scream. Cops raise their voices ever louder. I’ve long lost the woman I was dancing with, thrown by the white-water tide of bodies. None of us are stupid enough to come here without a planned escape route. We won’t all make it out.
The street outside wails with blue and red and white. Dark-adjusted eyes stinging, I scramble into the road only for a honking car to send me sprawling back toward the sidewalk. My pants tear against the asphalt, and then I’m running, running, running, as blood spills down my leg.
My feet carry me to my lab. I take the stairs two at once and burst through the door only to stumble when I find the lights are on inside. Jim Fletcher lifts his eyes from his microscope. Dammit.
He abandons his work to approach me, though I’m more stupid dyke than clever colleague right now, bleeding all over the damn floor. He asks me something like ‘“What happened?” or “Are you okay?” but I’m breathing too hard to hear him.
If I told him, he’d believe me. About everything, maybe. Women who glow in the dark; worlds destroyed by garish headlights and strobing red and blue. The way I’m one of them. The way sucking up to the military of a country that attacks its own people tastes like blood.
Instead, I only say, “Don’t,” and to his credit, he doesn’t. In my corner, I open the drawer with her inside. Her picture. Her voice. I’m shaking too hard to touch her without destroying her.
I’d always evaded questions about my work at Maud’s. Even admitting the most tangential of aid to a system the girls mocked would have earned me choice words. For a while now, I’ve known that I deserve them. I have seen the things that exist in darkness, their wonders and terrors. I have loved those women. Those who crack but will not shatter, who prefer life in shadow over selling their souls to a country trying so damn hard to fly too close to the sun. There are so few places for us anymore. I’ve discovered the path to another, and until now all I’ve done is invite the Navy to follow me inside.
Blood from my knee crusts the edges of my torn pant leg. Down lower is the crack I obtained in the WASP, the one that may glow if I go where sunlight cannot follow. Even now, in the haze of fading adrenaline, the insatiable urge for answers thrums within me. I have accomplished so much because of that drive. I have pretended to be so many things.
It’s not enough this time. Not the occasional dive when the Navy likes us, not photos in magazines, attributed to the wrong damn name. I don’t want those anymore. I’m uninterested in exposing the mysteries of that which I love to those who seek to destroy them.
By now I’m limping, the results of my recent experiments boxed in my arms. My gritty scrape burns, but I don’t stop until I reach the dock. I collapse to my knees; several months of intensive effort clatters down with me. The lapping surface water fakes true blackness, but it’s not deep enough, not yet.
It’s no small feat to get answers from the place the stars don’t see. You need focus, dedication, sacrifice.
My unpublished photos and recordings slip into the water without even a splash. No matter. I intend to speak with light.
A thousand meters beneath the sea, a witch calls.
© 2025 by R.J. Becks
3080 words
Author’s Note: I have loved bioluminescence for a long time, and reading Edith Widder’s memoir Below the Edge of Darkness cinched my desire to write about it, as well as provided many of the technical details necessary. However, the heart of this story comes from my grappling with how scientific research broadens perspectives, yet the need for research funding can push scientists toward military applications and/or corporate incentives. The main character in this story doesn’t discover a monster in the deep but instead learns more about herself there, and when she returns to the surface, finds that she is no longer willing to sell herself to a system that harms those she loves.
R.J. Becks is a writer and scientist who has studied endangered species, participated in 24-hour birding competitions, and lived on the road that inspired Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. She writes to capture the complexity of ecosystems and usually needs magic to do it. You can occasionally find her at @rjbecks.bsky.social on Bluesky.
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