The Things I Lost: The Herring School

A Survivor’s Parable

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Kellan didn’t want to be alive anymore. Hope was something caught up in the crashing of waves against the holding of his breath and things he did not want to see. His Golden Shallows dream of the reef was just a fishing trawler called to its demise by currents he could not navigate south. He could no longer work amongst these North mers following the Great Warm Current to their home reef in the North. But they would never share the secret path down the currents South. Minerta and her sisters would demand he follow them to the Breach again, and he knew he never would.

He was trembling as he stood on the precipice of the ledge overlooking the rushing currents of the Last Drift. “Why this shaking?” he wondered. Everything was the same temperature as yesterday and the day before that. But everything else had seemed to change “I am not afraid of death,” he told himself. “I don’t know any other way to shed this unsolvable life.”

He searched the racing waters for the white-bellied flicks of the mako pack arriving to exploit the sharp thermoclines where other swift predators became sluggish. He would just kick his tail and surrender to the gulf current that had carried him from his parents’ kelp farm off the Southern Banks this season but would not carry him back the same way.

Arriving was certainly much easier than leaving.

Surrender to the current and the pack. The Last Drift seemed like a fitting conclusion to the havoc both had already wreaked in his life. He brought his tail up across his heart and squeezed it gently. Hovering above the frigid channel, the current was strong and, without his tail to balance him, he started to teeter.

He remembered the pain of the mako’s bite and today’s atrocities. He started to trace the nonlinear currents of his decisions.

“That’s quite a scar down your face,” said the fierce, young tuna hunter with eyes like molten stone standing at the counter of his family’s kelp store. “It looks old. Settled. How?”

Kellan wasn’t used to his face-sized scar being objectively questioned. Teasing yes. Kids calling attention to it before inflicting pain on him. Definitely. But this tuna hunter was asking like she was interested. She didn’t seem like she was setting him up just to humiliate him.

“I ran into mako when I was four. My dad saved me. Well most of me. The mako got my hearing and my sight on my left side.”

“Phew. You were one lucky little boy. That cost you some time in recovery. I bet your parents worried plenty about you?”

“Yeah, a whole kelp harvesting season. They had to trade off caring for me. Even had to hire outside help.”

Kellen remembered the months of pain as the doctor would come to apply different blends of seaweed and shell fish over his skin, his eye, his ear. Nerve damage won against keeping his eyeball but he won keeping the ear flap. But after all the pain he felt at four, the pain that followed was worse. Kids made fun of his deformity. Ridiculed him. Beat him up. Locked him in claustrophobic benthic holes where curious octopuses, their copper-rich blood flowing beneath pale skin, used cold suction cups to understand what manner of creature was sharing their spaces. It was relentless.

He told himself one day he would show them all. Move to the Golden Shallows. Be respected. “What a foolish fantasy,” he realized. The northern current bringing him to the great banks did not return south.

A chill blew through the store as two more beautiful tuna hunters stormed through the door. They weren’t exactly singing but Kellan heard music, high pitch, soft.

“Minerta, buy the bailing kelp already and let’s go,” said the hunter with stark, calcified hair the color of a sun-bleached giant clam.

Her piercing, gem-blue eyes met Kellen’s closely guarded expression. “Don’t let her sense your fear,” he warned himself. “Show a ripple of panic, and a swordfish like her will think it’s okay to stone-crab the trailing edge of your fin.”

“Ashara. Don’t rush me. I’m talking to this nice kelpman about mako bites.” Minerta’s tone immediately lowered the timbre of Ashara’s register as if acquiescing to a stronger voice that made the scales on Kellen’s neck ripple. The water claimed a space around him.

The third mer’s unblinking focus on the strands of kelp lining the shelf softened. As she moved to the counter, her charcoal hair absorbed the store’s light like the inky darkness of an abyss-devil. “We need rope now. The meat is going to float off in the current and we’ll lose the catch.”

Minerta looked at Kellen. “Fifty strands of long kelp, please, before my sister Wildva blows the sea across the Bank. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Kellen.”

“Killer Kellen,” laughed Minerta. “The old ones would have sat around the lava vents bragging about their scars while passing you their spear hooks all day long.”

Kellen wondered what that meant. Today he had learned. Only the mako could ever help him unlearn it.

“Do you want to split a moon jelly later?” Minerta leaned closer. “I’ll show you where a nasty squid beak caught me in the belly seam while I was hunting in the Forbidden Canyon when I was a kid.”

Kellen couldn’t see the jagged beak scar inside her seam belt, but he noticed for the first time how her iridescent tail carried the dark death-pucker marks of a giant squid’s tentacles. Spots that no longer shined.

Kellen counted out the kelp and took her credits. He liked listening to the sisters’ harmonizing voices and wanted to hear more. “Yes, The Sand Bar isn’t far. I could meet you there when I’m done with work.”

Kellen hired on as a net-crafter when the hunt ended and the tuna train headed up the great Warm Current north. It was a wandering factory, longer than a pod of grays, and his days were spent lashing the rockweed hammocks to the tow-lines before the current could tear them loose. By blending his childhood knowledge of slick southern fronds with the rubbery, bladder-pocked northern wrack his nets were already stronger and lighter than anything the North train carried. “When the South mers see my wares, they’ll have to respect me.”

For the first time in his life, Kellen was invited to laugh around the night-vents. His earnings were modest, but his savings grew toward his own private terrace on the sun-warmed Golden Shallows, where the water stayed clear and his aging parents could finally move their nests out of the cold, murky kelp-mud. With the formidable North hunters as his steady clientele, the bullies back home would never dare taunt his family again.

Crews processed flesh for the deep markets while others spear-fended opportunistic sharks. When the ocean lost its heaviness and began to thrum against their bones, the sisters would breach the surface to trap game in tidal pools with the cold efficiency of skeleton shrimp. They never invited him along.

As he recovered his balance over the Last Drift, the skeleton of an enormous fin whale glided by, its bones stained a deep, marrow-grey. He wondered how the great bull’s life had ended. “Probably not in the jaws of a mako.” He imagined the bones traveling to All North, to permanent icy currents, and sinking into the silt where a bloom of deep-sea life would return him to the sea. “Did you ever have to do anything revolting to survive?”

Kellen mostly enjoyed Minerta’s company, and most of the time he liked the voices of all three sisters. They overlapped with the pleasant, tumbling trills of a passing beluga pod. They spoke with a single, fluid throat. When they weren’t singing, he noticed that they were always together, and he never saw Minerta alone. When there were arguments, that smooth water turned jagged. Their voices lost their music, scraping against one another like a dry, groaning creak of a heavy kelp tow-line stretched to its absolute breaking point.

Kellen and Minerta argued constantly, especially when he wanted to go home. She demanded he adapt to the North mers’ ways. “Your world locked you in benthic holes with octopuses,” she would remind him, her voice sharp. “Is that the home you’re mourning?”

One day Kellen asked Minerta, “Take me with you to the Breach. I haven’t seen the blue sky since I was eight.”

He had come to realize that he could never find his way South alone. Coming North had been exciting, fun, and as simple as following the Great Warm Current, a water which only flowed north. South was a schematic of currents, thermoclines, and structural markers like rock outcroppings and thermal vent fields. The North mers had passed the map down in song from one generation to the next. But unless he wanted to cross the entire circle, the Great Warm Current was not the way home.

That night, his chest vibrated with a deep groan and the sisters filled the flow with a distorted and unnatural music like capsized humpback whales. He found himself somersaulting and spinning to the sound.

“Come with us, Killer Kellen. We shall see if you are ready for the Breach.”

He followed. Carelessly and haplessly. Drawn by a music that carried a sharp, piercing edge. The sisters swam upwards through a maze of sharp, whetted stone that cut his tail. Then the sky drowned out the water. It wasn’t a bright blue as he remembered it. It was gray, like at the thirty foot therm, and churlish. It moved in rhythm with the crashing waves. Water fell from the sky. Useless though. Sweet to the tongue. It didn’t fill his lungs.

Wildva led them up a large outcrop of smoother rock that was covered with just enough water to breathe. Minerta’s eyes flashed with a dark, liquid fire reflected from the tidal pools that formed after water beat against rock.

“This is where the sea will drive our catch,” Kellen yelled over distant booms ricocheting around the air.

“And that is where you will catch your breath.“ Ashara pointed to the same pool.

The sisters’ songs were beautiful here. Unlike anything he had ever heard, even when he had two ears.

As the rock sprang from the water, the mers held their breaths longer. Minerta showed Kellen how to curve his tail and push off with it so he could climb higher up the outcrop. Just when he thought his lungs would collapse, a huge wave of water would slam him, and he would take in a big gulp of the water.

Kellen had seen human vessels lodged on the sea floor before, but he was fascinated to see one moving across the Breach like three blue whales swimming together. He tried to point it out to Minerta, but she didn’t notice him.

The air and sea thrashed against one another like two leviathans locked in mortal combat. Kellen would catch his breath and find himself thrilled. “Keep pushing up the side of the rock,” said Minerta. “We want to get to the top. Best view from up there.”

Kellen put the strength of his upper body in the climb, using his arms to pull himself while his tail pushed. He pushed his face under water every chance he could but the pools were farther away now. It was harder to find his breath. As they reached the apex of the outcrop, the rock sheared away, and they could no longer remain horizontal. Ashara pulled her torso up vertically using her hands more than her tail to stay upright. Wildva and Minerta pulled themselves up the same, bending perpendicular at the hips for balance against the waterless rock. The sisters sat one on each side of Kellen while Minerta fixed herself in front of him. His arms were built to swim downward into total darkness, but they did not like holding him against the sky. They all laughed at him teetering, ready to spill back into the water.

Kellen realized the sisters had seen the vessel. The sisters’ song called in a rhythmic, mock-ballad vibration against the approaching hull as they watched the vessel near the maze of jagged rocks below. Kellen’s first instinct was that it was going to hit them. And then he realized that it would crash on the rocks first. He had seen vessels on the sea floor and understood the consequences of crashing.

“It’s going to hit the land,” he cried. “It’s going to break apart. We have to try to turn it back.” He toppled over in his distress.

Ashara and Wildva steadied him.

“It’ll be close, Kellen.” said Ashara, “but we’ll be fine.”

“Killer Kellen,” laughed Wildva. “Are you ready?”

Minerta looked over her shoulder. “The ocean moves as it always has, Kellen. We just help it along a bit.”

The three sisters roared the feral shriek of apex ambush predators. Seconds before the vessel struck the rock, they grabbed Kellen under his arms and plunged him into the deep. A concussive shockwave tore through his chest as the hull shattered above, and he inhaled a long, cold draught of seawater, his lungs opening to the deep. As his body shook off the impact, the sight of the vessel, no longer swimming across the Breach but suddenly sinking away from it, froze his senses.

What came next was worse. The vessel dismembered and spewed its insides against foaming rock. Some land walkers were dashed against the outcrop while others struggled to climb it. In the water some sank in death. They were gorgeous creatures who breathed air like whales or dolphins but who could not remain submerged without drowning. His parents used to take him to watch them glide their vessels on the turquoise waters of the South current. They were not of the sea, but like the whales and dolphins, his parents had taught them they were not prey either.

“Kellen,” shouted Minerta, passing him a spear hook, “Harvest first. Look later.” She was harpooning these air breathers just as they might tuna. “Net the ones who sink,” she ordered, “while I gather the rock climbers.”

Ashara bolted to and from the vessel’s hull. “Bounty! Glorious bounty!” she laughed. “It is full of halibut, boxed in icebergs. We need more help or we’ll lose it.”

Minerta turned to Kellen, taking the spear hook from his hand. “Sorry, Killer Kellen, but this is bigger than a first spear hook. I need you to gather our people and bring back as many who would eat this winter.”

Relieved to flee, his body took him but his mind had paralyzed like a jelly stinger.

Kellen saw a white flicker of light where there’d been none, then the flash of dark blue rising from the Last Drift where the current accelerated. Makos. They’d arrived, cruising the shadow. Surrender would quell the cold ache in his lungs. A struggleless tilt of his tail, and the mako would finish what they had started years earlier. The ocean promised that he would never have to watch another vessel shatter against the stone. His trembling ceased. He was calm. At peace with the drift.

Then, a shadow blotted out the sky above.

A school of herring arriving from the open ocean, a mass larger than any blue whale, made of millions of separate, silver-bellied fish moving as a single organism. A dozen makos swam past Kellen to spring out of the current below, launching themselves into the silver cloud with snapping jaws. Their explosive speed struck empty water. Every time a shark blade cut through the bait ball, the school parted, rippling around the teeth like liquid silkweed. They seemed invincible.

Mesmerized, Kellen pushed away from the ledge to watch the hunt. The makos lunged. The herring folded. Teeth found only water. The school opened, gathered, and flowed on. Violence met motion. Every charge became empty water. At last, the exhausted makos sank back into the current.

Kellen angled his tail against the current to correct his drift. Only then did he realize he had chosen the same answer as the herring.

The mako struck him. His dad pulled him from their jaws. The kids tormented him. He dreamed of a store on the Golden Shallows. The octopus touched him in the dark. Nothing came of a little mer’s terror. The vision of all those land walkers disgusted him. He could swim away. He did not know the way home. But he would never find it riding the Last Drift.

“The Herring School” is a chapter in my memoir entitled “The Things I Lost.” If you would like to read other chapters on Medium, you can at

1. My Birthday
2. The Rocking Horse Pin
3. Love the Warrior. Hate the War
4. The Family Photo
5. The Day the Music Died
6. Laughter Out Loud

I think I’m about half way to having enough material to publish “The Things I Lost” into a book. You can support my writing a Ko-fi.com/deannahouse

Deanna A. House is a speculative fiction writer and freelance world builder. Her current projects explore survival, identity, cultural conflict, and the ethical consequences of emerging technologies.

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