Jane Morrison would spend her nights swimming in the river. On some nights, the moon would glisten like satin on her naked form as if she was one with the water. Her green eyes were globes of wonder and alien beauty. They felt at home in this ocean of angel fish and lost dreams.
Jane had a long history with the river. At five, she kissed her first boy. At thirteen, her first girl. Her mother would take Jane to the river every summer to skip stones, fish, and just watch the industrial world around it. It wasn’t like the rivers on Mars or even the historical Earth. Those were outgrowths of nature whereas this river was more man made than anything else. The satellite of Ganymede was founded twenty five years before Jane was born. Initially, the world was an endless sea. Or, at least as endless as any world can be. When man entered the frame, they made settlements over the ocean world. Some were more traditional cityscapes while others were teaming with canals.
Jane swam in one such canal. She called it a river because she preferred the sound of that word. There was a softness to the word that she couldn’t quite place why she found so beautiful. She would talk to Scout Lucas, her recently ex-boyfriend, about it. He would say some rather pretentious thing about the nature of language being inherently sexual and the fluid nature of “rivers” hits a dopamine gland that arouses certain people. Jane didn’t care though. She was too busy looking at him as he talked.
Scout, for all his pretension, had a wry nature to himself. He wasn’t the kind of person to necessarily stand out in a crowd, but one could easily say a pithy remark that would make everyone turn their heads. He was a lean fellow with blue eyes and a depressive disposition. Jane liked that his smile could warm even the cloudiest of days. Lisa Williams, their girlfriend, liked the way his hair would blow through the wind like a bushel of leaves on a cool fall afternoon cascading off a dying tree.
They had met at the river, just three years ago. Jane had just come out of college no better or worse than when she went in. Scout had recently finished a fishing commission with a friend of a friend, and was now waiting for the next gig. Lisa, meanwhile, was drowning. It’s not that she didn’t know how to swim. She knew quite well how to do that. Rather, it was the fact that she was having an allergic reaction to the angel fish that, while not deadly, made it hard for her to stay awake. Jane was the first one of them to see her, though Scout was close behind. By fortune and chance, they swam in an almost synchronistic formation towards the drowning Lisa.
It wasn’t completely easy for them to get Lisa out of the water. As they would later discover, she had a tendency to kick uncontrollably while asleep, which made keeping the covers on a difficult task. But they were able to get Lisa out of the river without too much difficulty. At most, they received bruises that would heal within a day or two. They considered calling an ambulance, though they soon realized that neither one of them had the funds to actually afford the ambulance, let alone a full trip to the hospital. While they were panicking over potentially losing everything they had over someone they’d never met, Jane noticed an odd bruise on Lisa’s thigh. Scout recognized it instantly.
“That’s an Angelfish hug. Happens all the time out in sea, though I’ve never seen one cause someone to react like that. Though, maybe she was allergic…“ Jane suddenly began to look worried. “It’s not deadly,” Scout reassured her, “At most, she’ll be asleep for another hour or so.”
“In that case,” Jane sighed with relief, “maybe we should get her out of here. My place isn’t too far, only a block or so.” Or so, it turns out, was five blocks, the exact distance away from Jane’s small, damp little apartment. It didn’t have much room. At most, one person, maybe two, could live there. The couch was broken with one of its legs missing. The bed was slightly too uncomfortable to get a good night’s sleep. And the window was basically just a hole in the wall. Not that Scout could complain. Life on the sea doesn’t pay much unless you own a ship or catch a monster of a fish, of which he did neither. As such, he lived on the streets like many a person on Ganymede. They laid Lisa on the bed and waited for her to awaken.
Lisa awoke with the groggy speed of an alcoholic. It took her a bit to remember how to speak coherently, and so her attempts at saying “Who are you” or “What happened” sounded more like “Horu” or “Hath pend.” The two were patient with her, having spent the past 25 minutes or so in petrified silence. It took Lisa another five to teach her mouth to speak coherently through saying wrongly right sentences such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
“Spam,” was the first word Lisa said coherently. She didn’t notice until five words later, after which she said, “That is to say… where am I?”
“You’re in my apartment,” said Jane “Not much, I know. But… it’s home.”
“And you are?”
“Jane. Jane Morrison.”
“Scout Lucas,” he said while reaching out his hand to shake Lisa’s.
“Lisa Williams. What happened?”
“You were hugged by an Angel Fish-“
“Angelfish.”
“Whatever, and you had some kind of allergic reaction to it.” Lisa looked at her thigh to see the still lingering bruise of the Angel Fish’s hug. It was asymmetrical in its attempt to be symmetrical. It was like a child’s drawing of a symmetrical figure. Sure, the basic shape had the air of symmetricallity to it, but the details within the sides shifted radically in unique and beautiful ways. “You almost drowned.”
“And you saved me,” said Lisa looking quite fondly at Jane.
“Well, we both did,” she noted quite sheepishly. A small laugh came out of Lisa’s mouth. More a nervous reaction to beauty and confused feelings of attraction than anything else. She looked at Scout in all his lean majesty.
“So what were you doing out in the canal,” Scout asked without a hint of snideness. “That place is full of Angelfish.”
“Well… I like swimming. Haven’t been on Ganymede for too long, and I didn’t know there were Angel-Fish on this world. Always thought they came from Mars. How far are we from the dam anyways?”
“About five blocks.”
“And you carried me all the way here?”
“Well, we took turns. I carried you half the way and Jane carried you the other half.”
“So why didn’t you take me to a hospital?” Jane awkwardly grunted to that question while gesturing to the cramped nature of her room. Lisa noticed a stain of water damage above Jane’s head as well as the cracked, downright chipped, stone floor beneath Scout’s bare and soot covered feet. “Ah. Well, I’m kinda loaded, so you probably would’ve been fine. Then again, I guess I was too asleep to actually ask.” Oddly enough, an air of levity came out of that revelation. Especially when Lisa elaborated on the nature of being loaded as less to do with being a multibillionaire and more to do with her connections throughout Ganymede and the other Jupiter satellites.
Lisa had been spending the past three years working the streets as a courier for various syndicates. She had recently done work for Law Rentzuo picking up his “rent” from the various people who owe him. The work dried up roughly around the time one of his “tenants” shot him in the face in what was deemed self-defense. She had for the guy who did him in. Law was many things, among them the kind of asshole who would mockingly eat an apple while his men did horrible things to those who couldn’t pay their rent.
But one of the benefits of working for Law Rentzuo as a courier is that you come into contact with various levels of society, among them the well-connected as well as the willing to help. As such, people looked a blind eye to a worker willing to help at a moment’s notice. Some even paid a nice tip for such help. Not enough to sustain a life outside of being a courier used between the various syndicates, but enough to afford a house that can fit more than four people.
Scout and Jane moved in after their third date. The first date was because Lisa felt she owed them for saving her life. The second was because the first date went somewhat poorly due to a fire at the restaurant caused by some kids playing with fireworks. The third came about because they realized at the end of the second date that they wanted more and more dates. Officially, they aren’t a couple. Polyamory is typically looked down upon, even on more liberal worlds like Ganymede.
For those three years, they were seemingly happy. They loved each other, to be sure. But, as Jane sawm in the river, she couldn’t help but think about their relative happiness. Could she have noticed if she wasn’t so busy being happy? Could she have seen what he was going through? Could she have prevented Scout Lucas from killing himself?
Lisa was the one to find the body. He was lying in the bathtub for about an hour. Lisa and Jane were out for work, delivering a package and stealing it respectively. He left a note by his body. It only had one word on it. Lisa screamed when she saw the body. Jane ran to her and could only feel numb. Not even tears could come out of her eyes. The funeral will be in a few days, Jane thought in the river. She hadn’t seen Lisa since that night. She bolted from the apartment while Jane blacked out of conscious movement.
She found herself at the river, completely naked. It was a warm river with the moonlight shining perfectly in the water. There was a serenity and softness to being in the river. It was a still river that only moved when the wind moved. At the right time, it could look almost like a mirror of the sky. Her clothes where right next to her feet and she wanted to fly. So she took a dive into that dark abyss. She would return for a few more nights, intentionally this time. It felt right, swimming naked in the river. She couldn’t put a name on why, but it felt right.
On that night, three before the funeral, she saw something at the bottom of the river. The moon glistened on the glass with an intensity of a spotlight. Out of curiosity, she dove down to the bottom where all the strange, wonderful creatures, swim to their heart’s content. When she broke the surface of the river and returned to dry land, she looked at the artifact she had unearthed. It was a pocket watch. It was circular in shape, almost like an anchor. It was a fifteen hour watch, the clock itself shaped like a diamond with curved corners to the point of almost being octagonal. It was old and rusted, probably down at the bottom for years. She could barely see the greyness of through the rust. The more she thought about it, the more it looked like a lock. Something to keep secrets locked within. To keep the past frozen in a moment of melancholy and longing that not even death could end.
Jane looked at the pocket watch and thought to herself, ‘Scout would really like this.’ Then she began to cry.
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