One Sea, Two Skies

Pip remembered what the ocean used to taste like. Clean. Cold. Like nothing at all which is exactly what water should taste like and almost never does anymore.

Pip was small. Small enough to swim through the handle of a plastic bag. Pip had done this. More times than counted. The ocean was full of handles these days.

Pip's world looked like this: A plastic bottle. Two plastic bags. Something that used to be a chair. A fishing net that had forgotten what it was for and was now just floating catching everything it wasn't supposed to. More plastic. Different plastic. Plastic pretending to be seaweed which was the worst kind.

And somewhere underneath all of it — the ocean. Pip's ocean. The real one. The cold clean one that tasted like nothing which was everything.

Pip swam. Through the handle. Around the bottle. Past the chair. Under the net. Always looking. Always moving. Always hoping the next patch of water would be the clean patch.

It usually wasn't.

On the fourteenth day of looking Pip found it. Small. Tucked between two rocks where the current ran fast enough to push the plastic somewhere else. Clean water. Cold. Tasting like nothing. Like the ocean was supposed to taste.

Pip stayed there for a long time. Just breathing it.

Then the shadow came.

Not a fish shadow. Too big for a fish. Wrong shape for a boat.

A face. On the other side of the surface. Looking down. Small face. Young face. Eyes wide the way eyes go when they see something they weren't expecting.

Pip looked up. The face looked down.

The face disappeared.

Pip went back to the clean patch.

Then something came through the surface. A hand. Small. Human. Holding something — a plastic bottle. Pip backed away.

But the hand wasn't dropping it. The hand was picking something up. Another bottle. Already there. Already floating. The hand took it. Back through the surface. Gone.

Pip watched.

The hand came back. Took a bag. Came back. Took another bag.

Back and forth. Back and forth. The small human hand and whatever was attached to it above the surface working quietly in the cold afternoon taking things away that shouldn't have been there.

The clean patch got slightly bigger.

Pip swam into it. The new part. Just reclaimed. Still cold. Still clean. Still tasting like nothing which was everything.

The hand came back once more. Stopped. The face appeared again at the surface. Looking down at Pip.

Pip looked up at the face.

They stayed like that for a moment. A small fish in a small clean patch of an ocean that was mostly not clean. A small human at the surface of the same ocean with cold hands and a bag full of plastic that shouldn't have been there.

Two small things looking at each other across the surface of something enormous that belonged to both of them.

The face smiled.

Pip didn't have a face that smiled. But Pip turned once in the clean cold water — a slow, full circle — the way fish do when something feels exactly right.

The face went away.

Pip stayed in the clean patch. It was still small. The ocean was still mostly plastic and bags and chairs that had forgotten what they were for.

But the patch was bigger than yesterday.

Pip swam its edges. Round and round. Mapping it. The way you map something worth protecting.

The water tasted like nothing. Which was everything. Which was enough to keep looking keep swimming keep turning circles in whatever clean water you can find or make or protect on any given Tuesday.