Leaving the Water
Sept 2023
Cole Bernstein
He’s thinking about how many stuffed animals he should pack with him for college when he first notices that she’s on her side.
He sets Kiki, his beloved stuffed snowman, down gently on his dresser before slowly making his way to the other side of the room, where the twenty-gallon glass tank sits atop the dresser, beneath the array of multicolored LED lights.
She looks normal otherwise—her skin still that luminescent pinkish white, her mouth still cocked in that eternally aloof grin, her frilly, raspberry gills still protruding majestically from that acorn head. But the fact remains: she has stopped swimming. She is on her side.
Something’s wrong, he thinks stupidly, before proceeding to mentally chastise himself for thinking such stupid, simple thoughts. He bends to a crouch and taps slowly against the glass. There are a thousand possible explanations for what could have caused this, yet every single one of them can be traced back to the pockmarked, deer-in-headlights profile reflecting back at him as he stares into the smudged, temperate glass that he’s been too busy, or lazy, or passive, to clean these past few stressful, end-of-senior-year weeks.
“Iris,” he whispers, mostly to himself. “Iris.”
—
It’s 2015. Life is good. You’re in Mrs. Smith’s sixth grade science class and the biggest worry on your mind is what creature to pick for your endangered animal research project. Most of your classmates choose quickly, thoughtlessly, settling for the easy options: giant pandas, snow leopards, orangutans.
But you will never settle for “mainstream,” even where endangered species are concerned. For better or for worse, you seek originality at all costs, always going the extra mile to put yourself out there in outlandish, attention-grabbing ways: mastering obscure talents, memorizing inane conversation-starting “fun facts,” showing everyone who asked—and didn’t ask—the stuffed snowman you carry with you at all times for “moral support.” You let these performative obscurities speak to who you are, because Lord knows your words never can.
And so you make the daring foray into the second page of Google, and a couple class periods later you strike gold— a tiny, amphibious creature with a strange, hard-to-pronounce name and a shocking, “Is it the ugliest or cutest thing I’ve ever seen?” appearance. You see it and feel instantly connected to it—or feel the desire to feel instantly connected to it. Something about it is the perfect embodiment of the quirky, humorous nature of you—or the you that you are trying to cultivate.
You find the form Mrs. Smith sent out, and when it asks for the research topic you selected, you excitedly, confidently type in: “axolotls.”
—
Iris hasn’t gotten up yet. Or maybe she has, but never in his presence. His presence is becoming increasingly sparse, these days. He can’t bring himself to look at her. He’s brought his blankets and pillow downstairs and taken up sleeping on the couch.
The sudden move has upset his mother. “Your last summer here, Alex,” she says through a tight smile. “Don’t move out on me already!”
He still shuffles guiltily to the tank each night to drop in the usual six bloodworms. The first night, she opened her mouth and let one drift lazily in. His heart leapt at the sight. But on his way out, he risked a glance back only to find her little head twitching, mouth open as if choking. But nothing came out, and eventually she returned to her inanimate state.
At least she’s moving, he thought, unnerved at how little he felt.
Well tonight she isn’t moving. He leans against his door frame for a few minutes, waiting for something, anything, to happen, before losing patience.
Kiki’s dark, pinprick black eyes watch him from the dresser as he grabs another pillow and leaves the room, turning the light off before he goes.
—
It’s 2016 now. You got an A on your axolotl project last fall, and never forgot about the strange little salamanders. In fact, you’ve become obsessed with them. “Axolotls1234!” becomes your password for everything. You doodle axolotls in the margins of your notebooks during class. You vow, even, to adopt one someday.
Mostly, though, you find yourself tumbling down axolotl rabbit holes online—articles on their mythological ties, their regenerative abilities, their scientific applications. You confidently tell people that axolotls possess the cure to cancer somewhere in their miraculous genome, you just know it. Good thing they never follow up to ask you what a genome is; you’d be left speechless. No, luckily they mostly ignore you, or speak about how weird you are in circles you and Kiki never come close enough to overhear.
For better or for worse, you are referred to by many as “the axolotl kid.” You are not embarrassed, how could you be— people know what axolotls are because of you! You are raising awareness. You are an activist. You start an online petition, ambitiously titled “Save the Axolotls.” You get ten signatures—one ten-thousandth of the amount you need to send it to the White House as planned.
But while you can’t single-handedly prevent years of tourist pollution, drought-induced loss of habitat, and competition with invasive species, your Christmas gift is the next best thing: an axolotl t-shirt! You wear it, at minimum, once a week.
—
Today, for some reason, he feels compelled to return upstairs for longer than the usual rushed dinner drop-off. Perhaps it was the outing he had with his mother earlier today, where she tearfully asked if he had any favorite meals she’d made over the years that she should make again in his final weeks at home.
They had just gone shopping for college supplies and were eating crêpes at the mall they’d always gone to as kids, and all he could think about was how desolate the whole place looked. How half the storefronts looked out of business, how few people were walking around with bags, how the children’s play structures all seemed so vacuous, so unattended, so small.
“Can you make apple bread?” he asked. She smiled, wiped her eyes, and nodded.
Now he stands in the doorway, watching Iris motionless, dinner just inches to her right, untouched.
He moves closer and sees that she’s lost weight. Her beady black eyes have grown from personable to vacant. Her beautiful, bright pink gills have dimmed in color, and acquired the slightest traces of fuzz around their corners.
“You love worms,” he whispers, bent to a crouch now, fingers pressed softly against the glass. The sound of his own voice makes it real.
—
It’s 2018 now. It is generally understood among your classmates that eighth grade is the last year to have a birthday party, and you want to make the most of it. And so you have a party centered around your most unique, universally well-known personality trait.
Many kids your age are having bar and bat mitzvahs around this time, and you use this as your warped rationale to insist this party be a blowout. As a result, your loving mother gives you the works: axolotl balloons, an axolotl cake, party hats with frilly gills protruding from either side, pink and white tablecloths (despite informing your mother that only leucistic axolotls are this color—wild ones are more of a brownish black), the party room of your grandma’s apartment complex utterly transformed into a true-blue axolotl-enthusiast’s heaven.
You will feel exceedingly guilty about all this many years later and will provide a half-assed offer to reimburse your mother for the wasted funds. But for now, you simply take it all in and gasp at what must be the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen.
—
He begins sleeping in his room again. He Googles axolotl care specialists, only to find that even the cheapest possible exotic pet veterinarian will run him over five-hundred dollars just for a consultation. He does research. He learns that poor tank conditions can cause an axolotl to attempt metamorphosis, an often-fatal process. He gets the nitrogen and ammonia levels of his tank tested at the Fish World near his house, and they tell him it’s all good and normal. They say the temperature of the tank is a little warm, though, so he begins performing daily water changes to keep it at an ideal fifty degrees.
He drops fifty dollars on an air purifier, to try and rid the tank of something—he’s already forgotten what the website said exactly—and another thirty-five on an ammonia test kit, because he’s starting to doubt that the Fish World people actually know what they’re talking about.
He runs into an old friend, Ian, working the register at PetCorp when he buys the kit.
Ian’s two years older—they met through Chess Club and had lost touch ever since he graduated.
Ian asks if he still carries his little snowman around everywhere (“CoCo or something?”), and he sheepishly says no, not anymore. Ian asks how Iris is doing and he says not well, he’s buying the kit to try and save her life. He says it in a forced lighthearted tone that feels traitorous—to who, exactly, he’s not sure. Ian nods vacantly, clicks his tongue. He asks Ian how college is going and he says it changes you.
—
His efforts just seem to make things worse. Iris’s albino skin has grown so thin that he can see the outlines of her little bones. Her gills are fully coated with dust now and have dimmed in color to a light, ancient gray. Her eyes have become ringed and filmy. Her limbs have begun to slowly twist and warp out of proportion, as if broken.
That night he moves his blankets and pillows to the floor and sleeps right up against the tank.
The next morning, he holds vigil. It’s come time to start packing for college, so he props his suitcases right up against the tank’s stand and begins packing beneath Iris’s ailing gaze.
Kiki is the first thing he packs. His inhaler is the second. He packs restlessly, obsessively, trying to get it all done in one sitting, thinking about how different his life will be one week from today.
When he comes up for air, it’s dark out. And when he stretches, stands up, and glances into the tank, she’s gone.
—
Nearly everyone you invite actually shows up, an improvement from previous years’ parties. Whether some are there to subtly poke fun at you (the modern variant of bullying, where the bullies pretend to be your friend), you do not know or care. All you care about is that the girl you’ve spoken only a couple sentences to in the eight years you’ve attended school together, but are still madly, paralyzingly in love with, has shown up, axolotl Beanie Baby in tow.
And not only that, but a few hours into the party, she waves at you. And smiles! And gestures for you to come over! You set down your cake mid-forkful and hustle over as quickly yet nonchalantly as you and your hormones can muster.
—
He knows she’s gone because she’s no longer on her side. She’s belly-up. She’s nearly translucent. Her buckled, distorted legs splay helplessly in the air like fucking Vecna got to her. And her gills, her perfect, cotton candy gills, have detached entirely from her acorn head. The fuzzy, graying wisps of them lie dormant on the side of the tank.
“Iris,” he whispers, scrunching his nose in an attempt to block the tears he thinks will come but don’t. “Iris.”
He stares at the tank for God knows how long, thinking about how this poor helpless creature met its end ten years too early all because of his stupid selfish desire to love and obsess over and adopt as his own this helpless, struggling species that would have been far better off had he never gotten near it, had he never possessed this inexplicable desire to be quirky at all costs, had he just chosen the Giant Panda like everyone else and called it a day, and how he’s no better than those assholes tearing the axolotl’s homeland apart to develop cities and promote tourism—he’s been using Iris for his own sinister needs just the same. How many “tell-me-one-fun-fact-about-yourself” whiparounds has he gotten through on the back of her existence, on the back of her noiseless suffering in his neglectfully ill-kept tank? How many conversations with friends, family, love interests, college admissions officers, has he had using Iris to get the conversation going or to keep it afloat—the perfect, lighthearted, memorable distraction from that dazed, vacant look that’s been simmering beneath his hazel eyes for what, maybe months now, and nobody’s noticed, or everybody’s been too afraid to ask.
He presses his hands against his forehead and sighs. He can’t keep standing here. For once in his life, he needs to take action. He grabs two Solo cups from the kitchen cupboard and a roll of blue electrical tape from the laundry room downstairs. He brings it back to his room, breathes in deep, and shoves one cup into the lukewarm water of the tank. Trying his best to keep the tremor from his hands, he scoops her frail body into one cup, clasps it shut against the other, and tapes the two together in a sort of makeshift coffin.
He stands there like that for a while, holding the remnants of his pet, surrounded by suitcases in the dark. Finally, he whispers: “Iris, do you want to see the rest of the house?” He carries the coffin from his room and walks slowly down the creaky stairs of the
darkened home. He shows her the kitchen where he and his mom make banana pancakes every Sunday morning. He shows her the television room, where he’s spent an embarrassing amount of time in front of Lab Rats, a childhood favorite. He shows her the basement, where he first landed a handstand, and subsequently broke his arm showing his mom an “instant replay” of the initial success.
After he’s hit every room, he stops in front of the door to the backyard. His mom must have gone to bed hours ago, and he realizes he forgot to say goodnight.
“It’s been a good run, Iris, hasn’t it?” he hears himself whisper, throat heavy, trembling in the empty room. “It really has, baby. I’m sorry. It really, really has.”
—
You ask her how she is. She smiles, says she’s good and returns the question. After a few more awkward pleasantries, she grabs your arm. The music is loud, everyone is dancing, and it feels like you are the only two people in the world.
“I just wanted to tell you,” she says, “why I love axolotls.”
You nod quickly, restlessly, praying you’re not sweating, trying not to look down at the tender grip of her impossibly soft hand on your shaky forearm.
“It’s because they stay in the water,” she says, turning you inside out with her wide-eyed, unwavering gaze. “They don’t shed their gills and become land animals like other salamanders. They stay in the water! They keep their frilly gills forever and live happily, peacefully, underwater for as long as they live! Kinda amazing, don’t you think?”
“I’m aware they’re neotenic,” you say, and instantly feel like punching yourself in the
face.
“Yes, that’s the word!” she says, sipping her shirley temple and squeezing your arm tight. “They’re neotonic. They never grow up!”
—
He’s in the backyard now, shovel in hand. It’s cold out for an August night, and the dirt is damp from yesterday’s rain.
He moves slowly but surely, pressing the shovel down hard and digging the hole deeper than it needs to be. He cradles the coffin softly in his hands, kisses it once across the middle, and slowly lowers it into the hole.
She tried to leave the water.
He stands like that for a while, looking down at what he’s done. The frigid air stings his eyelids. Cicadas chirp wildly against the dark and quiet night. He thinks about how everyone is going to end up like this, someday, lying on their back, arms twisted and splayed, the life sucked out from eyes that once held the entire world inside them. He thinks about the gills, lying abandoned on the side of the tank.
She was never supposed to leave the water.
He sits down, lets the wet dirt seep into his pajama pants, puts his head in his hands. Eventually, he gets up. He re-enters the house. He plods slowly back to his room, sifts aggressively through his carefully made suitcase, pulls something out, the very first thing he packed.
He returns to the yard, leans over, and gently lowers Kiki into the open grave.