Ocean's Pull

School ends on the last Friday before break. Mara walks out of the old building and glances around aimlessly. She knows her mom won’t be there to pick her up, she hasn’t since fourth grade. Mara begins her walk home. It’s not far, only about a fifteen minute walk during most of the warmer months. In the winter is when Mara has to choose between a cold and rarely shoveled trail or just pushing through her anxiety to take the bus. But now, the snow is all but melted fully and the trail is its normal state of rough and muddy. 

Her mom’s car is in the driveway when she gets home, but even then Mara knows they won’t talk until dinner, if then. She creeps quietly to her room and begins to pull out her homework when she quickly remembers she’s now on spring break. Instead, she pulls out her headphones and lies down on her bed. 

She doesn’t realize she’s fallen asleep until her mom’s yell for dinner jolts her out of it. Glancing at the time, she heads to the kitchen to see if her mom might’ve actually cooked something. To her surprise, Mara smells something that resembles a nice meal.

“Set the table.” This is her mom’s only greeting. Mara begins to comment on how special the dinner seems, but then thinks better of it and silently does as her mother asked. 

At dinner, they both eat in silence for a while, before Mara quietly decides to ask something.

“So, mom. Is it possible, I mean, are we going to do anything for spring break?” she asks under her breath.

Her mom remains silent for a minute, before responding in her cold, normal way. “You know we don’t have the money. And besides, I have work.”

“But, the coast is just a three hour drive. It could just be a day.” She looks up to see her mother’s expression has remained unchanged. Despite knowing the answer, she tries again “Not even just a quick trip?”

With a sigh that says she’s losing her patience, her mother interjects, “I know you have some crazy obsession with the ocean, but that’ll have to wait. Get one of your friends to take you for a day, I don’t care. But drop it.” With that, she puts her dishes in the sink and returns to her office.

Mara brings the rest of the dishes up. She scrubs each one with an angry intensity. She knows that the few friends she has already have grand vacation plans; they’d been talking about them all week. 

When she returns back to her room, she lies on the bed and sobs. She felt bad for it, but her mother scared her. She’d dreamt about seeing the ocean since she could read. But somehow, between her sobs and woes, she dozed off into sleep.

Mara lays in bed the next morning knowing she had no reason to get up. There wasn’t going to be any breakfast on the table, and she knew to avoid her mother for a bit. Despite their house being small, it was easy enough to not see just one person when they both stayed in their rooms most of the time anyway. The house was often dead silent. Despite that, she eventually gets out of bed, determined to go on a run or just get out of the house, away from her mother for a bit. Mara grabs her journal from the bedside table and tucks it in her bag, along with headphones and a water bottle.

As she takes a step out of bed, she feels her foot almost fall through the floor. Struggling to catch her balance, she peels back the old mottled rug to examine her floorboards. The one she stepped on has started rotting away, and to her surprise, Mara can almost see through a small hole the size of a coin. With a glance at her clock, she decides to lay the rug back over it. Now is not the time to bother her mom about something else. 

Heading to the bathroom to prepare for a jog, she sees her empty prescription bottle on the counter. With a sigh, she pockets it. Maybe her mom will be calm enough in the afternoon to go pick up her anxiety meds. She places the bottle on the counter with a very apologetic note, then, before slipping silently out of the house, adds a small stack of cash to the note.

Later that evening, once Mara has returned and snuck back to her room, she hears a disgruntled sigh and the sounds of her mom’s car leaving, then returning fifteen minutes later. Storming into the room, the bottle is thrown at where she’s laying on the bed.

“You know how much it costs,” her mom demands.

“I was just hoping-” 

Her mother glares at her. In a quieter tone, Mara apologizes.

Jumping out of bed, and careful to avoid the rotted spot, she goes to her dresser and pulls out another thirty dollars. She hands it to her mom without meeting her stare, hands shaking.

“You’re the reason we live like this!” her mother screams. “If it weren’t for you and your stupid doctors and therapist and fucking medications I would be happy! I would have the money to live a real life.”

Her mother slams the door as violently as when she entered. Mara pinches her fingers, wrists, any part of her she can find that hurts, and bites her tongue, trying to hold back sobs. Instead, she returns to her bed and pulls back out her journal. It’s a basic thing, just plain black that she’d painted some red doodles on when she first got it. She opens it up to the back few pages, and stares at her words. She traces a finger gently over doodles of tiny cliffs, trees, pills, guns, cars, trains, and ropes. A list is written in red pen on the last page, with many of the points crossed off.

Mara hears a startling loud crack, and winces in fright of her mother returning. When she realizes what the sound could have been, she peels the rug back to see the rot has expanded and the first floorboard completely fallen away to make a hole in her floor big enough for her entire arm to fit through. She reaches down to see if she can feel the ground or any concrete under the house, but finds only empty space. Curious, Mara takes her phone and shines the flashlight into the hole. To her surprise, she sees a small cavern, almost tall enough for her to stand up straight in. In a frenzy, she pulls up more of the floor to make a hole big enough for her, and tilts her head in enough to see a dark passageway carved out of the earth, leading away from her house.

In a moment of decisiveness, she whips her head up. Mara looks around the room before snatching her journal and pocketing her new bottle of pills, then with flashlight in hand, lowers herself awkwardly into the tunnel. Without a glance back upward, she begins to follow it away from her house.

The passageway is dark and dirty. It’s a tunnel cut roughly through the ground with roots dangling haphazardly out of the walls. Spiders and worms are the only signs of life, although the tunnel has clearly been tracked out by dozens, if not hundreds, of past travelers. Mara is grateful she’s not claustrophobic, as the height never changes to allow her to walk standing up fully. Eventually, she sees another tunnel branch off, but instinct tells her to keep to her own. Then, as she rounds a bend, there are suddenly hundreds of other passages, all branching off in different directions. 

It’s impossible to tell how much time has passed. Her phone goes dark and she can’t turn the screen back on, yet the flashlight remains. Mara continues down her own trail for a while, but soon she starts wondering about the other paths. Curious, she stops in her tracks at the next intersection, and peers down the tunnel. She can see it head straight for a distance then veer sharply back the way she came. She’s about to step down this other path when a sound brushes her ears, something she’s only ever heard in movies. 

Mara freezes mid step as she hears the faintest echo of thundering waves. With a cry, she races down her original path further, in the direction that she finally realizes has been leading her towards the coast. She turns around a bend, and almost runs straight into an old wooden door. This door is rotting away too, and crouching down, she presses her eye up to a tiny hole to stare through at the ocean. She could’ve just stared for hours except tears quickly start to cloud her vision, and she has to take a step back, blinking furiously and wiping at her eyes. A note is tucked into the doorframe, and with shaking hands, she carefully pulls it out. The ink is fading and the paper is old and crinkly, with creases that suggest it has been viewed and put back many times.

Turn around or go through this door, but you can not have both. Take a look, but letting this door close seals your fate.

This gives Mara pause, but after opening the door, she has no hesitation. In a quick moment, she slips off one shoe and wedges it firmly in the door frame, and runs down to the water’s edge. She pauses the moment before the waves can touch her, and looks up to see the once sunny sky has become dreadfully overcast in the time it took her to get from the door to where she stands. 

I’ll just stay five minutes… I can come back another day. She thinks to herself. 

She dips her toe into the water and gasps at the biting cold. As she plants her foot down fully in the water, a harsh crack of thunder splits the air in front of her. She winces, covering her ears and closing her eyes tight.

Despite this, she dives head first into the waves that are growing larger and larger. She struggles to keep her head above the tide threatening to pull her under, shrieking with adrenaline. Flailing around, she searches desperately for the shore, knowing she should get out of the water. She quickly notices, however, that the shore has outright disappeared. All that remains is the door, now floating above the water. 

Mara starts swimming frantically for the door, but as she does, the wind picks up. Her flimsy shoe is ripped from the doorway and tossed into the sea. The door slams closed with a booming echo, and even as she desperately tries to swim towards it, she sees the door fade into the air.

Letting out a cry, Mara feels her warm tears mix with the wrenching cold ripping her body back and forth in the tide. She goes limp. There’s no shore left to swim to anymore. With a final pull, the tide pulls her body down.

“What the hell is taking so long?” Mara’s mother shrieks from outside the bathroom. “I need a shower. There better still be hot water or else there’s no dinner.”

Impatiently, she just pushes open the door. With a faint gasp, she freezes in the middle of the bathroom, staring at her daughter. Her daughter, lying lifelessly face down in the water of the bathtub, fully clothed but with one shoe missing and a bottle of prescription medication lying empty, open on the counter.