A Hollow Man

Hollow Baby

I’m brainless. This isn’t self-deprecation or any other kind of subtle-jab humor. I don’t mean that I don't think I'm smart either. If it’s any way to judge intelligence, look at my college transcripts: straight A’s with a few B’s squashed between them. What I mean is exactly what I said: I don’t have a brain. I don’t have a heart either, or lungs or a stomach—there are a lot of things I don’t have.

You see, when I was born, my parents had a few shocks in the hospital. First, the doctor said I was dead inside my mom's womb, he couldn't read my pulse. But then he noticed I was moving, and started to look a little closer. Everyone was confused, but I was moving along like any baby does leading up to their birth. So we carried on normally.

When I was born, however, things started to become clearer, which brings us to the second shock. I was delivered successfully but quickly taken away because the doctor thought I wasn't breathing right. My parents were kept in the dark for a day or two, until my dad was ready to get physical.

Before showing me to them, the doctor told my parents I was going to be special. They took it pretty bad at first, they probably thought I had a disability or something. I guess it could be seen as a disability, but not in the way they were thinking. My issue’s a little different.

“No, I think you misunderstand,” the doctor clarified. He was wearing one of those long white coats, his plump face resting just above it. At least, that’s how I imagine him, babies don’t remember their birth. Anyway, the doctor told my parents “your son is—spectacular to say the least. By all rights, he should be dead.”

Of course, my parents gasped a little here, and my mom demanded to see me.

“I need to explain things to you first,” the doctor insisted, “just to prepare you.”

“Just spit it out!” my dad said—I can see him now, his brows lowering almost entirely over his eyes. He was always just a few hairs short of a uni-brow. “What’s wrong with our son?”

“In one sense, nothing.”

“In the other?”

“In the other sense, everything is wrong.”

“Cut it out with the mystery talk!” I bet dad was really frustrated now. The more worried mom got the angrier he got at whatever was worrying her. “Just tell us what is wrong with him or I swear I’m going to go and find him right now!”

“Alright!” the doctor answered, probably much more captivated by my special condition than afraid of my dad. I can’t imagine how many volatile new parents doctors dealt with every month. “Your son is hollow,” he told them. My mom told me this part, so I’m sure it’s accurate.

“Hollow?!” my dad shouted, leaving mom’s side and stepping toward the doctor. Mom’s face was totally pale, and dad always said that she looked hollow in that moment. “What do you mean he’s hollow?!”

“Just that, Mr. Jenson, your son is hollow.”

Dad was about to storm off to find me, but mom caught his arm.

“ Physically hollow? His whole body?” she asked. Dad says she was a lot calmer than he was. That’s probably why he doesn’t talk about my birth much, he tends to forget things when he gets really upset.

“Yes. His entire body, apart from bones, layers of skin, and blood, is hollow. Hollow as a doll.”

“How?”

“I don’t know,” the doctor answered. Mom says he was just about as freaked out as they were. “I don’t know how someone can be born without a brain or a heart, I don't know what fills the empty spaces their vital organs left behind!”

Mom says the room got really quiet then. I think she and dad started to realize that the doctor was serious. But the doctor was just getting started.

“That’s why we thought he was dead at first; he wasn't breathing! But he doesn’t need to breathe, he has no pulse, and—” the doctor paused, “will he eat? Can he eat?” My parents tested this out later on and discovered that it’s not a good idea for someone without a stomach to eat.

My parents were pretty shaken up by their living baby-doll. So was the doctor and every nurse who heard about it. A lot of doctors ended up hearing about it, actually. The guy who delivered me spread the word, trying to find similar cases to see if anybody else knew what had happened. My parents also went to other doctors, but none of them seemed concerned. Sure, their minds were blown, but in the end, they concluded that I was healthy in every sense. Somehow, I was alive.

Average But Strange

Moving into my childhood, you can probably guess that it was a little different than yours, and most other kids, for that matter. It wasn’t so bad while I was at home—my mom decided it was best for me to skip kindergarten—but things got more interesting once I went to school. I sometimes wonder why my parents made me go to public school. Heaven knows I nagged them about homeschooling for years. But maybe it was a good thing they pushed me, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a higher education if I hadn’t gone to public school. I don’t know. But I didn't have a completely unhappy childhood, I'm a little more normal than that.

The biggest problem with school was that I was something of a celebrity in my neighborhood. Not a cool celebrity, where people admire and look up to you for being different than the rabble. More like the way people look at somebody who has six fingers or a person with webbed feet. It’s weird, so people look at it. The only difference with me is that my hollowness wasn’t quite so visible. It might have been better if it was. If people could take one look at me and see that I didn’t have a brain or a heart, they’d just look and be satisfied. Instead, they had to know what it was like, and experimented with different ways they could be sure I was hollow. One thing they loved to pick out was my indifference to breathing. I remember one guy, probably around ten or twelve, putting his hand over my mouth and plugging my nose. I didn’t resist of course, knowing what would happen—my mom always said that I was smart for my age, despite not having a brain. She also said I was proof that the wrinkle-brain theories were nonsense. My dad would add that I was proof that a lot of things were nonsense, or at least, that science didn’t know very much yet. Back to me being bullied.

The kid held his hands over my mouth and nose for about five minutes, enough to kill anyone. But, surprise surprise, I didn’t so much as gasp after he was done.

“It’s true!” the kids gasped and whispered. “He’s got powers!” some would murmur, their eyes wide and faces pale. That one made me feel good. But the comments weren’t so nice once I got into high school.

By then, the shock of my emptiness had worn off. Fascination turned to morbid curiosity and opportunities for some clever jokes. Of course, they weren’t all that clever once they circled the school a few times.

But I did have friends. I remember Amanda taking sympathy on me first. I think it was sympathy, although she always said it wasn’t. Either way, she didn’t seem to care much about my hollowness, although she confessed to thinking it was pretty neat. Another friend I made was Vic, he was cool. Big and tough-looking, I was surprised when he came to talk with me and Amanda. One of the downsides of being hollow and not eating is that your body doesn’t grow the same way. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t beef myself up or even get fat if I wanted to. Instead, I was permanently thin. This didn’t matter to tough-guy Vic though, I think he liked hanging out with someone smaller than him, someone to protect. He would’ve made a great older brother.

Despite these two, I never felt quite at the same level as everyone else. But I shifted along the scale: sometimes I felt like I was worse, and sometimes I felt like I was better than them. The low end is pretty straightforward, everybody who’s ever felt different can relate and understand that side. But there’s another side of feeling different that I don’t think is quite so common. You see, at times I felt that, because I was different, I was supposed to do great things, things that normal people couldn't do. Kind of like the whole superhero thing: something bad happens and so the victim becomes the hero. I felt like my being hollow was a nudge toward greatness. But, I never came across anything exceptional. And regarding powers, I was pretty average. True, I didn’t need to eat or breathe, but that isn’t really going to help me save the day. I could say I was more intelligent, but once I went to college I learned that it wasn’t that unique to have a smart kid in the classroom. So I was left with average but strange.

Oh yeah, my first name’s Mic by the way. It’s short for Michael, but I insisted on Mic because I thought it fit my condition less. When I hear Michael I think of a smart and quiet person, someone who can do things but isn’t really known for them. Mic, on the other hand, is kind of like Vic. It’s tougher and more assertive. It sounds like a thug in an Italian mafia. I’d rather be tough and even thuggish sometimes, so Mic stayed. Dad didn’t mind so much, but mom liked Michael more.

Checking the Last Box

Anyone who’s been to college knows how busy and distracting it can be. Between classes, a constant push for socializing, and the occasional bad influences, it’s hardly surprising that so many students never finish. Or by the time they do finish, they're buried under a mountain of debt because they just had to go out drinking every Thursday. But I managed okay, I like to think I’m a bit more level-headed than a lot of people. Seeing as how I can't really drink, I also never had the same temptation to spend money on alcohol.

I went into psychology, specifically hoping to get a job as a research psychologist. The mind always fascinated me, especially the fact that it isn’t stored in the brain. Instead, it's floating somewhere out of reach, kind of like the wind. If it was physical, I wouldn’t have a mind. In case you're wondering, I don’t think I decided on psychology to try and “fix” myself or anything, I think it was just where my curiosities were at the time. Either that or I couldn’t think of anything else. I don’t really remember choosing all that much.

Like in grade school, I had a few friends and met the occasional bully. But, strangely enough, the bullies at college seemed tamer than the ones in high school. It was like they were afraid to step on my toes too much. A little was okay. I guess I understand that; after all, they didn’t really know me. I could be a psycho for all they knew.

Everyone seems to remember their college days as being “the glory days,” but I can’t say that anything really meaningful happened in college. I did well in my classes, learned a lot, and made a few friends. But nothing made me feel any different than I had before. I guess graduation was somewhat of a big moment for me.

I remember wondering what was next, really wondering about it. Through all of grade school, and even up to college, for the most part, kids are given a list of things to do. After middle school, you go to high school. Check. After high school, you either get a job or go to college. Check. After college, you get a job. I did that pretty easily, turns out that a few people had their eyes on me even before I graduated. Good grades and a good track record really encourage employers. Check.

Once I was settled into my job and working on a research project, I went back to my question: was this it? Did I check the last box?

I had a light discussion with one of my classmates about this before we graduated and he put it this way:

“After graduating, we’re really free. We can be whoever we want to be! We can do whatever we want! No more homework, no more teachers, just us and the world.”

I took his words to heart and thought about what I wanted to do with my freedom. The first thing that came to mind was my hollowness. It may seem strange, but I wanted to find a way to make myself less hollow. It was never a huge problem for me, at least, I didn’t think it was. But if there was one thing I wanted to be, it was more normal. So, after college, I embarked on a journey to fill myself up. Just a little bit, that’s all I was looking for.

Lila

I tried relationships, but they were never quite what everyone made them out to be. Watching my friends meet people, go on dates, and some of them eventually get married, it seemed so good and necessary. My parents had always been happy, despite several rough patches, and they'd always hoped I would find the right one and start a family. Everything seemed to point toward finding someone and settling down, thereby feeling a bit more full inside. So I branched out, started meeting people. This was after college, during college I was still too new and timid to try anything. But after I was more independent, I understood that I could and had to be the one to change things. And I guess my emptiness was something I felt I could change.

My first girlfriend, really my only girlfriend, was Lila. Believe it or not, we met at a convenience store. She was working a night shift there, and I was buying something—I can’t remember what exactly. It probably wasn’t that important. Anyway, Lila was the one to initiate things. I’m so horrible at starting conversations let alone this kind of a relationship, but she made it easy to participate. She made a joke about the weather, which I guess I didn’t find all that funny at the time. I didn't laugh, and it was a bit awkward. Later I learned that she didn’t think the joke was funny either, and that she said it mostly to be more engaging with customers. Managers liked that kind of thing. I guess my genuine response struck a chord with her, because a few weeks later—and after a few more trips to the convenience store—we went on our first date. I invited her out, as is customary of the boyfriend, and we went to see a parade that was passing through. It may seem like a dumb idea for a date, but I really wanted to avoid going out for dinner. I thought it would be best to break my hollowness to her slowly. The date was largely a success, and I felt pretty good about Lila.

Eventually, I felt that I should let her know about my hollow insides. To be honest, I was somewhat surprised she hadn’t caught on, seeing as I didn’t breathe or eat. But I’d managed to avoid eating, and I could fake breathe if I wanted to.

“Lila, there’s something I want to tell you,” was how I started. I think she thought I was referencing something else, and she got a little flustered. I hadn't dropped to one knee or anything, so I guess it was more on her mind than on mine. But any ideas of solid commitment were a bit too far away at that time, I wasn’t ready for that. I stopped pretending to breathe then, for a whole five minutes while she waited. I had hoped she would realize that I wasn’t breathing and be concerned or something, but she just looked annoyed at being kept waiting.

“What is it, Mic,” she finally demanded.

“What—” I stuttered and pointed to my mouth, wondering if she was really that oblivious. “You didn’t see? I don’t need to breathe.”

“Was that you were going to tell me?” I could tell by her expression that I had been wrong, she'd observed and come to some sort of assumption about me already.

“You knew?”

“Jeez Mic!” she sighed, her scented breath rushing out in frustration. “I thought—”

There was a long silence, and she looked away. She shook her head after a moment and then looked back at me.

“Yeah, I knew you weren’t quite normal.” She quickly added, “but ‘normal’ is a dumb word, nobody’s normal.”

“Wait,” I still couldn’t quite get over her lack of surprise. “You knew this whole time that I was hollow?”

“Is that what it is?” she asked, suddenly more interested.

“What?”

“I knew you didn’t breathe, and I’d never seen you eat, but—” she started looking me over, searching for some clue to my emptiness. “You’re really hollow?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I think I would have sighed if I could have.

“Wow,” she murmured. She was still studying me, and I started to get uncomfortable. It probably showed, because she apologized. “This doesn’t change anything, you know.”

I guess I should have been elated that she had said this, after all, the fear of the opposite response was why I had waited to tell her. But instead, I just felt, well—blank? Yeah, I didn’t really feel different. Nothing had changed, I was still hollow and she was still my girlfriend.

Me and Lila carried on for a while longer, maybe a year, if I remember correctly. She was a nice girl, and I enjoyed spending time with her. I think I was a good boyfriend—she never said otherwise—because before long, she actually wanted to take our relationship further. Usually, there are two responses to this, one is fear and the other is excitement. From what I’ve heard, it’s more often a mixture of the two. I didn’t feel either when she brought it up. And that made me afraid. I could see the light in her eyes, a passion and—and love, I guess? It was what my friends had probably seen in their spouses when they’d had similar discussions. But I knew that, if Lila looked close enough, she probably wouldn’t see that same light in my eyes. So I hesitated, told her I needed to think about it. I think this upset her, and it was a few days before we talked again.

By the time we did talk, it was to announce that I was breaking up with her. After our last talk, I had considered a future with Lila, really thought over the next sixty-ish years, and decided it wouldn’t be right to do that to her. We may have enjoyed each other at the moment, and maybe she found something in me that would last, but I knew I couldn’t. I was hollow, nothing stayed in me. In the past, I’d floated between hobbies and passions, never really finding something I could call my identity. Here I learned that I was the same in regard to love. So I was honest with her, and our relationship ended. I don’t think she understood very well, but then again, how could she? How could anyone really know what it’s like to be hollow? They didn’t need to understand, I just needed them to understand that I understood.

I almost stepped into another relationship a few years later, but I caught it in time. Her name was Diane, and according to her I encouraged her feelings. However it happened—I’m still a bit confused over it all—she wanted us to be something. I remembered Lila, imagined a relationship with Diane would end similarly, and told her no. We weren’t quite so far along as Lila and I had been (I didn't even know we'd gone anywhere) so Diane took it a lot better. I think she started dating someone else a few weeks later.

And that was the end of my explorations into romantic relationships. I decided they just weren’t for me, and moved forward.

I did think of Lila from time to time, wondering what might have happened if we'd gone further. But it never made me doubt that I had made the right decision. She was probably much better off with someone else, somebody with a heart.

If you’re curious, I never resented people who did have relationships. A lot of people do, you know. They tend to think that because someone has something they should be able to have it too. But I learned from a young age that people are born differently. Not everybody can and should have everything, and it’s petty to envy people who have what you don’t.

Chasing Cheese

The next chapter of my journey was somewhat confusing. It dealt a lot with what people like to call the rat race. I never really understood the term until I wandered up to the roof of a building once. From above, I could see why some would compare people to rats. The way they scurried around, whether to make a deal, go to work, go home, or take a break; each one was chasing the same goal. The majority would shove and claw each other in order to get the cheese. I decided to enter the race, to see if the cheese was worth all the effort.

I set to work, putting all other aspects of my life aside. I rose to the top pretty quickly, but in all fairness, I had a bit of a leg up on the competition. While they had to eat and breathe, I could steamroll through every hour of the day. What’s more, I didn’t have relationships or families to divide my attention. So it was pretty logical that I became the top pick for some more prestigious locations. My work was credited as revolutionary, and I became something really big in the eyes of a lot of people. And, as you might’ve guessed, the biggest and smartest rat gets the cheese. I accumulated quite a bit of wealth, not enough to be considered rich, but enough to have “made it.”

Big rats with lots of cheese tend to hang out with other big rats, almost like they're comparing their cheese. So I started stepping into higher social circles. They were fun at first, all the nice houses and fancy toys. Everybody had something different, bought with the same cheese. It made me wonder what I could get with my cheese. So I started getting, and got quite a lot. I bought whatever seemed impressive to me, and invited the big rats I knew to come and see. In turn, they invited me to see their purchases. To my understanding, I was doing pretty well in the rat race. But I was still just as hollow as when I was born. The fast cars and exotic parties were fine for everyone else, they seemed to be content. But I decided I wouldn’t—or couldn’t—be satisfied by them. So I left the rich circles and stopped spending so frivolously.

I started seeing people as people again, rather than rats, and went back to the normal Mic I had always been.

A Full Life

The next chapter still belongs to my work but in a different way. I remember, several years into my job, one research subject we had. She had a psychological problem where she would experience sudden bursts of—well, everything. She would feel angry, happy, sad, and confident all at once. It was too much for her to process, and she often ended up either hurting herself or just completely crashing. She had therapists and medications, the whole nine yards, but me and one of my coworkers were assigned to study her condition and see if we could learn anything new.

Her situation fascinated me for several reasons. The first reason comes with my job: it’s a unique situation and I want to know why it’s happening. The second is because she was so full of everything, whether she liked it or not, while I was so empty. And I know that my emptiness was different, but I couldn’t help but feel that it wasn’t so different. At times I did feel an emptiness other than my missing organs and insides. I wondered what it would be like to feel everything at once. In her case, it was obviously horrible and really debilitating. But nonetheless, I was somewhat envious of her.

Me and my coworker studied her chemically and neurologically, looking for any thread to follow, but we came up confused and empty most of the time. Like me, she seemed permanently, irreversibly different. My coworker didn’t like to think so, he was confident that we could find some breakthrough, but I didn’t hold out as much hope. I felt that this was her issue, just like my hollowness was mine. No one could fix her and she would have to learn to cope on her own. This may have been a heartless conclusion, but I didn’t have a heart. That was the joke I made with my coworker, at least. He didn’t think it was funny.

I resigned from her case, although I continued to keep tabs on her. I didn’t see the need to keep searching for something I knew wouldn’t be found, but was curious whether she would make it or not. It wasn’t at all abnormal that someone like her wouldn’t make it. But that didn’t fall into my job category, that was for her therapists and family members, as well as herself, to decide.

Several months after I stopped studying her, I learned that she didn’t make it. During one episode, she acted erratically and fell out of a window. At least, that was how I heard it. I questioned whether she actually fell. She could have just as easily jumped or even been pushed. After all, she was likely difficult to live with. If she had so little control over her emotions, it would make sense that she would have a difficult time controlling violent instincts as well. Violence can encourage a person to do almost anything. But I decided to stick with the first assumption. It was more likely that she jumped.

My coworker took the news pretty hard, even though it hadn’t been his fault at all. He’d put a lot of effort into her case, although he gave up in the end too. I could see why he'd be disappointed that all our work had been for nothing, but it seemed a bit deeper than that to him.

“We were just supposed to study the data,” I told him once after he'd been silent for several hours.

“But the reason we were studying it was so that she—” he paused, “so that she wouldn’t do something like this.”

I didn’t answer immediately. I didn’t quite see it like he did. I understood, in theory, his point of view, but didn’t quite accept it. We had been tasked with studying the data, that was why I had gone to college, and that’s the job I had signed up for. Yes, her conclusion was unfortunate—although maybe somewhat easier for herself and everyone involved—that she went like she did, but I didn’t think we should take any blame for it. In all respects, we'd done our job successfully.

“Some things can’t be understood,” I said, although I quickly learned that he wasn’t in the mood to be reconciled.

“Just stop, okay?” he replied, somewhat agitated. “We can’t just brush this off as a failed experiment! A woman died! And she—” he sighed, and his hands were shaking slightly. That had never happened to me, especially not with work. “She was our patient, Mic. Not just a research subject.”

I didn’t argue that she had been turned over to us as a research subject, that the only interaction we had with her was collecting data and studying her files. I could have proved that she was a research subject, but I realized that wouldn’t have done any good to anyone. I did puzzle over his guilt for a while, even more so after he left. I guess he couldn’t continue researching knowing that he hadn’t been able to stop her from ending it. Even though it hadn't been in his job description. I didn’t get it, but he seemed really broken up, so I backed off and didn't contact him.

The job wasn’t quite as fun without him, but it was more interesting. I started to wonder if people saw what I was doing as more than science. Maybe they looked to it for healing, for answers. They looked to me.

It was strange, and it made me feel something. A bit of my hollow chest swelled, but not for very long. After about a month, the effect wore off, overloaded by a continuous flow of research subjects. No matter how many problems I solved, the world seemed to have a million waiting behind it. I noticed as well that no one had a condition quite like mine, and while it felt good to find answers for someone, I still had none. My own studies were unsuccessful, and I could only conclude that the purpose for my hollowness just hadn't arrived yet.

This brings me to the present, to who I am today. If I’m being honest, not much has changed since I was born. I’m still hollow, but I’m still alive and operating pretty much the same as anyone else. More effectively, in a lot of ways, actually. I’m not sure what my hollowness means yet—I’m sure it has some kind of purpose. I keep my eyes open for new opportunities and things that make me feel a bit fuller, but nothing tends to stay with me very long. Maybe it's not worth looking, maybe I should settle for what I have and just get used to being empty. But maybe I will find something to fill me up, maybe one day it will make sense. I don't know, I wish I did.

One Day

Mic stepped onto the beach, the contrast of the vibrant blue ocean and the pale brown sand stopping him for a moment. He wanted to smell, he’d always heard that the smell of the ocean was salty, unforgettable, and distinct. But, he never could smell seeing as he didn’t breathe in; it just didn’t work. But the sand was warm beneath his bare feet, and he was happy that he could at least feel that. His inability to smell and the warmth of the sand didn’t seem to matter as much once he started onto the beach.

It was a quiet day, he'd picked a weekday and less populated beach so he could avoid the crowds. He didn't like having to walk over and around half-awake tanners and giddy children. Today the beach was almost empty, apart from a gathering of seagulls lazily gliding above.

Mic made his way further down the beach, his hands in his pockets. He stopped to look out at the waves, gently pressing forward in their never-ending march to shore. There was something in the water, something calling him forward.

What’s under the waves?

He passed the few beach-loafers and small children at play, walking toward the water absent of any thought apart from the gentle murmurs of the sea. These people, whether they were swimmers or sun-tanners; they didn’t go beyond the surface of the sea. They didn’t venture into the deeper recesses, they probably didn’t even think of all the life that was just several hundred feet away from them.

“Life,” Mic murmured, ideas suddenly lapping up with the seafoam. Was it really life? Fish don’t breathe, at least, not like humans do. Water flowed through them, almost like they were hollow, just sifting in and out. Were they really alive?

Mic stood on the shore a minute, trying to look past the waves. He felt a surge of something—if he had a heart, he guessed it would’ve begun beating quicker. His mind, wherever it was, started to work and accelerate, toying with the ideas forming. Mic took a step forward, the water reaching a little past his ankles. And then he took another, reaching knee-depth. And then another, and another, until—fully clothed—all that remained above water was his head. And then he fully committed to the idea. He stepped forward again, the seawater enveloping his head. He opened his mouth, the seawater filling the empty spaces in his body, making him a part of the ocean, just like the fish.

His eyes had been closed, partially in fear, and partially due to the warning that the seawater would sting his eyes. But, once he was fully under for about thirty seconds, he opened them.

The water did sting, but not enough to make him close his eyes. The world was a blur, a great big blue blur. He made out the sand beneath his feet and, stretching forward, felt that it was much more vague and simple now. It wasn't so coarse and rigid, and it gave way to his feet, dancing away in clouds as he stepped. The blueness of the ocean scaled between the deeper water and the surface, bright whitish-blue at the surface and a deeper blackening blue toward the horizon. Mic held out his hands. They too were blurry, simple shapes and outlines of hands. Who could tell that they were really hands? In his blurred vision, they could be small octopi or starfish. With a smile, he took another step forward.

His movements were slow and groggy, surreal and dream-like. At times he leapt, floating for a moment before he again returned to the ocean floor. But when he walked, he felt normal, as if the sea was where he was supposed to be. His hollowness had a purpose here, and he was full of something.

He saw a shape in the distance, colorful and ranging in an uneven line. He couldn’t be certain, but he imagined that it was a reef, and made his way toward it. Colors darted away from him, blurred figures he could only guess were fish. He walked among them, through them, and to the reef. He was much less afraid now than he’d ever been, he doubted that even the most seasoned divers were as confident as he was at the moment. He reached out and touched the reef, amazed at the contrast between the rough coral and soft stationary sea homes. Some of the foggy shapes felt like tendrils or gooey jello, and others were like prickly stones. It was a world far more feeling than he’d felt above.

Gently but quickly, a shadow fell over him and the reef. Mic looked up to see a shape pass over him. It was dark and gray, gently drifting beside the reef. It was long and thick, a shark, maybe. But Mic wasn’t afraid. He reached out and touched it, feeling its coarse skin against his soft hands. It was magnificently calm and serene, not reeling away from his touch as he'd expected. As the shape curved around one corner of the reef, small ribbons of fish darted around him, some going to the coral and some leaving.

Mic didn’t care whether he lived or died. He stepped away from the reef, back onto the soft sand, and fell backward. His descent was gentle and slow, and he eventually was laid softly on the seafloor. He spread his arms and legs out, looking up at the surface, the blurred light rippling through the waves.

This was enough, the cool sea around him and the water filling his body; it brought some sort of peace. His hollowness was full, although his mind still free and light as it ever had been. His mind went to his parents, to the few friends he had kept above. He thought of them for a few moments, wondering what they would think. They would understand, surely they would know that he was home.

Mic smiled, wondering why it had taken so long to find the sea. It didn't matter now, nothing did. Gently and peacefully, he closed his eyes.