And every time we’d touch a strand of jelly to the underside of our tongues (They said Sylvia would hit up in her vagina and we believed it), the tiny little stingers that got us high would break off and swim into us, and make themselves at home.
The motel we’re staying in, we have the living room in the front and a bedroom in the back. At night, when there isn’t any traffic, you can hear the sea. Everyone I know is in the hospital, or they’ve left for the coast.
Emily could still talk when we got here, so when the news hit, she was able to call me from the other room. I came in, and she shushed me and pointed at the screen. “They keep showing it over and over.” Her voice was choked and it was all I could do not to put my arm around her.
The image on the screen was Brad’s big, refrigerated tank, one end bubbling furiously from the aerator. Through the one glass wall, you could see a thick, brown mat growing on top, thinning to threads of clear jelly underneath. Animals float in the chill water, imbedded, threads of jelly bursting from their heads and hindquarters. They are not dead; they shift constantly but very, very slowly. Primitive motion. Mice and dogs and cats and one nude human body, pale, thin, clothed in jelly.
“Shit,” I said. “That’s our house. That’s Jason.”
Brad, microphones in his face, orange jumpsuit, looks awful; he’s crying. “I swear, I didn’t know this…I didn’t know what to do. He crawled in there and he was still alive, and he’s dead now, right? When they took him out, they killed him. I was the one who took care of Jason–”
The way they cut him off, he must have started swearing.
Now we knew we weren’t going home. It was settled.
When Emily seemed asleep, before her jelly came out, I cupped her breast. The nipple pushed into the palm of my hand and made me think of a kitten nosing for a caress. I drew my hand away, filled with shame at my act and resentment that Emily’s body still remembered me, even if Emily had forgotten. I don’t understand why she won’t let me go, but I understand why I’m staying. Hope is a bitch.
There’s a booklet, a ‘zine I made the spring Emily and I got together. I called it “Deep Blue” and Xeroxed it onto light blue paper, and embarrassed goosebumps just lifted the hair on my arms. Every time a friend asked for a copy, I gave them a handful and they made their way around. Sometimes, I’d find a copy in someone’s bathroom and get a chance to wave it around and say, “I did this.” I talk about the specimen they found in the Smithsonian from an old Antarctic expedition, claim it was a jelly-infected penguin. It could have been. And there’s something I found from a website for fishermen, talking about ghost nets.
Drift nets get loose from time to time, walls of plastic mesh moving on their own through the ocean, harvesting for nothing but rot. They call them “ghost nets”. So, when the strange things started showing up on sonar, unmoving schools of fish with dolphins floating among them, orcas and seals in an unmoving mass in the dark of the ocean, they figured they were ghost nets.
And when some boats that reported those strange things disappeared, the fishermen figured ghost nets were bad luck. Then they found out some ghost nets had been overgrown with something strange. Jelly. Turns out a polluted, overfished ocean turns into a slime farm—jellyfish, medusas, salps, and so on and so forth are opportunists that thrive in the areas man cleared out and poisoned. That’s what they think is happening. Jellyheads have other ideas.
I printed the story over a faint photograph of Emily on jelly. I called it “Oneirovore”. That’s what I think the jelly needs from the animals it infects. I think it eats our dreams. And isn’t it just too perfect the way jelly uses the mammalian diving reflex? Of course, I’m a fucking jellyhead and that’s the kind of thing we say.
The jelly organisms are colonial mesozoans, parasitic relatives of jellyfish and the other slimes. They aren’t a single animal; they’re a self-contained ecosystem. The stingers, the nematocysts, can’t penetrate human skin. You need to touch them to a mucus membrane.
At first, jelly was like jenkum, another fake drug the news gets panicked about. If you were actually doing it, the first news stories were hilarious. Then they found the way it entrained people’s brains. The mirror cells, the areas of the brain that allow us to understand other people by mimicking their hypothetical behavior, enlarged and became more active. There was talk of using jelly as therapy for sociopaths.
Jelly was too cheap and easy to cultivate to interest the investment class of criminals. And nobody ever got mugged by a jellyhead. After crack and meth and heroin, it was such a fucking relief.
It took a couple of years for the infections to advance to a stage where people started noticing anything was wrong. And let’s be serious. Not everyone was as honest with their doctors as they could have been.
Now I’ll be honest. I talk about jellyhead love, but Jason wasn’t my friend. He was just an asshole I had to put up with because I wanted to be around Brad and Brad’s jelly. Getting high and crawling into the tank is exactly the kind of thing that creepy little moron would do, and it’s different than what Emily and I are doing.
I can hear the noises, the slicks and bubbles as Emily’s jelly draws back in. I don’t like to look. In a few minutes, Emily is going to stand up. Then she’ll get her sun dress off the back of the chair, put on her flip-flops with the daisies on the toe-strap, and we’ll walk down to the beach, walk toward the lighthouse until we’re alone.
Then we’ll wade out into the water. And I know Emily. When the waves hit her, she’ll be scared. She’ll reach for my hand and, when I take it, she’ll hold onto me for protection, and I’ll help her under the waves until we get out far enough to swim. We will dive into the dark, a soft place where noises are all muffled by distance, take our place in the ghost net, and I will go to sleep and never be lonely again.
BIG BRO
By Arlene J. Yandug
Arlene J. Yandug was born in Bukidnon, a region in the southern part of the Philippines. She teaches literature at Xavier University; paints blooms, clouds and stardust. Like her paintings, many of her poems reflect local colour and landscapes. While generally cheery, she sometimes dabbles in surreal writing, especially after reading grim or gothic books, or when she is terribly, terribly upset.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories have appeared in places such as Fantasy Magazine, The Book of Cthulhu, Evolve 2 and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. She’s even been nominated for a literary award or two…and won some of them. Find her at: silviamoreno-garcia.com.