Remember that little stationery shop Grandma used to take us to, opposite the pier? They sold maps, too.Ĭaitlin remembered, and it might have been fun, were it not for the web of bribery and corruption that characterized what remained of the postal system. Morrie loved fiddling around with stamps and envelopes, always had. Silent and fleet and loyal, the orcas of now.īefore the Internet shut down completely, that was, and they’d had to resort to that quaint anachronism: letters home. We are the orcas, Morrie had said to her in his last proper email. Just because she didn’t know where her brother was didn’t mean he was dead, though it was three years and more since she’d heard from him, and even that final communication had not been from Morrie, not directly, just an automated confirmation from his division office, that the Neptune was still intact, still plowing the ocean’s waters like a Minke whale. The Void, Morrie called it, with a capital ‘V’ like in the monster movies. Part of the side railing had come away, leaving a dizzying blank space like a hole cut into a cereal packet, a window into thin air. They weren’t supposed to go out on the balcony because Gander said it was dangerous. If the subs were still out there, she told herself, then Morrie was, too.Ĭaitlin remembered how as children they had stood together on the narrow cast iron balcony of their grandparents’ house in Helensburgh scanning the gunmetal waters of the loch below, fighting over Grandma’s binoculars, playing at spies. Officially they had been destroyed, torpedoed in the North Atlantic during the first six months of the clampdown, though Caitlin allowed herself to believe that someday they would come home, streaming nose to tail up the firth like salmon nearing their spawning grounds. The submarines were gone, had been gone for years.

Neptunes cove corals