The Jar That Went Backwards

The bus could not leave because the road had flooded, so the whole class got herded back inside the little aquarium, dripping, and told to wait.

Maya was already not waiting. She had found a tank near the gift shop with a handwritten label that said NOT FOR SALE, which was a strange thing to write on an animal.

Soren came over because she had gone quiet, and Maya going quiet usually meant something.

"It's broken," Maya said.

In the tank there was almost nothing. A few threads of jelly drifting like torn plastic bags. On the glass at the bottom sat a smear of little stalks, fuzzy, pale, stuck down like moss.

"Broken how," Soren said. He liked to know which way a thing was wrong before he agreed it was wrong.

"That." Maya pointed at one drifting jelly, no bigger than a fingernail, its bell sagging, its tentacles ragged. "It's dying. Look at it."

Soren looked. She was right. The thing was coming apart, the way a flower does at the end, going soft and shapeless.

A woman in a staff polo shirt walked past with a mop and a face that said the flooded road was somehow the children's fault.

"What are those?" Soren asked her.

"Turritopsis," she said, not stopping. "Don't tap the glass." And she was gone toward the leak by the door.

Maya pressed her forehead almost to the tank. "It's sinking."

The dying jelly had drifted down. It settled on the bottom glass, near the moss-stalks, and folded in on itself until it was just a blob. A clump. Nothing.

"Okay," Soren said. He pulled out his notebook even though his sleeve was wet and the pen skidded. He wrote the time. He wrote blob, bottom left corner. He didn't know why. The inside of his head felt too small for what he was looking at and he needed somewhere to put it.

They watched the blob.

They watched it for a long time, while the storm threw rain at the windows and the rest of the class played on their phones.

The blob did not stay a blob. It flattened. It spread, thin and sticky, gripping the glass. And out of it, slowly, came a stalk. Fuzzy. Pale. Exactly like the moss-stalks already sitting there.

Maya stood up straight. "No."

"What," Soren said.

"It didn't die." Her voice had gone fast and low. "Soren, it didn't die. It went backwards."

Soren stared at the new little stalk. Then at the patch of older stalks beside it. Then back at the ragged drifting jellies up in the water.

"That's not possible," he said. Not to argue. Just to hear if it was true when he said it out loud.

"Say what you saw," Maya said. "Not what's possible. What you saw."

So Soren said it, in order, the way he wrote things. "A grown one. Falling apart. Sank. Turned into a clump. The clump turned into a stalk. The stalk is the same as the babies on the bottom."

He stopped.

"The babies come first," he said. "Stalks first. Then they bud off little jellies. Then the jellies grow up. That's the order."

"And that one," Maya said, pointing at the new stalk, "just went the wrong way down the order."

They looked at each other.

"It got old," Soren said slowly, "and instead of dying it turned itself back into a baby."

"Into the thing it was before it was ever a jelly," Maya said. "Before the start."

The staff woman came back past with her mop, and Maya caught her sleeve, which Maya would normally never do.

"That one fell down and turned into a stalk," Maya said. "The old one."

The woman finally stopped. She looked tired, and then she looked at the tank, and then something in her face changed, like she was seeing her own boring tank for the first time in a while.

"Yeah," she said. "They do that. When they're stressed. Hurt, starving, too old. Most animals, that's the end. These ones just," she made a small backward circle with her finger, "reset. Bell turns to a blob, blob turns to a polyp, polyp grows a whole new batch of jellies. Same animal. Going around again."

"How many times," Soren asked.

The woman shrugged. "Far as anyone knows? No limit. They keep finding ways to make it not work in a lab and the jellies keep doing it anyway." She tapped the NOT FOR SALE label. "That's why. Can't sell something that won't agree to be over."

She went back to her mop.

Maya hadn't moved. "No limit," she repeated.

Soren wrote it down. No limit. Then he stopped writing, because his hand had gotten strange.

"That one," he said, pointing at the oldest patch of stalks, the moss in the corner. "We don't know how old that is."

"We can't know," Maya said. "That's the thing. It could be a baby. Or it could have been a jelly a hundred times. There's no clock on it. There's no way to look at it and tell."

"It doesn't keep a record," Soren said. He looked down at his notebook, full of times and dates, every observation in its row. "It just goes around. And it doesn't write any of it down. It doesn't carry the old trips with it. Every time it's the start again, all the way new."

Maya crouched until she was level with the corner patch. The little stalks waved in the slow current, not one of them looking older than another, the new one already indistinguishable from the rest.

"Which one is the one that just did it?" she asked.

Soren checked his note. Bottom left corner. He looked at the bottom left corner. There were six stalks there now, identical, swaying together.

"I," he said, and stopped.

He could not tell them apart.

Outside, somebody shouted that the road was open and the bus was going. The class began peeling away from the windows, pulling on wet jackets, leaving.

Maya didn't get up. Soren didn't put the notebook away.

He leaned close to the glass and counted the stalks again, out loud, slowly, the way you count something to be sure, knowing already that the number would tell him nothing about which one had been a whole creature an hour ago.