The Lantern and the Mistake

Soren's aunt had told them to sit on the stools and not touch the jars. Then she vanished down a row of shelves with a clipboard and forgot they existed.

The jar in front of Maya was the size of a fishbowl. The thing inside it was the ugliest animal she had ever seen, and she had seen a lot of pictures of ugly animals.

"Anglerfish," Soren read off the little card. "The one with the lantern. There's a stalk on its head that glows in the deep water. To pull prey in."

"It's got a lump," said Maya.

"It's got a lot of lumps. It's mostly lumps."

"No. Here." She pointed at the side of the big fish, near the belly. "There's a little one stuck on. Like a second fish. A baby."

Soren leaned in. There was a smaller shape, no bigger than his thumb, attached to the female's flank. Not floating beside her. Attached. Where it met her body the skin went smooth and continuous, the way two candles look when they melt into one.

"Maybe it's eating her," Soren said. "A parasite that got pickled with her."

"Then why's it pointed the wrong way? A parasite would bite and hang on. This one's facing into her, like it's diving in and got stuck halfway."

Soren read the card again, slower. The card said the species name and the depth and the year. It did not say anything about a baby.

"Get your aunt," said Maya.

"She'll say don't touch the jars."

They found her three aisles down, frowning at a label. She was a marine biologist, but the kind who cared about exactly one thing, and the one thing was not anglerfish.

"That little fish," Maya said. "On the big one. Is it her baby?"

His aunt glanced over without putting down her clipboard. "Anglerfish don't carry babies like that. They release eggs into the water." She started to turn away. Then she stopped, the way a grown-up stops when their own answer doesn't sit right. "Which jar?"

She came back with them. She looked into the jar for a long moment.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, that's a good one. That's not a baby." She tapped the glass once near the small shape. "That's the male."

"It's tiny," said Soren.

"It's supposed to be. In these, the male is hundreds of times smaller than the female. And he can't feed himself well. His whole job, his entire body, is built to find her in the dark." She crouched to their level, which she never did. "So when he finds her, he bites on. And then he doesn't let go. Ever."

"Like holding hands," Maya said.

"More than that. He bites, and his mouth fuses to her skin. Then their tissues grow together. Then their blood vessels join up. His blood and her blood become one loop. He stops being a separate animal. He gets everything he needs through her."

Soren had gone very quiet. "What about his eyes?"

"He loses them. He doesn't need them anymore. He loses his fins, most of his organs. He shrinks down to almost nothing." She straightened up. "He ends up being basically one organ attached to her side. A part of her. She carries him for the rest of her life."

"That's horrible," said Soren.

"Is it?" said Maya. She had her face right against the glass now, close enough that her breath fogged it. "He was alone in the deepest, darkest part of the whole ocean. No light. No food. Almost no other anglerfish anywhere near. And he found her. And then he never had to be alone again."

Soren's aunt looked at Maya like she'd just done a trick.

"How does he find her at all?" Soren asked. "If it's that dark and that empty?"

"Smell, mostly. He's almost nothing but nose and the muscle to swim toward her," his aunt said. "In a place where you could swim your whole life and never meet anyone. He's built for one thing. Finding the one fish that fits him." Her radio crackled and a voice said her name. She made a face. "Don't. Touch. The jars." And she was gone again.

Maya and Soren stayed bent over the glass.

"Count them," Maya said suddenly.

"Count what?"

"The lumps. You said she's mostly lumps. But what if some of the lumps aren't lumps."

Soren moved the jar a quarter turn, carefully, by the lid, not the glass. On the far side, half-hidden in the curve of her belly, was a second small shape. Smooth where it met her. Pointed inward. Then, lower, a third, so worn down it was barely a bump with a faint line around it where the two bloods had joined.

"Three," Soren breathed. "She's got three of them in her."

"Three that found her," said Maya. "In the whole dark ocean. Three of them swam at nothing, toward one smell, and got there."

Soren reached for the notebook in his back pocket. He drew the female first, the big ugly lantern of her, and then the three small shapes melting into her side, and beside each one he wrote a tiny number. One. Two. Three.

"I keep thinking about the ones that didn't," he said. "That swam the whole time and never found anyone."

"Don't," said Maya. "Think about these three. They were the smallest, weirdest, most wrong-looking thing in the sea. Built for exactly one impossible job. And they did it."

Soren looked at his own drawing. At the three numbers. At the worn-down third one that had been a whole separate animal once, with eyes, swimming alone, and was now a part of something larger that would carry it forever.

"There's a smell out there right now," he said slowly. "In the dark. A mile down. And something is swimming toward it that has never seen anything in its life."

"Yeah," said Maya. "Right now. While we're standing here."

They both turned and looked at the jar, and then past it, down the long dim aisle of jars, all those sealed lit shapes that had each come up out of a dark they would never see.

Soren set his pencil down on the open page and did not pick it back up. In the jar the third male held to her side, the line where they had joined catching the light.