Eyes Shut in the Creek

The creek was the color of strong tea, and Soren could not see the bottom of it.

His great-aunt had said, if you stay very still and keep the torch off, you might see one. Then she had gone back up to the house because the mosquitoes were finding her ankles. So Soren sat on a flat cold rock with his knees against his chest and the torch dark in his hand, and he waited.

The water smelled of mud and eucalyptus. Somewhere a frog made a sound like a plucked rubber band. He was watching the surface so hard that his eyes started inventing ripples where there weren't any.

Then there was one that was real.

It came from under the far bank, a low brown wake, and at the front of it a flat dark shape broke the surface for half a second. A bill. Wider and softer looking than he expected, more like a wet leaf than a duck's beak.

The platypus dove.

Soren leaned forward. The animal was hunting along the bottom now, he could tell by the trail of mud clouds it kicked up, little brown blooms rising through the tea-colored water. It zigzagged. It stopped. It swung its bill left, then right, sweeping it side to side like a boy searching a dark room with his hands.

And here was the thing Soren could not stop looking at.

Every time the platypus surfaced for a breath, its eyes were shut. Not squinting. Shut. There was a groove in its face, a fold of skin, and the eyes and the ears were folded away inside it, sealed. Its nostrils, up on top of the bill, clapped closed the instant it went under.

Down there in the mud it had no eyes. It had no ears. It had no nose.

And it was hunting.

Soren's hand tightened on the dark torch. He almost clicked it on, to help the animal see, and then he understood that light would do nothing at all for a creature that had chosen to close its eyes on purpose.

He watched it happen four more times. Dive. Sweep. Stop. Snap. The bill would fan across the mud, back and forth, and then jerk sideways fast, and when the platypus came up it was chewing. There was a shrimp in the creek somewhere, or a wriggling insect larva buried in the silt, invisible, soundless, hidden inside the mud in the dark, and the platypus went straight to it with its face sealed shut.

He kept trying to figure out what it was using. Not sight. Not sound. Not smell. He listed them off in his head and crossed each one out, and when he had crossed out all the ones a person uses, there was nothing left on the list.

So it was using something not on the list.

Soren sat with that. The frog plucked its rubber band. The mud bloomed and settled. He watched the bill sweep, and he thought about what a shrimp actually is when you are down in the black water with no eyes. A shrimp is a body. A body is muscles. And muscles, when they move, when a buried larva twitches to burrow deeper, do something Soren had felt once at the doctor when they stuck little pads to his arm and a machine drew his heartbeat as a jagged line.

Muscles make electricity.

Every flick of a shrimp's tail was a tiny spark in the water. Too small for Soren to feel. Too small for the shrimp to know it was giving itself away. But not too small for that wide soft bill, sweeping side to side, reading the creek the way Soren's eyes read a page.

The platypus was not fishing in the dark. To the platypus there was no dark. The whole creek bottom was lit up, not with light, with life. Every hidden thing that had a muscle was glowing to it, a field of little living sparks flickering on and off in the mud, and it moved between them with its eyes closed because its eyes had nothing to add.

Soren's skin went up in goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold.

He thought about his own hand around the torch. His hand was full of muscles. His hand was, right now, sparking. If he put his hand in the water the platypus would feel him, the way he might feel someone strike a match in a dark room, would know exactly where his fingers were by the electricity leaking off them.

He had a whole sense he had never once used. He had been carrying an entire language his body wrote in every second, the flicker of every muscle, and he had never known he was speaking it, because he had no way to listen. The platypus had the ears for it. Soren had only the voice.

He wondered how many other things were being said around him all the time in signals he had no organ to catch. Whether the moths finding the porch light were reading something he couldn't. Whether the whole night was crowded with messages, thick as the mosquitoes, and he was standing deaf in the middle of them thinking it was quiet.

The platypus surfaced one more time, close to his rock now, close enough that he could see the water beading off the leather of its bill. Its eyes stayed shut. It wasn't looking at him.

But Soren, sitting very still with his own faint electric hands, knew that it could tell he was there.

He held completely still and let it read him.

Slowly, he lowered one hand toward the creek, fingers spread, and stopped just above the surface, close enough to feel the cool coming off the water. The platypus paused mid-sweep. Its bill turned, unhurried, and pointed straight at his hovering fingers, and held there, aimed at the sparks it could feel and he could not.