J. Condra Smith
We mainline toxins into the plankton’s water supply. We record declining growth rates. Populations teetering on extinction. The idea is to forecast the world of tomorrow. How much oxygen-producing plankton might we lose if pollution continues, unchecked? Can the planet even survive with a whole missing lung? “Da da da,” Jules’s mixtape informs. Really, it’s a playlist, but Jules comes from the male genus of I put this together, just so you could hear the soundtrack of exactly right now. Every song unseasonably chipper. That’s Jules. Trying to keep my spirits up. Could be, “Da Da Da” is his soundtrack for, “Here’s to you still being alive.”
On the microscope’s LCD, we watch the death throes of our simulated ocean. Zooplankton twitching under stress. Phytoplankton cell walls rupturing. Jules becomes uncharacteristically somber. It’s not science fiction: you really can see the future. But I realize it’s not the ocean’s future he’s looking at. I become aware of my own twitching fingers as I fumble with the microscope’s focus.
I often think about creatures with otherworldly verve and longevity. Bowhead whales still alive with Moby Dick-era harpoons encrusted in their flesh. Or Greenland sharks, the living contemporaries of Shakespeare. Those seer, milky eyes. Some born today who will see the year 2500. Creatures that might survive everything we have to throw at them.
My diagnosis is hereditary. As a young girl, I watched as it slowly cut off Dad’s neural highways, incinerating the bridges to his body. To the outside world. At first, I rejected my own symptoms outright. Taking creatine, steadying my hands against solid surfaces, making involuntary movements seem intentional. These habits formed an almost-language—a semiotics of denial—until the symptoms interrupted it all at a volume I couldn’t ignore.
It’s our third collaboration. By now, Jules and I have fallen comfortably, sometimes irritatingly, into sync. Even the silences feel companionable. Like we’ve settled into the contented, burned-out peace of the long-married. And all while bypassing the passionate heartache of the newly-in-love.
I’ve learned of fungal species whose bodies unspool across millennia of growth, ultimately spanning kilometers of underground earth. Older still is an aspen colony, a single organism masquerading as a forest. Forty thousand genetically-identical trunks. One root system. Fourteen thousand years in the making.
It was always our plan to submit the next research proposal together. Then Jules tells me. He’s accepted an invitation. “From the University of Sydney.” He says I’ll be brilliant alone, or with another colleague. “I just have nothing more to contribute to my work. Or to you, really.” His eyes well up and he smiles at the floor. Once, he asked me out over schnapps and a concoction he’d call a martini dinkum. His hopes were always fated to tank. The way I watched my dad age prematurely, his clock speeding him to an early deathbed. Maybe my emotional anatomy was time’s second victim. All those requisite parts used for reaching out, pulling close. Parts that continue receding with every gain the disease makes.
“Rock Lobster” cranks up from the lab’s speakers. Jules always keeps his music flush against the sixty-decibel mark. Anything to keep our research untainted. Once I say, “Doesn’t the world deserve to know how The Cure affects plankton reproduction?”
“That’s next project,” he says. He stammers after the word next. A silence grows between us.
Some creatures are unfathomably ancient. Possibly ageless. Among them, the hydra: minuscule and unnoticed, yet abounding in all the lakes and rivers you’ve ever seen. Hydras’ stem-cell composition allows them to regenerate, without limit, until the end of all tomorrows.
***
It happens on one of our last days working together. We’ve just concluded our study in apocalyptic fashion. A pollutant cocktail, concentrated to worst-case estimates. Potent enough to hit the reset button on all life in the tank. You couldn’t get more doomsday results with a demolition crew. Ten water samples and nothing but inert blooms of krill and copepods.
It’s not until the second-to-last sample that we see them. Bulbous gelatin bodies no bigger than a pupil. Translucent except for the ember-red of their organs. Tentacles, like dozens of withered filaments. What I immediately noticed was their movement. A jittering through the toxic stew. Injured, but alive.
I’ve often heard of researchers finding turritopsis dohrnii in their samples. Inevitable that they’d turn up in ours someday. The tiny jellyfish had found their way into plankton blooms from Australia to the Caribbean. Amazing how abundant a miracle can be. But unlike other immortals, T. dohrnii don’t age forever into the future. They instead restart the clock of their life completely. When aged, sick, or injured, T. dohrnii undergo a kind of reverse-development: tentacles receding into their hoods. Damaged cells cannibalized. Their adult selves winnowing away in the current. As uncanny as a butterfly tucking its wings back into a chrysalis, to re-emerge as a caterpillar.
***
I keep reliving our last day. The many goodbyes we made to forestall the last one. I still feel the twist of his fingers through my hair. How they dug, on and on, until I thought he’d reach my skull. How the silence told us when the last goodbye came. The one we couldn’t bring ourselves to say. I glance at the lab’s empty spaces, try to fill the silence Jules left. I wonder if we ever know what we need most, when we most need to know it. Still, all those mangled parts to account for. Parts just whole enough to reach for someone else, while too injured to actually reach them.
Now, I look after my tank of tiny miracles. I fret with my phone. Thumb poised over the call button. I fight to still my quaking hands, provide clean water, hatchery shrimp eggs. I pocket the phone, call button untouched. I record my observations. Perhaps, someday, I’ll be able to call. For now, I look for changes in tentacle length, hood and manubrium structures. I’ll keep watch. Waiting for the metamorphosis-to-come.
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J. Condra Smith (he/him) is a queer writer with roots in Mexico and the U.S. Ottessa Moshfegh awarded him the 2025 Stella Kupferberg Short Story Prize. His fiction has appeared in Peatsmoke, Fiction International, Defenestration, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from The University of Maryland, where he also taught creative writing.