Nina Y. Moragon
Sunday, prepping.
On the day of the dolphins, Anna made a week’s worth of cabbage soup. The magazine cutout said success hinged on using precise measurements. One head of cabbage, two green peppers, two cans of tomatoes, one bunch of celery, three carrots, one package of mushrooms, six to eight cups of water, or vegetable cocktail. Still, she had to decide the appropriate weight of a cabbage; vegetables did not come in standard sizes.
It had been a joyous event to communicate with animals. Dolphins everywhere started talking. They knew English, Japanese, Spanish and Italian. Their accent was strange, interrupted by clicks and high pitches, but it was intelligible. One video, Anna’s favorite, had a small dolphin talking to a kayaker.
“Hi, I am dolphin. Hi, you are human. You swim in small boat. I talk to you now. Hi.” It, or he, goes back under, rehydrating, she supposed. “Hi, human, hi to you on boat. I am dolphin at water.”
“Hi, dolphin. I am Jeff.” He was off camera, holding the phone.
“No jeff. We want human. Is human and small boat a jeff?”
“I am human, human Jeff.”
But the dolphin seemed unconvinced. It dived and vanished.
As the video went viral, minutes after being uploaded, others learned the mistake. No names. Just humans.
The soup smelled like cans and water. She added black pepper, but not too much. Anna hung her bathing suit on the freezer door. The genuine challenge lay in the new rule; she could not step on the scale until juice day. She had been following a dietitian online who said that weighing constantly increased the levels of cortisol, thus causing bloating. And weight gain. She had hoped for a stomach flu, but luck had skipped her. Unlike her sister, who had gone through a rough depression, and then norovirus, losing a whopping twenty pounds in one month. It had always been like that, her sister getting things effortlessly, while Anna remained unseen.
When the soup was done, Anna had to get dressed for her weekly outing with her friend. It was always jeans that seemed to fit worse. These hugged her hips and butt, moving fat deposits over to her back and sides. She could feel it if she sat down, which, of course, had to be avoided at all costs. These were standing jeans, not sitting jeans.
***
“You know Margaritas have three hundred calories? Plus, I cannot have juice until Sunday.” Anna said to her friend, as she stood at the restaurant, eating air and ogling the complementary baskets of greasy, crunchy, salty chips landing on every table.
“Today is Sunday, but whatever.” Her friend Allele rolled her eyes and pulled out her bedazzled phone. Anna knew Allele had changed in the car, as her shift had ended only half an hour ago. She would not get caught dead in her scrubs, instead she had a yellow bodycon dress that emphasized all her perfect curves. Anna wished she knew how to carry her extra pounds like Allele did, unworried and unbothered. “Did you see the Caribbean dolphins? I don’t think they have names, that’s why the dolphin got upset. They must think him not human, because he said he was a ‘Jeff.’ Do you think it’s fake?”
“One comment said it had a glitch, right when the dolphin dives. I can’t see it. It doesn’t seem warped to me. Too small to be dolphin. That’s a harbor porpoise.” She barely shrugged. “It’s all fake, anyway.” What Anna could tell is that dolphins looked incredibly toned and slim, which was another point in favor of the pescetarian diet she had heard so much about.
Her friend pulled up a video. The Caribbean dolphins were chattier. Whole pods jumping out the water and screaming “Buenas, ¿cómo estás?” and “hey, hey” in an unorganized medley.
The night was a success. The smells were exquisite, and Anna went home excited about the start of her new diet and all the good things that would come to her if she could, for once, have some discipline.
***
Monday, cabbage soup, fruits, no bananas.
Anna didn’t know that talking to dolphins was a felony until the next morning. She sat with her plate of seventy-two grams of strawberries and scrolled into chaos.
“Did you see this bullshit?” was the first text on her screen. Allele had texted her relentlessly last night. She had been extremely tired and had crashed at around ten, missing much of the online debacle.
The kayaker had been arrested for “engaging with a marine mammal in a way that disrupts its natural behavior.” The guy, Jeff, looked strong, but not cut. She could see herself trying kayaking when it was time for her to “bulk up” a little. Then there was another video of a marine biologist from the University of Somewhere Fancy, stating that the dolphin had displayed unnatural behavior before the kayaker had interacted with it. There were dances, people jumping up and screeching “buenas, ¿cómo estás?” in a range of terrible Spanish pronunciations.
Strawberries felt like a cheat. A tinge of guilt emerged. They were too sweet, too colorful. Anna took a deep breath and remembered; these were only seven to nine calories each. But strawberries did come in various sizes, which is why using grams was such a life changing hack.
Apparently, dolphins had things to say, and people wanted to listen. Her coworkers couldn’t stop talking about it. When she saw the video of the protest forming in one of those “swim with dolphins” tourist traps, she was so distracted that she bit into a stray banana in the breakroom. The soft, white flesh of the banana came apart under the pressure of her incisors. It was that softness that jolted her system. Bananas were only allowed on Thursday, and today was Monday.
***
The summer had been dry, and authorities were urging people to stop watering the grass. But Anna filled herself with water, leading to double the average bathroom trips. This, at least, gave her the satisfaction of seeing that her pee was clear. She was detoxing. She gave herself a thin smile in the bathroom mirror.
The blond guy from legal held the elevator for her as she intended to walk past. She had, at one point, hoped for this. He smelled of copy machine ink, a whiff of manufactured minerals and warmness. Anna liked this about him.
“Pretty wild circus this morning, huh?” He jabbed the L button. “Lobby?”
“Yeah,” she said, shriller than she expected. “Do you think it’s fake?”
“Oh, I think it’s real.”
“What do you think of the Marine Mammal Protection Act?” she said, in the tone she’d once heard on NPR.
“I don’t know. I do family litigation mostly.”
The elevator dinged as the doors opened to the first floor, the sweet smell of toasted bread and vanilla making her dizzy with hunger. But Anna knew she wasn’t hungry, she was just thirsty.
“Lobby, right?” He stared at her expectantly, as if waiting for her to walk out before him.
“Yeah, sorry, thanks.” Anna walked out, sharply aware of how this shirt made her back look bigger. That’s what her ex had told her.
Anna walked one lap around the lobby, pretending to go somewhere. She had nowhere to go but the stairs. Three flights of stairs were thirty-six steps. And because she had taken the elevator, she ended up doubling her count. Seventy-two, not bad.
She sat on the empty staircase. Looking at her phone, her finger hovering over her weight tracking app. She scrolled away, unsure of what app to open, which crisis to peek into. So, she went back to her text messages. The cemetery of her social life.
“You are fun, just not my type.” 10:30 am.
“Read 10:34.”
“You unsend a message.”
“You unsend a message.”
Fun. Anna knew she was not fun.
***
Tuesday, leafy greens. No starches.
A sailing troupe named Alison, Jordan, and Ezequiel start a livestream talking with the dolphins by some unnamed island. The blond girl had hair like the sun. She looked like one of those influencers who moved to Costa Rica to eat papayas and promote a “High-energy-charged-vegan-water” pyramid scheme.
People translated in the comments, since the dolphins spoke broken Spanish, and took turns explaining the problem. It was hard to follow, as the comments moved too fast for her to focus. Yet people agreed on this general translation: gray tiny humans who lived in the deeps of the oceans were going to come to land.
Anna used a ½ measuring cup to scoop out one serving from the big red pot. The taste of canned tomatoes overpowered everything else. It had a soft boiled texture.
“Tastes like skinny,” she said to herself. It was the flavor of active weight loss, of work still needing to be done, not of winning. She always thought success would taste like key lime pie, floral and tangy. The white-bare walls flickered as her energy waned. Pink glitter bloomed in her eyelids as she passed out.
***
Wednesday, cabbage soup, boiled eggs or baked potato, non-starchy vegetables.
Anna debated this and decided this was not the time for indulgence or frivolities. The potato could be saved for a more dire time, which, according to everyone, was to come.
Today’s viral clip showed a zoomed-in video of strange orbs emerging off the coast of Boston. The orb was a perfect sphere of water, about the size of a Mini Cooper. Inside, there was a creature. Anna could almost make out where the eyes were, though the image was grainy and gray. It seemed to have long, bony arms. For a moment, it looked like the humanoid was pulling and pushing two levers while swiveling its round, bald head—as if surveying the dirty port. When it reached the end of the commercial dock, the sphere vanished into the water, as if the entire structure had dissolved.
Anna beheld donuts in the break room. There was something obscene, the way they lay exposed, gleaming under the fluorescent lights. She had packed a bag of frozen cauliflower, broccoli and carrots for lunch.
“Are you going to season that?” Her coworker asked, little triangles forming on the sides of her nose. “I remember you adding marinara and calling it pasta a few weeks ago.”
“I didn’t know how much sugar is in marinara sauce. It is almost ketchup.” Anna said, picking the carrots out.
When she opened her phone over soup that night, her usual social media app was dark. She had a text from Allele.
“Everyone left that fascist shit. They banned videos of the orbs. We are at Bluesands now, I am alleliisback.”
The new feed was nearly identical to the previous one.
No one cared about dolphins anymore. Now it was all about the globes. Hundreds, thousands. Anna imagined the aliens inside, observing and making quiet plans. They just hovered in the distance across from Boston, New York, and New Jersey. At the start of the day, people stopped and gawked at them, taking videos and selfies. People commented on other videos, “What are we doing about this? Why don’t we just shoot them down,” one bearded dude said.
Scroll.
“Imma wait for ‘em to get closer, tis why the second amendment is there,” said the next video, another guy with a fishing hat.
Scroll.
“I am going to be a mermaid!” said an adorable toddler with brown skin and blue eyes. Anna wondered if her mom had told her to say that.
Scroll.
“Since soon I might be cooking for our new 75 percent overlords, because water, get it? I will be making kelp salad!” screamed an overly enthusiastic bearded guy while holding some sort of thick green tube.
Scroll.
“Do not be afraid.” A woman with blonde dreadlocks and teeth jewels whispered while staring into the camera. “This is what we manifested. This is what we hoped for. Saviors. We welcome the end of the grind.”
Anna set the phone down for a bit. She had forgotten to manifest her weight loss.
***
Thursday, unlimited bananas, skim milk.
This was to be the strangest day. She could only eat bananas. Milk and bananas, actually. It made her nauseous. The smell, the texture, the unnecessary phallicness of it all. Plus, they were not good for weight loss. She had firsthand experience with the frugivore path. She dropped the whole thing when she found out her diet coach, some lunatic from New Orleans, put sugar on her banana shakes, because it was “raw.” Anna scrutinized the banana, taking one bite and distracting herself by getting lost in the clips Allele sent her. The long ones, the ones that just had people sitting in cars, at desks explaining that the dolphins had been right to warn us, that underwater humanoids have set out to conquer dry land. They are tired of trash and see land as an idyllic place. A girl sitting in a pink room explained how the army simply didn’t have plans for dealing with “water-orb”. The streamer encouraged people to leave the coastal cities, to be prepared for hunger. But Anna was prepared. She knew about starving. Butter and olives when there was no new diet and no imagination left.
***
Friday, ten to twenty ounces of fish. Six tomatoes.
It was better to have her ten ounces of meat for breakfast. That way, she would make sure she had her protein for the week. She went with canned salmon. It bothered her that cans had six ounces instead of five. And though Anna owned a scale, she had trouble deciding if she should take one ounce out of each can, or two ounces out of the serving of two cans combined. Those were the details people seldom shared about their lives. It was gross, and she felt pride in eating it all. She had to eat six tomatoes today, three during lunch, three during dinner.
Four of her coworkers were glued to the small screen on the receptionist’s desk. The tall woman with the high heels and long legs exclaimed, “But what are we doing? What are they doing?” her Senegalese accent thickened with her irritation. She exclaimed something in French, a curse probably.
“They are waiting. We are all waiting.” The receptionist said, while lifting her gaze over her tiny red glasses, noticing Anna. “Anna, put the damn soup down and come see this.”
Anna peered at her cup. It wasn’t soup, it was three tomatoes cut in fours. She walked around them to see the video. It was the water orbs assembling. From the distance they looked like a swarm. But then she noticed groups converging into one. It was a livestream, and the dialogue was indistinguishable, as people yelled and whispered over each other.
***
That night, Anna ate the remaining three tomatoes with a cup of warm water. She had bone broth, and as she felt the pangs of hunger, she considered eating that too. But there was no point doing things without putting all of your effort into it. So she decided against it.
She was staring at a spot on the wall. Her mind empty. She let herself enjoy the sinking feeling that came with her dizziness spells. I am doing a good job. Cheaper than drugs anyway. Her limp arms stretched on forever. The apartment was too small to hold her. Her body was huge, and her mind was even bigger as she unraveled. Long empty thoughts as if tongues unfolding.
Rhythmic knocks took her out of it. “Anna, What the actual fuck? Pick up your damn phone. Open up.” Allele’s voice came through the door, her knocking more insistent. “I’m gonna use my key in one, two, three.” Anna heard the lock clicking, but she hadn’t planned enough calories for socialization today. “Get up, eat something. I called you twenty-three times. Twenty-three. Where is your phone?”
Phone, phone, calls. It echoed in Anna’s mind, not registering.
“We need to leave before everyone else. Get a fucking grip, grab a backpack, we are getting off the coast, we can make it to my mom’s by tomorrow if we leave now.”
Allele stared at Anna in confusion and disappointment. “Are you high right now? For fuck’s sake…” Anna heard a zipper, random noises, drawers opening, closing.
“I’m not gonna carry you too.” She said from the bedroom. “Get whatever you can’t live without.”
Anna shook her head, breaking the invisible roots that had held her in place for the last couple of hours. She weakly walked around the kitchen, grabbed four frozen mason jars with cabbage soup, and the white bathroom scale.
Allele stared, incredulous. “That’s what you can’t live without?”
“I told you I can’t weigh myself until juice day. That’s in three days.”
“I am sure my mom has a scale?” Allele frowned, grabbing Anna’s gray hoodie from the door hook.
“It’s not the same one. Sometimes different scales give you different weights.” Anna didn’t say that it connected to an app that gave her a detailed graph of her gains and losses. It had five years’ worth of data.
Allele sighed loudly, touching her index to the center of her forehead. “You know what? Whatever, bring it.” She waved her hand in the air. “I swear you are like a child sometimes.”
***
Saturday, beef and non-starchy vegetables.
She must have dozed off soon after getting in the Outback, because it was now morning. Saturday then: beef and vegetable day. No starchy roots. She didn’t have any of those things. At least she had soup. Allele was asleep in the driver’s seat, and they seemed to be on a deserted National Forest Road. From the passenger window, she could see the bare landscape. See all the way onto the highway. It was a solid line of cars. Little dots, people, moved around the traffic. It seemed they were trying to break the center barrier, to drive in the opposite direction. Those lanes were empty, no one wanting to go back to the coast. The highway ran parallel to the bloated river. Yes, it was oddly high. Anna knew rain had been sparse, and it was too early for snowmelts.
Allele stirred. She had dark patches under her eyes. Anna noticed she was wearing her green nurse scrubs. It was real then. They were running for their lives.
“Thank you for last night.” Anna said as Allele opened her eyes. “Why are we in the middle of the desert?”
“Have you seen the road? It’s not moving. I don’t feel safe down there. They are too close to the river. What if an orb comes out of there?”
“Is that what happened? What is happening now?”
“I don’t know. I left when the internet went dark. I was just leaving work, trying to get signal. Then I heard screaming and gunshots on the other side of the parking lot. I went to get you and left. Everyone else had the same idea. It just took them longer.” She pointed at the highway. “I say we wait it out… we have water, food, enough room to sleep.”
No beef, no vegetables. No scale without Wi-Fi. Maybe just soup was fine, fewer calories after all. They ate in silence, staring at the cars overflowing into the new lanes.
Anna glanced at the anxious bees. She read somewhere, no, she saw on Instagram once, that bees are too heavy to fly, and yet they still do. Allele vacillated between wanting to save battery and attempting to get a signal. Anna’s own attention fluctuated between the shiny bits reflecting on distant cars, the now useless scale, and the increasing softness of her muscles. Her thighs flattened when she sat down. It was a particular sensation, the way she lost muscle density by the minute. She was supposed to be eating beef. Without muscle, the body burned fewer calories at rest. Did the sea aliens eat algae? Or did they absorb plankton, freeing themselves from the tiresome burden of chewing?
Anna lay crooked in the passenger seat. It occurred to her that she should be worried. Yet fear didn’t reach her. She supposed she didn’t have enough calories to spend in anxiety, and that was at least something to be glad of. Feeling light of head, and heavy of body, it was easy to pass out.
***
Sunday, unlimited fruit juice.
Allele’s cursing woke Anna. Out the window the world glittered, an unreal blight. When her eyes adjusted, she saw Allele standing just outside the car. Her tears had cleaned the dust, small rivers washing debris. Anna swallowed her hunger and stepped into Allele’s arms. Her embrace was limp, but Allele held her tighter, like someone who’d been adrift.
“I think we are fucked.” Allele blurted after some small eternity.
“We are.”
Anna scanned the horizon. Water. The highway was gone. So was the dirt road. The water rose like a mirror. No waves, no rushing. Clear and fast. Far-off, unrecognizable things bobbing on the tranquil surface, their reality softened by the distance. A single water orb hovering above like a new sun.
The water moved closer. They were an island. Big enough for their makeshift camp and a few brambles. The new sea was crystalline, the morning light reflected on it. Silver and coolness pushing up the air and its burning heat.
Allele and Anna stared at each other.
“We should have gone to the snow peaks.” Allele stared at the new archipelago.
Anna said nothing. It was finally juice-day. She had packed none.
#
Nina Y. Moragon is a writer living by the Salish Sea in Washington. Raised in Puerto Rico, she writes literary fiction with speculative, surreal, and sci-fi elements. Her work is rooted in quiet absurdities and shaped by empty trails, migration, and existing in a female body.