Tides of Sorrow

The necklace had been dim for three days when I finally admitted something was wrong.

Not broken. I want to be clear about that. The chain was intact, the clasp worked fine, and the little glass pendant still hung exactly where it always had, just below the hollow of my throat. But the light inside it, that soft blue shimmer I'd woken up to every morning since I was nine years old, had faded to something closer to dishwater. Like someone had turned a lamp down low and forgotten to turn it back up.

I sat on the edge of my bed and held the pendant under my desk lamp, turning it left, then right. Nothing. The glass stayed dull, a murky gray-blue, the color of a sky right before it decides to rain.

"Come on," I whispered.

My grandmother's voice surfaced in my head, the way it always did when I touched the necklace. *The sea gives it light, Arnisah. As long as the sea is well, the light is well.*

I was seven when she said that. I'd asked her why the pendant glowed, and she'd laughed, and told me it was a piece of the ocean that had decided to live with me instead. I believed her for years. Then I turned thirteen and decided it was probably just some phosphorescent mineral, something cheap she'd bought at a market. Now I was twenty-two, and I'd stopped deciding anything about it at all. The necklace glowed. That was the fact. I didn't need to explain it.

Until it stopped.

I got up and walked to the window. My apartment faces east, toward the water, though "water" is generous. From my fourth-floor window, I can see the bay, or what's left of it. The fishing boats still go out at dawn, but they come back lighter every year. The water itself is the color of old tea most days, brownish-green, with a slick rainbow film that catches the sun in ways that used to look pretty until you learned what it meant.

I pressed my palm against the glass. Cold. It was always cold in this city, even in June.

"You're being dramatic," I told my reflection. "It's a necklace. Things fade."

But my grandmother's voice came back. *As long as the sea is well.*

I grabbed my jacket.

---

The fish market opens at four in the morning, which means by the time I got there, around eight, the good stuff was gone and the smell had settled in for the day. I don't know why I went there. Habit, maybe. My grandmother used to take me every Saturday when I was small, and I'd hold her hand and stare at the crabs in their tanks, wondering if they knew they were about to die.

Now the market was half-empty. Three stalls out of twelve still operated, and the woman at the one closest to the entrance, Auntie Ros, had known my grandmother since they were girls. She was gutting a mackerel when I walked up, her knife moving in short, efficient strokes.

"Arnisah." She didn't look up. "You look thin."

"I look the same."

"Same as thin." She scraped the scales into a bucket. "What do you want? I got nothing good today. Boats came back early."

"Why?"

She finally looked at me. Her eyes were the color of the water used to be, back when it was still blue. "You asking me why the fish are gone, girl? You live here. You know."

"I'm asking why the boats came back early."

Auntie Ros wiped her hands on her apron and leaned on the counter. Up close, I could see the lines around her mouth had deepened since I'd last seen her, which was maybe six months ago. Maybe a year. Time moves strange in this city. Everything looks the same until suddenly it doesn't.

"Something in the water," she said. "Not the usual. The usual, we know how to work around. This is different. The fish are swimming wrong. Going deep. Staying deep. The ones we catch taste like metal."

"Metal."

"Like licking a battery." She picked up her knife again. "You didn't come here to talk about fish. What do you want?"

I pulled the necklace out from under my shirt. The pendant hung between us, dull and gray. Auntie Ros stared at it for a long moment. Her knife stopped moving.

"Where did you get that?"

"My grandmother. You know that. You were at her funeral."

"I know what I saw at her funeral." She set the knife down. "That thing was glowing so bright I had to look away. Like a piece of the sun in her coffin."

I felt something cold crawl up my spine. "It's fading."

"I can see that."

"Why?"

Auntie Ros looked at me the way adults look at children who've asked a question they don't want to answer. Then she sighed, reached under the counter, and pulled out a plastic bag filled with ice and something silver. She dropped it on the counter between us.

"Take this," she said. "It's the last decent fish I got. Cook it. Eat it. You're too thin."

"Auntie Ros."

"Go home, Arnisah." She turned away, back to her mackerel. "And don't show that necklace to anyone else. There are people in this city who'd take it off your neck and not ask questions first."

I wanted to argue. I wanted to demand answers. But she'd already closed the conversation, the way old people do when they've decided you're not ready for the truth.

I took the fish.

---

That night, I cooked it the way my grandmother taught me, with ginger and scallions and a splash of soy sauce. It tasted fine. No metal. Just fish.

But when I sat down at my little table to eat, the necklace started to glow.

Faint. Barely there. A flicker of blue, like a match struck in a dark room, then gone.

I froze, chopsticks halfway to my mouth.

The glow came again, stronger this time, and with it a sound. Low. Almost below hearing. A hum, like a cello string plucked somewhere far away.

I looked down at the pendant. The light was moving inside it now, swirling, like water going down a drain.

And then I heard it. Not with my ears. With my chest. A voice, or something like a voice, saying a single word.

*Help.*

The light died. The hum stopped. I sat there in my silent apartment, chopsticks still raised, fish going cold on my plate, and I understood two things at once.

The necklace wasn't broken. It was trying to tell me something.

And whatever it was trying to say, the ocean was saying it too.