By Dr. Khashayar Rafat Zand.
1
Abel stared into the obsidian expanse of the Black Ocean, its surface as smooth and still as black glass. Night had long fallen, yet a strange luminescence glowed beneath the waves, as if an entire world lurked down there, yearning to be revealed. He stood at the edge of his boat with a stick of dynamite, poised to fling it into the deep. Fishing these waters was a lucrative but brutal trade: one explosive toss, and fortune rose to the surface in a glorious shimmer.
He lit the fuse. It sizzled like a serpent’s hiss before disappearing into the sea. A thunderous detonation ruptured the silence, sending a plume of saltwater skyward. For a blinking instant, the night was still. Then fish—stunned and flawless—bobbled up in droves. These were the prize catches of the Black Ocean: plump and gleaming, as though they had been cooked and deboned by some invisible hand. Rumor spoke of a miraculous bounty here, but the truth was more cunning. Abel reached for the spoils, but a rogue wave jostled him off balance. Before he could steady himself, he was pitched into the frigid water.
2
Down he went, all sense of up and down lost to swirling darkness. He kicked, fought for air, but a mighty current tugged him deeper. The cold seized his lungs. He glimpsed faint silhouettes in the water—fish moving in silent arcs. Yet something about them made his heart clench. A small flicker of moonlight revealed gashes on their sides, twisted fins, and a swirl of blood in the currents.
He saw fish in every direction—wounded, scarred, trembling—an endless throng of fin and scale riddled with infection, bent spines, and open sores. One large, moon-colored fish circled in slow, bewildered arcs. Its eyes appeared dull, as if it had forgotten how to see or perhaps forgotten why it should. It nudged against rocks, confused by their presence, recoiling each time as though in pain. Every so often, it let out a thin, echoing moan through its gills—a mournful sound that tugged at Abel’s heart, reminiscent of a sorrow he couldn’t name.
Another fish swam erratically, its body streaked with a vivid patch of crimson near its tail, as though life itself seeped out in a continuous swirl. The fish would flick its fin in panic, drifting again, weaker with each pulse. Around it, the water tinted with scarlet ribbons, uncertain but insistent—both mesmerizing and terrifying in equal measure.
A small fish—no bigger than Abel’s hand—hung with quivering gills, as though in the throes of endless retching. It spasmed, coughed up flecks of salt, then drooped, its eyes fluttering shut as if succumbing to exhaustion. A moment later, it revived with a start, convulsing once more. Abel reached a hand out instinctively, but the fish recoiled, as if it perceived all hands as threats.
The current carried Abel past another creature: an ancient fish, its scales flaking, with grotesque lumps along its side. It labored to move, each thrash of its tail a monumental effort. Though battered by time and burdened by hidden rot, it persisted, refusing to yield to the dark. Nearby, a smaller fish with a battered forehead darted in frantic loops. Crimson oozed from the top of its skull, swirling into the currents like ink. Its swimming was panicked, erratic, as if each jolt of pain rattled whatever sense of direction it had left.
3
Yet Abel remembered how, back on his boat, he had only ever plucked the most perfect specimens from the water. They had practically leapt into his nets, their scales gleaming like polished silver, their flesh firm and fresh, as though they’d been readied for a banquet. Fishing in the Black Ocean had always meant easy riches: a single toss of dynamite and—presto—he reeled in fish so flawless it was as if they’d been flash-cooked and deboned on the spot. The fable of the Black Ocean promised bounty beyond belief, and Abel and his fellow fishers were only too eager to believe it.
But now, forced beneath the surface, he glimpsed a different reality: countless sickly fish lurked just out of reach, their bodies twisted and pockmarked with disease, their eyes clouded with desperation.
These were fish, of course. But something about them made Abel pause. Abel could not banish the notion that they were not mere fish. Their eyes glistened with an ancient sorrow, a pleading hope. A memory flapped through Abel’s mind, then a maeltrom of confusion swallowed it.
5
Somewhere above, the moon flickered on the surface, a silver coin trembling at the lip of the horizon. A sudden thunder cracked the ocean’s silence, sending vibrations through the murk, and all around him the fish stirred, turning toward that distant promise of rescue. With a collective lurch, they rushed upward as though the gates of paradise had flung open. Abel, caught in their wake, felt himself swept along in a current of desperate, wounded bodies. But the ascension soon became a scrum: sickly fish collided with each other, a twisting column of battered fins and haunted eyes, each obstructing the next, an engorged mass locked in place beneath that sliver of lunar light. Yet somehow, Abel saw healthy, gleaming fish slip effortlessly through the blockade—passing like sound through a pregnant womb, unhindered by the press of the multitude.
As he struggled for space, he heard the echo of an ancient incantation—Give me your poor… your huddled masses…—though in these depths, it was only a scream of silence. Panicked eyes turned skyward, longing for the surface, yet imprisoned by their own overabundance. Abel kicked, tried to claw his way higher, but the throng closed around him, each creature a reflection of a thousand broken hopes, all crushed beneath the thunder that beckoned from above.
Then, without warning, the thunder above receded, and the rising wave of bodies collapsed in on itself. Those who had surged upward now plunged backward like limp marionettes with their strings severed, tumbling into the endless murk below. It was as though the very sky had rejected them, casting them back into the abyss in a slow, dreamlike freefall. The battered fish fell like souls unmoored, drifting down and down until swallowed by darkness—reminiscent of those Hollywood scenes where the alien horde, once triumphant, suddenly rains from the heavens, lifeless.
6
More fish, endless fish, countless fish. One had a tail so twisted it could barely move; another’s skin was flecked with sores that bled into the salty water. A mother fish clutched her egg-sac, frantically scanning for an opening that might appear at any moment—or never at all. Abel felt the ache of their predicament as though it were his own: a timeless, borderless limbo where no one knew if rescue was nigh—or if it would ever come.
Back and deeper in the black water, Abel felt time unspool into a languid haze—no pulse, no pattern, no sky to track the sun’s passage. He sensed movement all around him, an endless queue of battered fish drifting in murky currents, their eyes hollow with resignation.
A vampiric variation of a Dr. Seuss verse seethed through Abel’s mind, piercing his ears, his eyes, and his lips, harpooning his heart: “Waiting for a hook to come…”
7
Now and then, another thunderclap would shudder through the sea, a few sleek, shining fish slipped upward as easily as breath through lungs, leaving the wretched multitude to wait behind. Renewed forever remained the cycle of the desperate charge followed by the dismal plunge. Abel watched, transfixed, trapped in that eternal waiting place—an underworld of indefinite longing, endless lines, and quiet, churning heartbreak.
He drifted with them in dim pockets of water, overlooked or abandoned by the bursts of dynamite overhead. Nobody bothered with them—why waste the tools, the time, the effort? It was far easier, far more profitable, to haul up the plump, shining catch that rose readily to the surface in the shockwave. Here, in the haunting gloom, Abel realized the Black Ocean wasn’t magical at all; it was masterfully rigged. The dynamite blasts would cherry pick the ocean, leaving the remainder to languish in the shadows, beyond notice, beyond care.
In that moment, Abel grasped the Black Ocean’s true darkness; how everything hinged on which side of the surface you were. A fisherman on the deck today would find himself sinking with the wounded tomorrow, and in that plunge, he would discover an entirely different realm—one akin to crossing a hidden border, from the land of the healthy to a silent nation of the ill. Once you slipped beneath, you could never again see the Black Ocean the same way. In the Black Ocean, no one can hear you scream.
11
In the far reaches of Abel’s waning sight, something bright glimmered like a distant star. He felt a jolt in the water—a final echo of thunder? No, it was more delicate. A slender shard of metal drifted close, humming with promise. Abel tried to move, but his limbs were leaden, his lungs burning with the weight of the sea. Then the barbed steel, a hook, found purchase in his tattered shirt. With a sudden yank, it tore him from the gloom. He felt the deep of the ocean peel away, as if an unseen hand were raising him to the surface. The blackness receded, and an excruciating explosion of light flooded his vision.
12
He woke with a retch, gasping in the fluorescent glare of an emergency department. The stench of antiseptic and stale coffee assaulted his senses. A nurse in rumpled scrubs hovered at a distance, eyes ringed with fatigue. Tubes taped to his arm, a throbbing ache in his skull—Abel remembered: he was not truly a fisherman, nor was he ever. He was Dr. Abel Carter, a burned-out ER physician who had gambled his life away on a lethal cocktail of stimulants and sedatives. He had become the dynamite in his own existence, shattering the boundaries of safe practice just to keep pace with the uncatchable.
Time passed, how and how much of it Abel could not know, in a haze of overhead announcements and scuffling footsteps. On the day he later learned was the third , the curtain slid open, revealing a psychiatrist with salt-and-pepper hair and soft, tired eyes: Dr. Melanie Marmoush. They had known each other in sunnier times—bright-eyed residents filled with impossible dreams.
“Abel,” Melanie said gently, “what’s going on?”
Abel closed his eyes, the underwater dream still swirling in his mind. He saw fish contorting in agony, half-blind and gasping in the dark. And he saw them reflected in hospital corridors, patients waiting, languishing, uncertain if help would ever come.
“Abel, I had no idea you would do this to yourself. You said you only needed to sleep better” Melanie sighed.
“I am abandoning my boat”, resigned Abel.