Chapter 9

A Different Ocean

“Archie, come here for a second, please. Quickly!” Kaisa said, stretching out her arm while Archie was desperately holding on to Nonni’s pant leg. 

“No, I don’t want to,” he replied and took a step back. Kaisa sighed, but stopped herself. She pressed her lips together and let her shoulders sag. Don’t push, she thought. Just don’t.

“Archie, you can stay here, we promise. But maybe, if you stand next to us while we open the door, we can actually go outside. You seem to have your own little magic, my friend,” she said, and the pitch in her voice made her flinch. She tried her best to sound empathetic and kind, but while she heard herself talk, all she could think was how she so absolutely would not buy it. Nonni put her hand on Archie’s back. He looked up at her and she gave him a reassuring smile, accompanied by a little shove towards Kaisa’s reaching hand. Kaisa watched him take the tiniest steps in her direction. She asked herself why Rita couldn’t do this instead of her, considering she was so much better at these things. Archie seemed to think alike, because he chose to walk right past Kaisa and took Rita’s hand. 

“Okay, but then I go back,” he said, and Rita nodded. 

“Don’t worry, baby boy.” 

Rita gave Kaisa a quick nod, reached for the handle and pushed it down slowly. The door swung open and just as expected, everything was fine at first glance. There were the stone front steps. There was the front yard, the gate, the street that led from her house into the rest of the neighborhood. If one could call it that.

“What in the world…” Kaisa gasped.

Right where the front gate led out to the neighborhood street, the world seemed to have…changed its mind. The entire street was submerged in three feet of clear water. Small schools of fish and other sea critters made their way through flower beds, bushes and over small fences. At first glance, it even looked peaceful. Kaisa glanced over to Hemma’s house, the one across the street, and it almost looked abandoned. The door was shut, the windows blocked and the walls were overgrown with tall grapevines that reached all the way up to the roof. Another house down the street to the right was upside down. Kaisa blinked and squinted, because it was hard to make sense of it, even for her. It looked like Mrs. Dubois’ house, but it was hard to tell. How could it even balance on the tip of its roof? It seemed perfectly suspended in this position. Kaisa wondered what the inside looked like. She wondered, but hoped she didn’t have to find out. The house next door was gone, just gone. There was nothing. Was Annie gone too? What on earth was happening here? 

“We have to go!” Rita pushed Kaisa aside, ran down the steps, across the footpath through their front yard and stopped at the gate. She took off her coat, boots and socks. 

“Wait! Gosh Rita, wait! I’m coming…” 

Kaisa followed her down the steps and tried taking off her boots mid-run. Rita opened the front gate. There were big gaps between the wooden planks, yet strangely enough, the water didn’t seep through. As Rita pulled it all the way open, they saw that the water was stopped right at the edge of her property, as if pushed against an invisible barrier. Both girls shot each other a baffled look. 

“I…I’m not sure what I’m looking at to be honest,” Kaisa said, her eyebrows raised.

They both stood in front of what looked like an almost waist-high wall of water. 

“Do we just walk in, or do we have to get in from the top?” Rita said, a small quiver in her voice.

“There is only one way to find out. Let’s hope it’s not cold.” 

With these words, Kaisa held her boots and coat over her head and walked right through, submerging herself almost to her waist. 

“It looked like you just walked through jelly,” Rita exclaimed with a nervous chuckle. 

“It’s not too bad, but I suggest we get a move on.” 

“Yeah, right, right. Here we go…” 

Rita quickly put her clothes and boots in a bundle, held it up over her head and stepped into the water, visibly shuddered for a moment, then followed Kaisa down the road. They started pushing towards Rita’s house, which was usually a twenty-second sprint from door to door, but wading through water this high made it even difficult to walk. Their slow progress made Kaisa antsy and the more time she had to think, the more urgent their situation started to feel.

“Do you think there are sharks here too?” Rita asked, scanning the ground beneath her feet as well as she possibly could.

“I don’t know. I don’t think sharks really do anything, or do they? But we’re barefoot, and I think we’d better watch where we’re stepping. These aren’t Icelandic waters, and the fish definitely aren’t either. I’d really hate for this adventure to come to an end, because one of us steps on a stonefish and dies. Would be kind of pathetic, you know?” 

“Glad we’re making cheerful conversation.”

“Didn’t you just start with the sharks?” 

Kaisa glanced over her shoulder, carefully eyeing each house they passed. Usually there would be a cat on every corner, lingering on every fence post, staring down from the rooftops and leaping through the flower beds. They must’ve all left, she suspected. Water was, after all, not quite their territory.

“Doesn’t Onna live here?” she heard Rita say with a small, hushed voice. They stopped outside what looked like it had once been a small single-story house with walls of a bright sunny yellow. 

“I do hope for her that she doesn’t right now.” 

Onna’s house had always looked like it had come straight out of a painting. Her flowerbeds were always in bloom, and her curtains always drawn. People liked her, that’s all Kaisa really knew of Onna, but from the time Kaisa was very little and allowed to walk over to Rita’s by herself, she felt uneasy passing Onna’s place. She remembered telling her mother that she thought Onna looked ‘see-through’ and even though she couldn’t quite explain what she’d meant by that, it still felt true. It would scare her. She saw her neighbors walk into her house and thought they looked like insects flying too close to a spider’s web. Thought they would never come out. Of course, they always did, always with happy faces, still chit-chatting on their way home. She didn’t understand then. She thought she started to as she got older. 

As they stood in front of the once beautiful house, not much was left of its former glory. The flowers were all wilted, their brown dead leaves swimming across this newfound neighborhood ocean. The windowsills were cracked, the windows themselves smashed, a black, smoking liquid oozing from them. The once bright yellow walls were gray. The house looked eerie and sinister, almost haunted. It was the opposite of what it used to be. At least from the outside.

“What…happened? What happened to that house? It looks so evil.”

“I think it looks sad,” Kaisa said. “But it kinda always did.”

“What do you mean?”

She paused, staring up the gray walls for a while longer.

“It’s just…you know what, never mind. I think we should keep going.”

Kaisa saw Rita glance at her from the corner of her eye, but chose to ignore it and looked at her feet as one of the dead flower petals floated past her, and a little red fish quickly swam after it to give it a tiny nibble.
This, whatever this was, had been inching towards their little town for a long time now. Kaisa felt it in her chest, in the tip of her fingers. She’d been feeling it for years.