Ricky Lindwall

Submerged

Talia was slow to emerge from the water, as always. Switching from her regulator to her snorkel, it was her custom to spend a few minutes on the surface looking and listening for whoever might be nearby. Fishermen, scavengers, thieves- she’d encountered each, and very few showed a disinterest in what she hauled up from the deep. Hundreds of feet above Yiu Wa Street in Causeway Bay, she quietly unfastened the camouflaged tarp from her skiff and placed her gear onboard. Unmooring the boat from a railing on the thirtieth floor of the building, she remembered adolescent evenings at the popular boba café on the other side of that same banister. She could still vividly recall standing at that railing, sometimes looking down at the athletic complex far beneath to watch boys play football, and other times simply looking at the vast and various glows of the city, wondering what profound future the world had in store for her.