You always return to the mangroves. Even if what happened had not happened, they would be your homecoming. Your transition point. They are both earth and sea, death and flourishing, strangeness and familiarity. You tell me you love them because they are green and smell of salt, mud, life, decay; because the twisted roots and branches are ugly in a way that you find restful; and because this is where your friends live, now.
All this helps.
This—after a year or years abroad, after days in flight or transit, after hours on the road from the city—this is where you breath in. First you go to the mangroves, and then you come home to me.
And I say, tell me about your friends.
Once, you described Peri by her quickness. Mathematics prizes. Netball shots sunk from anywhere on the court. Smoked before the rest of you ever snuck a cigarette. Told her parents about her girlfriend before her older sister could tell them about hers, neatly shuffling the burden of expectations like a card-trick. Suspended for getting a tattoo of a mathematical equation like a bracelet around her wrist. You thought it was beautiful, although you didn’t understand it.
Or Kura, who won a snowboarding sponsorship when you’d barely graduated high school, even though the mountains were hours away. Winters training during northern summers, summers competing in northern winters. He was the first vegetarian you knew in your tiny, backwater, nineties town. Persuaded your school principal to play both versions of the national anthem in assembly. Every month he got you in detention by cracking you up in class.
Lily was the only one you’d have described as a water person. Hurtful comments, raised voices, anything she didn’t want to listen to slid off her like raindrops; she shook them laughing from her hair. Lily swam lengths in the local pool; she kept tropical fish and wore blues and greens, she had a poster of a dolphin on her bedroom wall when the rest of you had moved onto boys, girls, and bands. She dived from the highest diving board before you could even swim; she rescued a boy from a rip when she was only fourteen.
All of them fearless in their own ways. That’s what you might have said before. If you were being honest, you might have added that they were all braver than you.
Don’t take that the wrong way. I’m glad of it. I’m glad that you’re still here.
Because at the mangroves that last night, you were too afraid to join them. The four of you came back from where you’d scattered after high school—university, work, travel—to converge on Lily’s family bach. Homing. Retracing. You drove over the bridge, the drowned pewter landscape. Over the flooded fields, where cows waited at the fence lines like stitches for the patchwork squares of water. The firth. The small-big city with its life-and-death hospital, an hour’s drive from where you grew up—an hour, you learned when you were eight and plunged off that wall, that your desperate mother could do in forty minutes. The concrete UFO sculpture, stranded by the picnic table. You’d loved that as a child. Fish and chip wrappers escaping from an overfilled bin.
The coast, finally.
In my memory the plains and the coast never match. The plains are always flooded but the coast is spangled by summer light: an overcast sky but a lapis sea; the pōhutukawa blooming like every month is December. What was it like when you last drove there together?
I imagine a night fueled by junk food, movies, and beer. Then, just before dawn, “Let’s go down to the sea,” said Lily. I imagine it was Lily. It could have been any of those three, but not you.
“Let’s go down there.” She didn’t say why. But you all knew.
You’ve tried to explain it to me, since. It was somewhere between a thread and a song. A tug, here, you say, motioning to your gut and chest. You were being called.
“It’s only the mangroves,” you would have said, unwilling to stir. You liked the beach. You liked knowing exactly what the plan was before you set out. At eighteen, you liked the same things you did at eight: your pet rabbit Neo, being home and sleeping-in, friends you knew well, your mum being proud of you. (I was. I am).
You did not like sharp oyster shells underfoot, and crabs and eels and risk. You did not like the rain. You had not outgrown your childish habit of imagining taniwha and crocodiles lurking under the twisted roots, ready to grab. Had never liked the squish of black mud between your toes, or spattering your new board shorts.
Bad reasons, maybe. Insufficient. But yours.
Did you know? Certainly, you all knew something would happen. The song rising from the mangroves told you..
And you could see it for yourselves. In the predawn, the mangroves spread for miles along the coast, unbounded by their usual limits of houses and farms and beaches. No town lights were visible. No bridge. No traffic. It was silent except for the gentle sound of water and night-birds. A ruru called from where the road should be, though you didn’t cross the tarmac like you usually would, when you walked barefooted down from the bach. Had you gone back in time, or forward? Even the stars were different, faint inland and overhead, but distorted and compelling on the horizon above the mangroves. Magnified. Like fishing lures, you told me later. I found this out, drip by drip, over many years.
And from the mangroves came a kind of breathing, but that in itself wasn’t unusual.
Your friends kept walking, and you did not.
Now you have a fist of mud-root-saltwater lodged up under your ribs, dragging you back. But your friends? They have the whole of the mangroves. They changed, while you stood on dry land and waited for them.
They left you behind.
But not entirely.
Each year the mangroves grow, encroaching a little more on the lands around them.
Now, if I say, tell me about your friends, you describe Peri not by her cigarettes but the constant shifting smell of the mangroves under her skin. When you lean close you can feel its steamy heat. Her eyes are tidal, drawing you in, pushing you away. Birds live in her hair. Her voice contains the swell and fall of water. Kura, mangrove-rooted, tugged by sea. When he strides out of the black mud to stand under the moon, he is stronger than any bridge or town. His heart is an oyster, purifying the water. His eyes are stars like fishing lures. And Lily, who drowns people; who goes beyond; who has silt in her veins; who eats handfuls of crabs, exoskeleton, pincers and all.
Their families and friends think they’ve gone. You and I know different.
The blood-warm saltwater washes through the mangroves’ atria. The heart beats slow, counting not hours but nightfalls, daybreaks, moon phases, tides, seasons.
It scared me, when I learned the truth. First, I thought what everyone thought: teenagers, beers, an ill-fated midnight swim, a traumatized survivor. Then, even when I finally believed you, I misunderstood. I thought you were telling me that your friends had been devoured, or maybe had become monstrous.
No, you said, patiently. They’ve become the mangroves.
You always teach me what I’ve missed. They keep the land together, you explained. Protect against storm-surges and pollution. Keep the coast from falling away. They shelter life, like once they sheltered you.
We don’t talk much anymore. But whenever you’re home, you tell me a little more. And, always, you talk about regret. You wish you’d gone with them: jumped down from the boardwalk, walked out through soft-sharp mud and shoots, hand in hand. Waded out to where the mature trees, over centuries, knit together roots and branches, land and water, shadows and light; walked until you were too far to be seen from shore. You tell me your heart went with them. Your longing fills everything between us so that there is no space for anything else.
If only I’d gone too, you say.
You never notice how much this hurts me. It never occurs to you that if you’d walked into the mangroves, I would have lost you too.
But that’s all right. You’re my daughter. Maybe that’s how it should be, mangroves or no.
And I never tell you what should be obvious: that you are not the person you once were. The mangroves changed you, too, that night. You’re just too filled with regret and longing to see it.
If you hadn’t, I would not have believed your story. The obvious explanation—your friends drowned; you hide your grief behind layers of myth-making—convinced me. But that was before I saw what you had become. The quicksilver movements behind your eyes. The way your hair haloes your head, as if you’re suspended in water. The smell of the sea in your room. Once you picked up a half-crushed dead crab, dropped by a gull. You held it in your cupped hands, breathed once, then let it scuttle alive and whole back into a rockpool. And when we walk down the beach together, we leave one normal set of footprints—mine—and one ribbon of tidemark, tiny shells, mangrove shoots, dancing in your footsteps.
So eventually I believed you.
But when you visit the mangroves, in your head, you’re still the same person you were that night. Part of you has waited for ten years for your friends to turn back and take you with them. When they visit, maybe they’re just as they were on that last night: laughing, legs flecked with black mud, smelling of salt and oxygen. Taller and braver than you. Or maybe they are vaster and stranger and wiser than that, now, when they stride out of the mangroves to see you. Maybe their hair ripples through the whole sky. Maybe their shadows tug the moon, and stars catch in their teeth.
You think you missed out. Lingering on the boardwalk, too frightened to follow. You think you’ll always be left on the boardwalk. But you’re wrong.
You know what your heart is now? It’s not gone. It’s the tiny seed that floats to a new life: a pale shoot, two round green leaves, waxy and protective. The mangrove propagule (I looked it up). Cradled within the dark waters of your body. Across oceans.
I don’t mean this in a metaphorical sense, like the way you floated in my womb. What I’m talking about is something far less human.
Why else do you think they still come to you, when no one else has seen them for ten years?
You’re one of them.
If someone said tell me about your daughter, I’d tell them that fear and courage live side by side. That you have always been worthy of other people’s secrets. My mangrove daughter, there’s a reason you’re the only one who ever saw Lily cry, who knew how homesick Kura was on his trips away. In Year Three you scolded the older boys who bullied Peri for her accent, even though your voice shook. It was you who gathered up the snapping dog that was struck by a car, and rushed it to the vet.
There is power in waiting. There’s a reason you were chosen to contain the future.
They need you.
You’ve always been more like them than you know.
So, you float away and return, but one day you’ll put down roots. You’ll sustain a web of life, joining Kura’s branches, Lily’s currents, Peri’s birds.
Your body will nourish something huge and breathing. It will fill with rich, black, life-giving mud. It will shelter crabs, frogs, and insects. A sanctuary for birds, a nursery for fish. Cicadas will sing through you.
I know you think your humanity is a small price for this, mangrove daughter. And maybe you’re right. More and more, I look at the world, and think maybe you’re right.
But I will miss you.
| E.M. Linden (she/her) is a spec fic writer from Aotearoa New Zealand who likes coffee, books and owls. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Strange Horizons, The Deadlands, Flash Fiction Online, Weird Horror and elsewhere. She is online at emlinden.blog or @emlinden.bsky.social. |  |
One thought on ““Mangrove Daughter” by E.M. Linden”