estuary



As she woke up from her nap, she swam towards the source of the smell and the force that just seemed to be pulling her along.. The water smelled and tasted different, like the rain she sometimes smelled on the surface of the ocean. Fresh water was mixing with the salt water. Yet she smelled something more, too--an inky, tarry smell that she had no experience with. Pollution in the estuary, like oil that had run off from the Juneau streets, was both invisible but certainly real in her sense of smell, and visible, too as she could see the outlines of thing on the banks like soda cans, old chip bags and so on. As soon as Sylvie began to get her bearings in the estuary, she began to feel strange--maybe a little weak, driven onward, yet so weak she needed to rest. When Sylvie looked at her body --catching flashes of her own tail as she swirled around to snatch and eat fry and needlefish in the beds of eel grass- the scales appeared to be disappearing right into her body.