Pills coated in sunscreen taste bad going down. They’re gelatinous, like sashimi, sliding down your gullet, landing in your stomach with a squelch. Under gamma rays, baking in the heat, hot sand underfoot, you tilt your head back and open wide, squeeze the white cream onto your tongue and stick both hands in your mouth, covering every inch of your soft, pink cheeks, tongue, throat, teeth. You swallow, and pray it is enough to coat your whole esophagus because you really don’t want to do this again. They taste especially bad today, like oily chemicals unwilling to mix with you, a creature made almost entirely of saltwater, except for the parts of you that burn when exposed to light.

       You tiptoe around gobs of slick, red algae and heaps of seaweed carried on the ocean’s waves, piled high with seafoam. Seagulls squaw overhead, while that white-hot light beats down so hard you can feel your insides turning red, and yet, you follow the curve to where the cliffs shadow the beach; a familiar alcove you remember, despite trying for the last fifteen years to forget.

       Let’s go to your happy place, the insufferably soothing, disembodied voice says.

       Today, the cavern’s surf is low. The air is cool, full of brine and the drip of water. Almost like it was before… but then you gulp, and the alchemical aftertaste of sunscreen stabs your throat’s soft-tissue, not unlike the spray of hose-water on a hot, summer afternoon. This is accompanied by the bay of your father’s laughter, which echoes right out of your memories and bounces off the cave walls, forcing you to shut your eyes until the white-hot light fracturing inside of you subsides.

       What cuts through the pain is not an echo, but the snarl of something very real, very close.

       It gnashes its teeth, snapping at the air – at the absence of where it wishes your neck was. Rusty, metal chains screech against the pull of what they bind to the cave wall, somehow uncorroded after fifteen years of incessant, unforgiving swells. It is you, but younger. Pale, with needle-like teeth that belong in the mouth of a lanternfish, not a girl of fourteen. She lunges at you, choked by the yank of the chain. Her hair hangs in jet-black tendrils, her skin is shriveled, and her feet have become webbed.

       It’s hard to remember how you made it this far, almost 30-years-old while this imprisoned you never got past freshman year. You left her here too long, and now her skin has turned to scales and her nose is collapsing flat into her face and her neck is breathing through gills that she cut herself, scraps of flesh still stuck to the tips of her fingers. It will be harder, now, to bring her out into the light. Harder to make her not hate you. To make her understand.

       To turn her back into something that can live on land.