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For days she’d traveled; exactly how many became less and less important the longer she walked along the coast, searching for an end to the Shimmer.
No, that wasn’t true. She wasn’t looking for the end of the Shimmer. It didn’t end in any meaningful sense of the word, not with the way the scenery seemed to repeat itself as she continued north, to fractalize endlessly outward. And inward. The brightness inside her felt big, squeezing her organs against her ribcage like a heavy, irate fetus. At night, it was hard to sleep, half because the Biologist just didn’t need to, and half because she glowed so bright that moths of all shapes and sizes had begun to gather around her as she tried to sleep, their powdery wings brushing against her face and arms. She never bothered trying to sweep them away, letting them bask in her green light as she laid down on the damp earth to rest.
The damp earth. Lately she’d been feeling the urge to sink her fingers and toes into it, and she saw no reason not to. The soil was sandy but moist along the coast, and she could feel her body taking that water in when she laid down, feel herself commune with the roots of the trees she leaned against in the evenings. She provided phosphorus, they gave her sugars that warmed her blood and soothed the ache in her legs from walking all day. Her fingers still looked like skin. But the hairs on her arms and legs had turned a translucent white, like polar bear fur or asbestos crystals or mycelium. She had no access to mirrors here, but she suspected her eyebrows and possibly the roots of her hair had also changed.
A butterfly had been following her for the last few hours or so, hovering around her head and trying to land on her hair. Something about it seemed desperate, for some reason, its wings like little flags, or tiny leather sheets flapping out smoke signals. She stopped, holding one finger out to offer it some rest. It obliged, its purple wings finally coming to a stop and it turned around on her fingers, crawling onto her palm. She turned her hand around and looked closer and saw its tiny proboscis unfurl and lap at the sweat that collected in the folds of her skin. Its wings opened, and on them the Biologist could see her husband’s eyes.
Down to every last detail, they were his. His eyes were a dark hazel, the left one just a tiny bit greener than the other, and the black ring around them was thick, which always gave him an attentive, intense look. Tinier copies of them were scattered across the butterfly’s wings, dotting the edges and filling the space between its black veins, and all of them seemed to stare up at her, the way they did when he was waiting for her to speak.
She’d seen him in the dolphins, and now this butterfly, which had taken its fill of her salt and fluttered off into the breeze, leaving her.
Maybe it was a sign. She didn’t normally believe in omens and superstitions, but here, in the Shimmer, everything was connected and every stone, every caterpillar, even the Crawler in the tower, was infused with singular purpose and movement. To what end, she still didn’t know, but it hardly mattered now. She had her own purpose now, and anything that happened outside was secondary.
That was one of the last nights she was able to actually sleep. The stars overhead seemed to change positions in the sky every time she looked up from underneath the juniper she took shelter in, and she briefly wondered if any meaning could be divined from them as well.
The next morning, she woke up surrounded by the smell of nectar, though the vegetation around her remained shrubby, wind-whipped, and flower-less. Then the breeze changed direction, and she realized that the smell was coming from her. She was surrounded by an entourage of insects now, day and night, as well as the occasional bat.
A flock of birds swooped overhead, and woven into their chattering were the tunes she always hummed beneath her breath when she was driving alone. So it wasn’t just her husband who’d melted into the landscape; the Biologist herself was beginning that process. The Shimmer was building new things out of the pieces it was taking from her, just as it was giving her pieces of everything else that lived here.
Maybe that’s how she would find her husband again. Honestly, the prospect of him not being completely intact and whole when she found him didn’t bother him like it used to. She was as lost to this beautiful, godforsaken place as he was, and maybe the Shimmer was what they needed to bridge the gap that had always existed between them. God knew she couldn’t do it alone, and she knew he struggled as well. Only now that her borders were beginning to go fuzzy did she appreciate the true scope of how limited human speech was. Maybe she could tell him how she felt with the nitrogen and sugar in the tree roots, or the shifting colors of the little octopi that inhabited the shallow tide pools along the shore.
She knew what she felt towards him wasn’t romance, the way romance was supposed to be between a woman and a man, between two humans. She loved him the way deer loved one another, the way blinking fireflies and singing toads and blooming daffodils did, and the way the Shimmer loved everything inside it. For the longest time, she’d feared that he was only tolerating that, the way she’d only tolerated the idea of marrying him, just because his parents pushed and pushed. Could he feel her love now, permeating the biosphere? Could he understand it, reconcile with it? Could she feel him reaching back as well?
The sound of the wind going through the coastal scrub at night sounded like his soft breathing from her memories of sleeping by his side, and even though what she did now could hardly be called sleeping, she’d close her eyes and breathe with him.
Finally, after however many days she’d spent trekking up the same twenty miles of coastline, she sees… something. It’s far ahead near the horizon, absolutely tiny and inscrutable, but it was standing still and was maybe her husband’s height. The brightness in her, which she was beginning to simply think of as another part of the Shimmer, lurched forward. Its will was hers now, and vice versa. She picked up the pace now, suddenly getting the urge to get on her hands. She dropped down onto all fours, and somehow it felt right, and when she glanced down she saw that her hands were hooves, then they were paws, then her own hands and feet, shifting over and over as she galloped across the sand.
“Kane!” she shouted, and it came out as birdsong.
The figure grew larger as Lena approached the horizon, finally, finally reaching the end of the Shimmer, and there was no need to go further, because he was here, he was here. Grey wings moved her further and she transmuted, again and again as he came into view.
It was him. He was beautiful. He was a tree, he was a six-legged elk, he was a squirming mass of tentacles, he was Kane, he was her husband, and as she collided with him, he was her.
It was an eternity since they’d last touched, and her talons ran over the bark of his arms, and his own hoof dislodged petals from her hair, scattering in the wind. Glowing spores streamed from her mouth as she exhaled, and when he opened his beak to speak to her, laughter in his voice, more spores came out and mixed with hers.
“I knew you were coming,” he said in infrasonic whale song. “I felt you.”
She pulled back to look at his face, human, but also dolphin, also mockingbird, also velvet ant. Silent as always, she sent a pheromonal response.
I’ve missed you, she said, antenna wiggling, I found your journal. I’m sorry.
He sent his response through the mycelium of his stubble that ran over her furry cheek. What for?
I don’t know. Everything. I don’t love you the way you love me.
But you love me. I’m happy to have it, in any shape it comes in. It’s always enough.
She was not the Biologist now. She was not Lena. She was not she. She was he, and he was the Shimmer, and they were all the Shimmer. They were them. And they loved them.
They knew this as they melted away together, in the marrow of their bones, in the mycelium that became their veins, in their copper-blue blood, in their feathers, in their myriad eyes, in the fangs in their mouth, in all eight of their legs, in the dark warm humus of the forest further inland, in the stones worn smooth by millennia of waterfalls, in the empty cocoons of resurrected butterflies, in the Crawler, in the dying and the living of the countless creatures that had become one with the Shimmer.
For all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing.