What Lives in the Static: Part 1 — Angler Fish

Part 1 of a monthly new weird serial exploring scientific hubris, collapsing realities, and the defiant beauty of queer love in the face of humanity’s reckless quest to control the uncontrollable. Sign up to follow the serial on Substack here.

The car isn’t supposed to exit so soon. It isn’t supposed to slow down when it passes a little nothing town and then tear across three lanes to get off the freeway before the town fades into the rearview mirror — but the woman behind the wheel, the woman named Cass Sullivan, figures that the freeway is clear enough that she can do so with no major incident.

Cass Sullivan, above-average height and slender build (which is to say, gangly), with hair that tapdances on the line between blonde and brown and falls in waves two inches above her shoulders, which are now hunched up in anticipation toward her ears, with gold and silver earrings haphazardly snaking their way up, mismatched rings and chipped burgundy nail polish on the fingers gripping the steering wheel of her 2015 jasmine green Subaru Outback, drops her blue — not turquoise, not aqua — eyes to her phone. She isn’t one of those people who likes to say their eyes “change color”; color is color, and the DMV doesn’t care how blue or green or brown one’s eyes might look depending on the sweater they’re wearing.