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Five on the TABLE OF CONTENTS:

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Ayuka Breathes - Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Home Two Lanes to Nowhere - Chelsea Graham

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The Present at High Tide - Chris Schacht
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One of Many Deaths - Maria Pinto
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Walk Into Splintered Sunlight - Trevor James Zaple
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Ayuka Breathes
By Mandy-Suzanne Wong

Surfacing, she rested only a few seconds. Shed told Hiroki to slap the water with a ping-pong paddle
if, in this frail interim, he wanted her before she went deep again. Shouting wouldnt do; Ayuka
wouldnt hear. Oceanic pressures had exacted an early toll: when waterlogged, her ears were
particularly weak.

Hiroki knew this. He knew his wife was not deliberately hard to reach. But it did hurt, having more and
more to shout at her as though she lived fathoms away, and he didnt enjoy slapping things like some
sort of seal. Ayuka claimed she could feel him in the oceans recoil.

A net fisherman by vocation, Hiroki Watanabe had no qualms about pounding the pier with his foot
when the amas doddering procession seemed to dally. The women donned masks and wetsuits in a
hut beside the beach, and there Ayuka left them, making her way alone to her husbands boat. As
Hiroki aimed their prow at open sea, Ayuka watched her mother and sister swim out from the beach.
She saw eight pairs of flippers kiss the sky, plunging fifteen meters to the reefs and seaweed forests.

Hiroki turned off the boat in an undulating field of blue and gray without horizon. He gave Ayuka a
rope attached to a windlass. Ayuka tied the rope around her waist and jumped into a cold, blue
otherworld.

Sinuous forests and grasses swayed in absent breeze and moody gray-blue light. With a wooden
spatula of prehistoric design, Ayuka turned over rocks, delved into crevices, rooted through seaweeds
in search of edible mollusks and echinoderms. She tugged the rope around her waist when she had to
breathe, and Hiroki reeled her in with the windlass.

Whereas the other ama stayed in sight of shore, Ayuka had eyes only for the oceans very heart. She
was a funado ama fune meaning boat the last of her kind in dwindling Kaiyono.

It seemed the deep belonged to her alone. Hiroki was her harbor.

The ama swam as deep as endurance permitted without breathing apparatus. They were predators
and caretakers of a ten-thousand-year-old custom, sheltering their prey against themselves.

The prey, mostly mollusks, starved or withered nonetheless in poisoned seas. The fishing co-op tried
to save them: trimmed the amas workday to an hour, truncated the fishing season, hid farmed prawns
and mollusk-babies in the wild. Ayuka and Hiroki kindled their love with dreams of nursing the ocean
back to health. Hiroki would lead the co-op. Theyd change everything.

They failed, of course. The ama, the fishermen, the village joined their prey on an expressway to
extinction and discouraged their children from following. The Watanabes two sons followed their
friends to the city, and then in their empty house, Ayuka and Hiroki no longer knew what they were.
Ranged against them were the forces of a planet self-destructing.

The Watanabes couldnt hate the planet, so they blamed their disappointment on each other. Their
hasty criticisms decayed into stubborn misunderstandings when Ayuka misheard and couldnt bring
herself to ask him to reiterate or when Hiroki, knowing he would have to reiterate, forbore to say
anything. A devotee of quiet who believed fishes spoke in gestures, Ayuka asked Hiroki to point to
things that would indicate his meaning. Hiroki refused because it made him feel foolish.

Hiroki and all the ama worked for Ama no Ryokan, Ayukas mothers guesthouse. Along with freshly
caught seafood, the divers served up tales of when their workday was a day and mollusks lived to
adulthood. Ayuka, The Last Funado, spoke only to deliver her spiel: boat, windlass, husband. When a
tourist had a question, her sister shouted it into her ear. And there was always someone, some
scintillating wit, who advised her to keep that man of hers happy for Hiroki held her life in his hands.

Another ama said thank goodness Ayuka was too deaf to flirt. Some urban salaryman said too bad
because fifty-year-old Ayuka was the youngest ama left. Ayuka, saying nothing, assumed a fixed smile.
And Hiroki, elsewhere prawn-fishing or cleaning guestrooms brewed an image of her flaunting
private memories in which the two of them braved the ocean all alone.

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He thought he was quite the stoic. But his resentment, obvious to everyone, was stifling to Ayuka. That
it might have roots in plain husbandly jealousy never occurred to her. She thought he resented tourists
in general for listening to divers and ignoring fishermen. She wondered what theyd say if she
Five on the described the time when Hiroki forgot to pull her up.
Fifth There she was, fire in her chest, clawing through broken sunbeams, breaking the surface at last with a
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cry. Hiroki jumped up as if from heavy thought, dragged her into the boat, and wept, begging
forgiveness as she gasped for breath.
Home
But he couldnt explain. He didnt know why hed done it. Nor could Ayuka bring herself to question
Submit him. She agonized for months: what could she have done to make Hiroki turn his back on the
windlass?
Current Issue
Short Fiction Contest From then on, Ayuka postponed surfacing to breathe. The air, heavy with doubt, brought no relief.

Patrons Underwater was relief. Ayuka ashore was a ghost of an irrelevant species. She was a figment of
tourists imagination, their false nostalgia for a Nature theyd never left behind despite themselves.
About Down in the shifting blue, she was predator and caretaker, she moved and perceived as a being
Masthead self-aware.

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She lived in a kind of whirlpool. The longer she spent weightless and solitary in the deep, the more
unreal terrestrials began to seem, Hiroki included. The rope that bound her body to the boat became
the rigid corpus of the silence between them. Wishing not to provoke it, Ayuka stayed down deep to
the limit of her endurance. This merely redoubled her dependence on Hiroki, who had to whisk her up
as quickly as he could, and intensified her fear of a certain recurrence. The fear confused her, drove
her deeper underwater.

For all this, Hiroki never recognized his true, fathomless rival. Learning that Ayuka was seal-hearted
made everything worse.

The word ama means sea-woman.

Riku Hayashi, a research physiologist, wanted to find out if centuries of lifelong diving had adapted the
sea-womens circulatory systems to protracted underwater living. Noting that the women free-dived at
least ten meters for at least a minute at a time and did so forty times an hour, day in, day out, well into
old age, he sought permission from the fishing co-op to conduct experiments.

He wrote: The ocean is growing, uprising everywhere. This research is vital to our time.

The ama longed to hear that their struggle was worth something. Ayukas keenness had even more to
do with private shame.

Whilst the co-op no longer permitted it, Ayuka believed that ama should dive naked as their
grandmothers had done, resisting masks and wetsuits out of respect for the ocean who bared herself
completely. But if Riku was correct and the ama were authentically aquatic on the inside, that basic
honesty would redeem the dishonor of outerwear.

Of course, she said none of this to Hiroki. And Hiroki said nothing of his terror of Ayuka diving where
he couldnt reach. Before he knew what he was doing, he condemned the experiments as privacy
invasions, announced that he wouldnt allow Ayuka anywhere near Riku, and said to her in front of the
entire co-op: You already push yourself too deep for too long. Just because you like being a tourist
attraction.

This was an echo of other mens barstool-laments: flaunting themselves of an evening made
ama-wives too feisty. However, with a withering glance in Hirokis direction, his mother-in-law argued
that if Riku found what he was looking for, tourists would flock for a glimpse of Kaiyonos Anthropo-
amphibia.

It was unheard-of for feminine concerns to override husbands. But the village was hardly in a position
to let the promise of brisk business slip away.

Ayuka felt as if, just because a part-time janitor would never lead the co-op, her husband couldnt
dream of her attaining true significance. Underwater she ignored her spasming chest-muscles as the
surface became synonymous with the toxic kind of silence in which spouses can convince themselves
of any wild notion: he never loved me, only his pride; she never loved me, just wanted to marry local so

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shed keep her right to dive under the sea-tenure rules.

When the physiologist arrived, Ayuka went to him against Hirokis wishes. She joined the other ama in
Five on the wearing electronic bracelets which tracked the amount of time they spent underwater, the speed at
which they plunged, their heart rates, and the oxygen in their blood at the wrist. After their daily dive,
Fifth they took the bracelets to Rikus office. He uploaded the data, measured the amas blood pressure,
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performed chest and throat ultrasounds, and had them breathe into a spirometer.

Hiroki was appalled by the bracelet. He said: You let him tag you like a seal.
Home
Submit For such as Hiroki, seals were an absolute bane, hijackers of fishing nets. Though he painfully
understood the concept of endangered species, he couldnt see why it should apply to seals with
Current Issue greater exigency than it did to prawns, mollusks, or fishing villages. Even an imaginary affinity between
Short Fiction Contest his wife and a seal was an insult added to festering injuries. And Hiroki gobbled it, crammed it down
into his overstuffed resentment, where it blended with pernicious fear fear that shed come to
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exceed him.
He stopped touching Ayuka at nighttime. Ayuka pretended not to notice.
About
Masthead Riku Hayashi took a room at the guesthouse, dining nightly in the amas restaurant, where he asked a
lot of questions about techniques and ancestors. He took a keen interest in Ayuka and addressed her
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in special, relaxed tempos and volumes, gesturing in ways that she somehow understood and liked.
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Having checked his findings against library research, other amas recollections, and observations by
Previous Issues her none-too-civil husband, Riku asked Ayuka to visit his office alone.

In his small room and awestruck tones, Riku told her that her daily dives were significantly deeper and
longer than the other amas, their ancestors, and every funados in every record he could find.
Clutching her handbag, Ayuka asked, knowing shed been reckless, if too much deep diving had
damaged her insides.

With a smile, Riku explained that the oxygen in her blood during diving was abnormally plentiful,
indicating a remarkably healthy system. All the amas arteries were as if a decade younger than the
women really were.
This delighted the divers, set the restaurant to trilling with speculation: Ancient Practice as
Cardiovascular Disease Prevention; sustainability no one could undermine.

But there were detractors. Riku requested that Ayuka come alone because hed endured Hirokis
objections firsthand. The man was a curmudgeon in Rikus opinion. He thought Hiroki ought not to see
the ultrasounds until Mrs. Watanabe this strange, abstracted woman who mainly spoke in silence
had seen them for herself and had time to consider.

Ayuka stripped in an empty cove, slipped into the water, inverted, descended until her hands touched
kelp. Underwater, sounds and shades diffused, always moving, strange Ayuka imagined she swam
inside an inhuman thought.

Later in the kitchen, she told Hiroki what Riku found, what it meant. Deep wonder lit her face such as
boat-bound Hiroki had never seen, adrift as he was on the surface of the waves.

Behind Ayukas astounding free-diving ability was a deformed aorta. Not an aneurysm; her aorta had a
solid wall. Rather, her aortic arch, the onramp from her heart to her other arteries, was forty percent
wider than the rest of her aorta, taking the shape of a bulb just outside her ventricle. The bulb was a
holding pen for the blood emerging from her heart, which percolated through her at an exceptionally
slow rate. Her body absorbed oxygen in this slow burn, urging her to breathe less often than other
ama.
Ayuka asked if the bulb had any bearing on the fact that she never turned blue in the frigid water. The
bulb stored a heartbeats worth of blood, Riku explained. So even when her heart rate plummeted in
the cold, Ayukas organs and muscles were never deprived of energy.

The aortic bulb was unprecedented in humans but vital to marine mammals, particularly certain
pinniped species, whod evolved this vascular distention as an adaptation to frequent diving at
extreme depths. According to Rikus ultrasounds, Ayukas aortic bulb appeared naturally enlarged by
the same proportions as those of certain seals. When she explained to Hiroki, she thought his silence
merely typical. She didnt know he stopped sleeping. She dreamed of oceanscapes as an exile dreams
of home. He wondered how long shed continue to need him.

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Ayuka never knew what shed find in the deep, yet she herself was of the deep, oceanically crafted.
And now her own body, too, was a stranger to itself, an alien seascape, and the most familiar
phenomenon. This paradox bespoke uncounted possibilities.
Five on the
Mutation is difference, difference the stimulus and ambition of change. Change is evolution. Rikus
Fifth words, his word, hope, floated on Ayukas suddenly surging voice. She felt like a new person because
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of what shed always been, what she and her foremothers and the ocean had achieved. Riku lent her
books on marine biology. Ayuka looked at them as at pictures of her sons.
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She discussed them with Riku, the books and the sons. She wanted them to come and show him their
Submit aortas. But the boys thought she was silly, and she didnt know how to explain as Riku did: she wasnt
a silly old woman but a newborn ocean creature.
Current Issue
Short Fiction Contest Her sons might be the first of a new kind of being. Her marriage, she thought suddenly, had never
been anything but a success. It had fallen silent only because husband and seal-woman hadnt
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understood each other, a mystery which now made perfect sense. Shed begun diving protractedly,
she decided, not to avoid Hiroki but because she was made for it. Her body had after half a century
About grown into the challenge of being itself.
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This impression came to her as a heady breath of air. Transported by affirmation, Ayuka laughed when
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Hiroki saw the ultrasounds. She misread his look of betrayal as wounded pride which would in time be
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proud of her. She insisted that by refusing to give up, theyd achieved this evolution together. She
Previous Issues misconstrued his incredulity as astonishment unaccustomed to anything except disappointment. And
she asked what did he think, should they go with Riku to a city hospital and let him take 3D pictures of
her heart?

Hiroki said no, said it in terror become wrath. If she went to the city, shed come back changed,
infected with urban values that valued nothing but self-interest. Rikus pictures would convince her
that she was a treasure, too valuable for Hiroki.

This conclusion was the result of fear and envy escaping reasons paddock and turning savage. Ayuka
heard only envy: Hiroki refusing to forsake his pride even to let her cultivate the first shoots of
self-worth. She rebelled as only a funado ama could.

Down she went. She stayed longer than ever and didnt tug the rope. She just appeared beside the
boat, gasping, exhilarated, just as seals pop their heads out wherever it suits them. Then she saw
Hirokis face.
Hiroki said, Did he put you up to that, some sort of test?

Shed planned to say shed done it just to see if she could, but she knew it was half true and hardly
sensible. She already regretted it. She climbed into the boat, and he said, Why did you do that?

Ayuka no longer knew. She never did it again. She tugged the rope with what Hiroki thought absurd
regularity. He mistook it for mockery. Their silence clogged the air like smoke.

Hiroki decided that Riku loved her. Ayuka didnt know, her ears were full of oceanic summons. The
adoring note in Rikus voice when he spoke of Ayuka and her pictures was a projection of Hirokis
anguished mind, which happened this time to coincide with truth.

Of course Riku loved her. Ayuka Watanabe was the discovery hed longed for. Inside, she was
perfection, which made her merely pretty face the epitome of lofty beauty. Never mind that she was
ten years Rikus senior; her enthusiasm, her quiet, her singularity swept him away. She made his
research beautiful by delighting in it. She gave all his hopes a body. If hed had the chance to declare
himself to her, Riku wouldve sworn to love everything she was: the wife and the ama, the woman and
the nascent marine animal.

Hiroki imagined Riku declaring precisely thus; for Hiroki knew it was what Ayuka wanted. But all he
saw in Rikus diagnosis was a living tourist attraction playacting at drawing a veil over despair. Hiroki
despaired of his life with Ayuka, which it seemed would never be enough for her.

He became as if vindictively possessive. She withdrew into herself, spending so long in her
underwater haven that he became suspicious. He decided to blow a lot of money on a wearable
camera, which she saw as an invasion and at long last sparked an argument.

It might have meant relief for both of them, had they carried it through. But Ayuka couldnt bear it.

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Flaying each other with words was worse than drowning in silence. She threw herself overboard as if
into a lovers arms, maskless and weeping.

Five on the THE END

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Five on the About the Authors

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Ayuka Breathes: Mandy-Suzanne Wong's short fiction appears in THE HYPOCRITE READER, DARK
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MATTER, and the 2015 Aeon Award shortlist. Her novel, DRAFTS OF A SUICIDE NOTE, was shortlisted
for the 2015 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award.
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Two Lanes to Nowhere: Chelsea Graham received an MSc in Sociology from the London School of
Submit Economics and a BA in Communication from the American University of Rome. Her fiction spans and
Current Issue sometimes unites the corn fields of midwest America and the graffitied side streets of Rome. Her work
has been featured in the Stockholm Review of Literature.
Short Fiction Contest
The Present at High Tide: Chris Schacht received an MFA from New Mexico State University. His work
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has appeared in Blank Fiction, Drunk Monkeys, Newfound, and The Bellevue Literary Review.

About One of Many Deaths: Maria Pinto's work has appeared in Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, and Pinball.
Masthead She was an Ivan Gold Fellow at the Writers' Room of Boston, in the city where she reads for
Pushcart Nominations FLAPPERHOUSE & walks dogs. Her debut novel is in search of a home.

Best of the Net Nominations Walk Into Splintered Sunlight: Trevor Zaple is a Canadian author whose work has appeared in Morel,
Previous Issues Trigger Warning, Tracer, and the Nightmare Collective anthology. He has a B.A. in Contemporary
Studies, and writes risk analysis pieces for Western University's Leadership and Democracy Lab.

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