With her face in her pillow, Lucy paws blindly around the surface of her nightstand for the glass of water she knows she left there, half full, last night. She surveys the surface of the small table with a slow sweep of her hand, careful not to knock the glass over if her arm finds it before her fingers. She swings her arm across the nightstand again though this time more from agitation than in actual attempt to find her target. Lucy emits an exasperated moan as she forces her eyelids open, arm still outstretched toward a glass of water that she now sees has been lying overturned on the floor. It seems that the escaped water has mostly evaporated from the hardwood but for a drop or two left stranded in the glass.

At this sight, she shrugs out of her comforter, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and on her hands and knees examines the scene from the edge of her mattress. The traction of the sheets is less than adequate, and slowly she falls forward in her intense concentration, like a glacier sliding from an ice shelf. Unaware that she’s slipping, Lucy’s focus is solely on the drops of water that remain in the glass.

Her phone vibrates loudly.

Shocked in her morning haze, Lucy tumbles from her bed as she instinctively reaches unsuccessfully for the device. Her head collides with the floor, and she lands with her vision perfectly aligned with the inside of the toppled glass. The buzzing from the phone persists. With a grumble, she rubs her head in vain, and as she brings her fingers away from her now damp hair, she discovers that the water from last night had in fact not evaporated. From the floor, she can see the phone shaking its way past the perimeter of the nightstand, searching for someone’s grasp to attend to the apparent emergency on the other side.

She watches as it, too, falls on the hardwood and lands against the glass in front of her. It continues buzzing, though now with an added annoyance from the glass’s surface. Lucy lets it keep ringing, and stares at the thing until it decides to give up. Almost as soon as Lucy realizes the phone has stopped vibrating, she hears a muffled shout through her wall.

“Luce! Why didn’t you answer your phone?”

It is the shrill voice of ignorant bliss.

To the same effect that she ignored the call that she so instinctively reached for, Lucy opens her mouth as if to respond to the voice, but no sound emerges. She closes her mouth and opens it again. She repeats this motion again, imagining herself as a fish that had, its whole life, lived in that half drunk glass of water. When the contents of her world puddled on the bedroom floor, she had spilled out along with it, taking in gill-fulls of reliefless oxygen.

Splayed out on the floor, Lucy writhes away from her bed toward the door to her room. She is parched and drying out. This new world is too dry for a fish to exist in it. There is no place for her here.

Her phone begins vibrating again, somehow seeming more urgent than before. Lucy is unable to see this, but she knows her roommate’s face is beaming out from the screen of the phone.

When they first met, Victoria had snatched the phone from Lucy’s hands and added her number to the contacts list. She also took a picture of herself to attach to her information, in case Lucy forgot what she looked like. In this picture, she was sure to show each one of her fluorescent teeth.

The handle to Lucy’s door now looms over her, and she stares blankly at it with big unblinking eyes, still unable to breathe. The phone keeps making noises to persuade her to answer it. Lucy no longer has the instinct to try and answer it. Lucy is a fish.

“Lucy!” Victoria yells again the moment a prerecorded message asks her to leave a message, lying that Lucy will be in touch with her as soon as possible. “Lucy?” The voice’s timbre changes from annoyance to vague concern.

From the floor, Lucy reaches to turn the door’s handle, and when the door opens, Lucy is confronted with a wall of water. It is stationary, and does not flood into her room, as if she has opened a secret entrance to an ocean. The water has filled her house, and she wriggles into the depths to wet her gills.

Her movements are much more fluid now, if a bit ungainly from her new form. She swishes her tail to propel herself forward, swimming through the space which is usually so familiar. She floats to the top of the room, and rubs her dorsal fin gently against the ceiling just to experience the feeling, and looks down at her furniture anchored on the floor. Smaller objects litter the water here and there, moving about uncertainly. A forest of seaweed has sprouted from the hardwood floor in the living room.

Lucy makes her way to the kitchen cabinet where the glasses are kept, and wedges her body between the cabinet and its handle to open the cabinet door. When the cabinet opens, she sees a display of clean glasses that Victoria has neatly arranged in a pattern where one glass stands on its base, right-side-up, and the next is upside down. She does this so the glasses sit against each other perfectly in the way that the letters V and A sit against each other perfectly.

Victoria situates the glasses in this fashion to conserve space, though the cabinets hardly hold enough dishes for space conservation to be a pressing matter. Lucy opens and closes her mouth. She might be mouthing, “VA VA VA VA” as if reading the glasses in the cabinet. The few plastic cups in the cabinet drift around, bumping into each other, caught between shelves.

Lucy swims into the mouth of one of the upright glasses, and pressing her face against the rim, flicks her tail furiously until the glass tips slowly over. Using this same method, she pushes the glass out of the cabinet and on to the floor. Lucy watches as it sinks and eventually lands on its side.

She glides into the mouth of the glass, and testing its weight, attempts to move it back to her bedroom. It isn’t as heavy as she had thought it might be, and she is able to glide the glass back with ease in the same way she moved it from the cabinet: face against the bottom, tail fluttering. Lucy imagines she is a pilot flying the glass through the sky, though a submarine would be a more fitting vessel.

Once she has reached her destination, Lucy sees that the water has now invaded her room. Her sheets dance in the liquid, held in place by the ends tucked under her mattress.

Guiding the glass to hover above her nightstand, Lucy makes a dive to set the glass on the surface, tipping it right-side-up and letting gravity handle the rest. It settles nicely on the table.

Lucy then makes her way back to her bedroom door and pushes it closed. As the lock clicks in place, the water begins to empty from the room. She doesn’t know where the water is draining to, but she is far more concerned with having to exist in that dry world again where she cannot breathe or swim, the world in which Lucy is not able to live. She darts around the room in panic, until she decides to take refuge in the glass on her nightstand. As the water level sinks lower still, Lucy waits inside her glass sanctuary until finally the only water left in the room is that in which Lucy resides.

From her glass, Lucy sees her phone illuminate with Victoria’s pearly whites. It seems like her teeth are what give the phone’s screen its glow. Lucy couldn’t answer the phone even if her instinct to do so suddenly came rushing back, but she doesn’t seem to mind that so much. She would just as well stay safe inside the glass of water, relieved of the ridiculous obligations of that wretched, dry world, waiting for the water to someday rise again.