The Woman Who Breathed Brine

The Woman Who Breathed Brine

by Ozzy Annoa

They said she was spending too much time in the tanks.
The others whispered it, casually at first—over open laptops and late-night freeze-dried meals, in the clipped shorthand of colleagues pretending not to gossip. But the concern grew, quietly. She was always wet. Not damp from a lab spill or rinse-off—wet, as if freshly pulled from somewhere else.

Dr. Mare Callin was the kind of researcher who didn’t just observe her subjects—she mirrored them. Her work focused on the breathing patterns of aquatic species in fluctuating salinity environments, but it had always gone beyond the measurable. She claimed her body could learn something the instruments missed.

Her routines shifted. She adjusted the oxygen mix in her quarters, kept the air warm and heavy, wore clothes that stayed saturated. The palms of her hands softened and then thickened, faintly ridged. Her eyes stayed red too long after dives. Her voice sounded lower. Slower.

Her dives became longer. She began charting her own metrics but refused to publish them. “You can’t replicate what the body knows instinctively,” she said once, in a meeting, without looking up. “In fact, measurement distorts it.”

She started diving without gear. No mask. No tank. At first they believed she was holding her breath. But a student reviewing underwater footage noticed she wasn’t surfacing at all. She had simply stopped.

No one knew how to ask her about it. Not directly. She was tenured, elusive, private.

One day she failed to show up for her scheduled tank maintenance. Then she missed her housing inspection. When the tech team entered her room, they found it humid and salt-streaked. The carpet was soaked. The windows were open to the sea.

Her wetsuit hung on the wall, dry.

There was no record of her departure.

At the edge of the research station, just below the breakwater, a hollow space had formed beneath the rocks—an unnatural tidepool, deep enough to vanish into. Divers sent to investigate reported the sense of being watched. One claimed he felt a hand close softly around his ankle. Nothing was recorded on the footage.

But sometimes, when the tide is high, people standing out on the dock swear they hear it:

A sound, like slow breathing
rising from below.