Strange Horizons, March 16, 2020

“The Touch Pool” by Lisa Nan Joo

Reviewed by Anthony Perconti

This week’s issue of Strange Horizons features the tale “The Touch Pool” by Lisa Nan Joo. The story focuses on a nameless narrator (that is a medical worker), who is grieving for the loss of her daughter. Amy, who mysteriously disappeared after going out with friends in celebration of completion of her law exams, leaves a gaping hole in the life of this grieving mother. The narrator slowly begins to abandon her scheduled life and job, as the decaying orbit of the regular visits to the police station come up with dead end leads.

She moves in with her Nan, who owns a house at the sea’s edge. As time passes, the narrator makes a marginal living collecting and selling seaweed from the ever encroaching ocean. Embedded throughout the macroalgae, the narrator discovers human (and non-human) detritus. This includes shards of glass, razor blades and discarded syringes. Also found within the sea’s bounty is the spiral structure of a shark’s egg.

This specific artifact is directly linked to Amy, in that, it was an emotional focal point for the girl a decade in the past. Joo makes the unsettling correlation that (perhaps) through this emotionally charged vestige, Amy is able to visit her mother, after death, from the depths of the ocean. Only after her mother casts Amy’s shark egg souvenir into the ocean, do the otherworldly visitations begin. “She is different, but I know it is her. Her teeth are pointed. Her gills suck at the blustering skies. She is grey-black and plump, and her eyes are like pieces of black glass in the flat of her face…She is heavy and yet elastic, her body snaking forward, the slits of her nose pointed at me, smelling me out.” This visage is quite disturbing, yet welcome all the same. In the narrator’s case, a nearly unrecognizable loved one is a better option than none at all.

Amy visits her mother several more times, but with each encounter the daughter becomes more and more distant, more alien. It is gradually revealed to the reader that the protagonist’s Nan is now living in an assisted living complex with a focus on memory care. The narrator’s interactions with her deceased daughter are not corroborated by another living being. Joo makes the (sly) insinuation that these ghostly interfaces are quite possibly happening within the mind of the narrator; internal events, as it were. “The Touch Pool” works simultaneously as a ghost story and as a meditation on how individuals process personal loss. The fact that Amy’s shade may or not be ‘real’ is almost a secondary concern. What is important though, is that Amy is real to her grieving mother. Joo leaves enough ambiguity in the story for the reader to come to their own conclusions concerning Amy’s apparition. “I know she is never coming back. A creature like that survives best on her own…She’s not the one I lost…I love her, yes. But now I have to give her up to the sea.” Time and memory (like the sea’s constant rhythm) erodes away even the sharpest edges of our deepest losses. A cold prospect for certain, much like the winter ocean at dawn. But a comfort nonetheless.

Anthony Perconti lives and works in the hinterlands of New Jersey with his wife and kids. He enjoys well-crafted and engaging stories across a variety of genres and mediums.  His articles have appeared in several online venues and can be found on Twitter at @AnthonyPerconti.