Marriage to the Sea

Sarah Stone

In Marriage to the Sea, the Zamarins, a Jewish family of artists and activists, navigate the eco-crisis, political turmoil, personal losses, and the afterlife. In their love stories and adventures—spanning Paris, Venice, and a dreamy phantasmagorical underworld—each of them searches for the overlap between what the world needs and what they have to give.

When Katya, a rebellious bi+ sustainability activist, is visited by her father’s ghost one night, she decides he’s urging her to change her life. She and her youngest sister Arielle—a recovering addict and Shakespearean actress past her ingenue sell-by date—head to Paris on a quest to help his environmentalist heroine, and, along the way, they discover unexpected new loves among the living and the dead. Their Aunt Julia (a TV villainess returned to experimental theater) also falls recklessly in love, just as her meddling brother—and the whole theater company—arrive to stay with her. At every turn, the characters are forced to navigate a world in which the sea is rising and new social movements are taking shape.

From Shadow Island

       In the corner of the loft, beside a tangle of Arielle’s workout clothes, a shape flickered. A trick of the streetlights? A power surge? A figure made of light: bluish, patchy, four pinpoints of light above his head. She shook her head, closed her eyes, opened them. He disappeared, then reappeared, in and out of the world. His solid body now transparent, bent over, as if he couldn’t yet stand up straight. He stared through her, maybe blinded by the sharp lights above his bearded face. Her longing for him came over her like a blow to the heart: She wanted to crawl straight to him but froze, as cold now as she’d been overheated earlier. He was so thin. Maybe he needed different food now but didn’t know how to find it yet? He wasn’t here. He wasn’t anywhere.

       She heard his voice, forlorn, a lost child. When are you coming?

       “Daddy?” Quiet, not to wake Arielle. Who would or would not see this blue, flickering being.

       The voice—so like him—asked again, When are you coming?

       She whispered, “What do you want? What can I do?” No answer. “Have you seen Mom? Is she there with you?”

       When are you coming? Raucous and plaintive at once, a seagull far from the ocean, sending a call she had no goddamn clue how to answer.

       The streetlight outside blinked out; the bluish light vibrated intensely. The room went dark. When the light came back on, he was gone.