Julia

This story was originally published in Day One, a weekly literary journal dedicated to short fiction and poetry from emerging writers. Twelve-year-old Julia is distraught when her father—an oceanographer whom she adores—abruptly abandons the family. Living in a silent house full of her mother’s grief and her sister’s bitterness, Julia has her own theories about her father’s disappearance. She believes he left to find the source of an unexplainable oceanic sound that he’d recorded a year earlier and named after her. Her hypothesis is that if she can find the sound’s origin, then she will also find her father. As Julia sets out on a perilous quest toward an oncoming hurricane, she confronts the ocean at its most violent and puts to rest the hopeful adolescent fantasy of being able to find answers if you just know where to look.