Originally published in 2015 in Drunken Boat, “Lettie from the Ocean” is irreverent fan fiction by Caroline Wilkinson that responds to Neil Gaiman’s novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. In Gaiman’s novel, the nameless male narrator is saved from evil forces as a boy by his childhood friend, Lettie Hempstock. While the narrator has moved on to an adult life, Lettie has remained in her childhood home — or outside the home. Submerged in a pond on her mother’s property, she continues to heal from injuries that she sustained while saving her friend.
The narrator returns to the Hempstock home as an adult with a false idea of the past. He remembers Hettie as having moved to Australia; from the pond, she reminds him of what actually happened. The narrator has no reason to feel either obligated to Hetty or guilty. Unlike him, she is not human but, rather, an ageless creature. The pond where she lives, furthermore, turns out to be an ocean.
Lettie is drawing you back too, reader. She wants to tell you of a present shaped by a falsely remembered past. She is calling from a phone that is, in fact, an ocean. You can pick up below.
All images from Albertus Seba’s Cabinet of Natural Curiosities.