Clara knew it was rare to inherit a full classroom as a first year teacher, especially a full classroom from someone who had been teaching for longer than she had been alive, and that she should be grateful for the opportunity. And she was, mostly. She was grateful for the picture books and physical toys—kids these days were glued to screens and most toys were virtual now. She was less grateful for all the random papers and keepsakes that cluttered the room.

Cleaning out the classroom was a project Clara had been putting off all summer. Now it was two days before school started, two days before her first kindergarten class came rushing through the doors for their first day of school, and she was only just getting started. First she arranged the tables, making sure there was still plenty of space for the projected avatars of the three virtual students on her roster. Then she took down faded posters with motivational sayings and taped up her own, giving a snort of amusement that while the design of the posters had changed, the actual sayings had not.

Mrs. Lenore Jacobs, or Mrs. Jacobs to her students, had been a kindergarten teacher for forty-five years before Clara had been given the key to her former classroom. The woman was a figurehead in the Silent Bay Community School District, and her rapid decline in health that led to her sudden retirement was all anyone had talked about when Clara moved to town. Mrs. Jacobs passed away on a Tuesday and Clara had been given her room Wednesday morning along with everything in it. Mrs. Jacobs had no family coming to clean up her classroom and take her belongings.

Clara moved over to the desk that sat in the corner. She wondered if it would be better to move it, but she wasn’t planning to do so until she had emptied the drawers. The first drawer was already empty. The second drawer had a stapler and some highlighters. The final drawer contained a stack of papers. Clara picked the stack up, realizing that these were drawings that former students must have done. She examined the scribbles on paper that had yellowed and crinkled over time. Clara picked one up that was so brittle she worried it would snap right in half. It depicted a stick figure of a little girl and a brown blob with legs, probably a dog. No name and no date, but Clara figured by the clothing this girl was at least her age now if not older. She shuffled through a couple more drawings until she found one of a boy (another stick figure) on a boat in a big cloud of the color blue. It took Clara a few seconds to realize this boy had drawn the ocean back when it was still blue.

Out the window, Clara could see the Silent Bay (which it was anything but) for which the school district was named. The ocean rocked gently back and forth, a sea of mottled green and rusty red. The color Clara had known it to be her entire life, but which she knew it hadn’t always been. Algae covered most of the ocean’s surface now, blooming in greens and reds that prevented the water from taking on its own color. Coastal regions were typically the worst, with too many nutrients in the water according to scientists.

Inspecting the drawing further, it seemed the boy had drawn some sea creatures as well. A skinny grey creature… Clara frowned, trying to come up with the name. Extinct animals never came easily to her. A dolphin, that was it. That meant this drawing had to be at least thirty years old. The boy had drawn some fish, which she recognized by shape alone. A sea turtle, another extinct creature. Then, in the bottom corner, was a pink blob with strings coming off of it. A jellyfish.

Ocean acidification had wreaked havoc on most aquatic life, but the winners were the soft-bodied and the boneless. Jellyfish and their relatives had flourished. They bloomed almost like the algae, driving out fish and other animals. They were so abundant that most seafood contained jellyfish parts. Clara wasn’t big on seafood, and she thought jellyfish were too salty, but there was no denying the way they’d bloomed into local culture.

The color pink was an anomaly, everyone knew jellyfish tended to be clear or an orange-ish red, as was the size. The one in the drawing looked tiny, nowhere near the skyscraper sized jellies that drifted out in the open ocean. Clara looked out the window again, spotting the massive bells of jellies breaking the surface in the bay. The local species tended to be car-sized, and they were easy for locals to spot and avoid.

Clara placed the drawings back in the drawer. Maybe she’d hold onto them, in honor of Mrs. Jacobs. Or maybe someone from the historical society would find them interesting. She turned back to her half-prepared classroom. None of her students would ever think of the ocean as blue, or see a dolphin and sea turtle with their own eyes, but they would all know what a jellyfish looked like.