“Yesterday,” she says, “during my lunch break, when I said I needed to go to the bank, I didn’t.”
There are a few seconds of quiet before he asks, “Where did you go, Elizabeth?”
“Choate Bridge,” she answers. “I just stood there a while, watching the river.” It’s the oldest stone-arch bridge anywhere in Massachusetts, built in 1764. There are two granite archways through which the river flows on its easterly course.
“Did it make you feel any better?”
“It made me want to swim. The river always makes me want to swim, Michael. You know that.”
“Yeah, Betsy. I know.”
She wants to add, Please don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to, but she doesn’t. It would be rude. He means well, and she’s never rude if she can help it. Especially not to Michael.
All evidence of her fingernails has completely vanished.
“It terrified me. It always fucking terrifies me.”
“Maybe one day it won’t. Maybe one day you’ll be able to look at the water without being frightened.”
“Maybe,” she whispers, hoping it isn’t true. Pretty sure what’ll happen if she ever stops being afraid of the river and the sea. I can’t drown. I can’t ever drown. How does a woman who can’t drown fear the water?
There are things in the water. Things that can hurt me. And places I never want to see awake.
Now he’s running the sponge down her back, beginning at the nape of her neck and ending at the cleft between her buttocks. This time, the pain is bad enough she wants to double over, wants to go down on her knees and vomit. But that would be weak, and she won’t be weak. Michael used to bring her pills to dull the pain, but she stopped taking them almost a year ago because she didn’t like the fogginess they brought, the way they caused her to feel detached from herself, as though these transformations were happening to someone else.
Monsters should be honest.
At once, the neural processes of her vertebrae begin to broaden and elongate. She’s made herself learn a lot about anatomy: human, anuran, chondrichthyan, osteichthyan, et al. Anything and everything that seems relevant to what happens to her on these nights.
The devil you know, as her grandfather used to say.
So, Elizabeth Haskings knows that the processes will grow the longest between her third and seventh thoracic vertebrae, and on the last lumbar, the sacrals, and coccygeals (though less so than in the thoracic region), greatly accenting both the natural curves of her back. Musculature responds accordingly. She knows the Latin names of all those muscles, and if there were less pain, she could recite them for Michael. She imagines herself laughing like a madwoman and reciting the names of the shifting, straining tendons. In the end, there won’t quite be fins, sensu stricto. Almost, but not quite.
Aren’t I a madwoman? How can I possibly still be sane?
“Betsy, you don’t have to be so strong,” he tells her, and she hates the pity in his voice. “I know you think you do, but you don’t. Certainly not in front of me.”
She takes the yellow sponge from him, her hands shaking so badly she spills most of the salt water remaining in the bowl, but still manages to get the sponge sopping wet. Her gums have begun to ache, and she smiles at herself before wringing out the sponge with both her webbed hands so that the water runs down her belly and between her legs. In the mirror, she sees Michael turn away.
She drops the sponge to the floor at her feet (she doesn’t have to look to know her toes have begun to fuse one to the next), and gazes into her pitchy eyes until she’s sure the adjustments to her genitals are finished. When she does look down at herself, there’s a taut, flat place in place of the low mound of the mons pubis, and the labia majora, labia minora, and clitoris—all the intricacies of her sex—have been reduced to the vertical slit of an oviduct where her vagina was moments before. On either side of the slit are tiny, triangular pelvic fins, no more than an inch high and three inches long.
“We should hurry now, Betsy,” Michael says. He’s right, of course. She has to reach the bathtub full of warm salty water while she can still walk. Once or twice before she’s waited too long, and he’s had to carry her, and that humiliation was almost worse than all the rest combined. In the tub, she curls almost foetal, and the flaps in front of Elizabeth’s gills open and close, pumping in and out again, extracting all the oxygen she’ll need until sunrise. Michael will stay with her, guarding her, as he always does.
She can sleep without lids to shield her black eyes, and, when she sleeps, she dreams of the river flowing down to the ruined seaport, to Essex Bay, and then out into the Atlantic due south of Plum Island. She dreams of the craggy spine of Devil Reef rising a few feet above the waves and of those who crawl out onto the reef most nights to bask beneath the moon. Those like her. And, worst of all, she dreams of the abyss beyond the reef, and towers and halls of the city there, a city that has stood for eighty thousand years and will stand for eighty thousand more. On these nights, changed and slumbering, Elizabeth Haskings can’t lie to herself and pretend that her mother fled to Oregon, or even that her grandfather lies in his grave in Highland Cemetery. On these nights, she isn’t afraid of anything.
THE CHAIN
by MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
THE FIRST DAYS were pleasant. Fun, even. Different from normal life. A break. A change—exactly what David needed, and what he’d come there for.
He slept well and rose early, carrying his first herbal tea of the day down to the beach. He took long walks and ate healthy meals, and sometimes when he felt like a cigarette he elected to not have one. He avoided alcohol. He thought about what he might paint, and in the evening sat on the small deck in front of the cottage and read non-taxing fiction or sat gazing calmly into space, nodding affably at people who walked by, as if he really lived here.
Everything flowed. One day led comfortably into the next.
It took a week before the chain began to break.
* * *
On Monday he’d arrived by car down from San Francisco and moved into the cottage. This didn’t take long. The tiny house was thoughtfully set up for vacation rentals, and provided everything he could possibly need except something to wear and something to do, both of which he’d brought with him in the back seat of his convertible Mini Cooper. Once a source of pride, the car was now battered and prone to malfunction (much like, David occasionally felt, himself).
He put his regular clothes in the drawers in the bedroom. He put his painting clothes in the small garage, along with easel, paints and a stack of canvases. He’d brought ten, a statement of intent. All were three feet square, purely because his supplier in the city happened to have them on sale. Tackling a fixed aspect ratio might be invigorating, and having no choice might also help focus the mind. So he hoped.
The garage had no windows except for a thin frosted strip along the top of the door, but the owner evidently used the space as an occasional workshop and it was artificially well lit via bulbs and fluorescent tubes. It seemed a shame, having driven five hours to such a beautiful part of the coast, to be planning to spend large portions of every day hidden from it—but that was the purpose of being here. To paint. To kick himself back into enjoying his vocation, even caring about it again.
If he really got his groove on, ten canvases wouldn’t be nearly enough for three weeks’ work—his process was to rough out initial masses quickly, returning at leisure to detail and finesse—but should additional ones be needed then he was confident he’d be able to obtain them. Carmel has a bewildering number of art galleries, and is home to people who fill them. They weren’t David’s kind of painter, but that was okay. David wasn’t sure if he was his kind of painter any more either—or any kind of painter at all.