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Drowning
Chapter Four
(from a novella in progress...)
by T.L. Kelly
The second mandarin goby has managed to stay alive for three days now. Ella is wrestling with the prospect of naming him. She knows he will die eventually and that by naming him she will have made a step in some direction. She doesn't fear the emotional attachment as much as she fears that watching him die after she's named him will make his little death somehow more significant than the deaths of all the other fish. It will be death with a name on it. She fears this will make her a little excited, maybe excited enough to speed the death along a little. Pull the plug on the tank, just as soon as she sees him begin the dance? Then it would not be, "Oh look. the fish is dying." It would be "Oh look. He is dying."
Ella lays back down on the bed and curls up into a ball and forces herself back to sleep. She dreams of Carla. Not the teenage Carla who eats her hair in the mental ward. No, this one is the one that taught her calligraphy and how to make chocolate pudding cake. Carla and her boyfriend were on the run from the Missouri police after their two-acre pot farm was raided. Ella met them in a pizza place in the Mojave Desert in California. They would refer to "The Commune" now and then, shrugging, like they really didn't miss it much.
Carla was tall and lanky and had long white hair. She was an albino. They lived in an airstream trailer parked behind a drive-in theater. They were always ready to go.
Carla and Ella got drunk and Carla invited Ella to the airstream to smoke a few joints of thai stick and make chocolate pudding cake. Ella said yes. Everything in the airstream was bolted down. They drank Boones Farm Apple wine from mugs that slid into mug holders suctioned to the fold-down table. "If we have to leave suddenly, we'll drop you off somewhere on the way," Carla told Ella.
There were navajo blankets over the windows and macrame wall-hangings stapled to the cupboards and decoupage plaques that said things like "Give Peace a Chance" in Carla's own calligraphy. Carla passes a joint to Ella and Ella takes a hit real slow. She stifles a compulsion to cough. Carla's boyfriend, Stretch, comes up behind Ella and starts brushing her hair. Carla smiles at Ella while smoke curls up around her nose, and Stretch says, "Before we go, you're free to stay with us and share our bed. We both want to fuck you but it's okay if you don't want to."
The next dream begins, the drowning dream. It cuts to the part where her head is finally submerged and she is sinking, resigned to the pull from the creature-woman who has turned herself into a pearl.
Her eyes sting. The salt water burns her dress off, it sags away into deeper water and she watches itself-destruct and finally disappear into the darkness below. The physical distress of suffocation begins. Ella, to pass the time, the little time remaining, reaches out for the pearl. This time, her fingertips brush against it and it veers a little, but then escapes her grasp. Her lungs begin to expand from the pressure of her futile effort to hold on to the last air bubble welling up inside her. Ella wraps her arms around herself like a straightjacket. Ella feels the black-out coming on, that last moment before dying when you can't help but writhe from the pressure of holding on to one more moment. Or is it the failure of the comedy that makes one struggle? The comedy of holding on to one moment that is basically as horrible as the previous moment in the process of drowning.
The moment passes and another begins. The pearl begins to zigzag because the water this deep is thicker, wilder, whipped by unresolved currents. The currents begin to push Ella back and forth, zigzagging her body like a snake. Why haven't my lungs exploded yet? Ella wonders. She holds on to herself tighter, squeezing herself as if to speed up the process. But the explosion doesn't come and Ella is sinking further into the water than she ever has before. Leg cramps. The weight of the water reshaping her. Ella moves her arms down to pull her knees up, to curl up in the water, into a ball. Perhaps I should try to go to sleep, to avoid this, Ella wonders. But then she remembers, I'm already asleep. When she brings her knees up she feels something slick and scaly. Where her knees used to be is one mound of scales, a fin. A huge fin. Ella looks around for the pearl. It has sunk to the bottom, somewhere in the darkness which is now enveloping her.
Ella considers releasing the last bubble in her lung right now, to wake up. But just out of a sudden curiousity that is different from the curiousity that led her into the water in the first place, she rubs her legs to confirm her suspicion, which is confirmed, she no longer has legs, she has a huge fish tail, a mermaid's tail where her legs used to be. When she rubs her hand up, her fingers catch in huge thin plates, her scales. She looks down at herself. She is a mermaid. She holds on to the bubble a little longer. She moves her tail slightly. She rises up just a little in the downward spiral, a swimming motion. She senses the bottom of the ocean rising up to her. She swims a little harder. She rises up, then relaxes, resumes the spiralling descent. She sees the pearl there at the bottom. It has landed in the open maw of a giant clam. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness. Her lungs begin to expand. For once in a long long time, she wants to stop suffocating. She opens her mouth to release the bubble but no bubble comes out, instead the water rushes into her mouth and down her throat and fills her lungs and she lurches and the water rolls out and back in and she is breathing the water. She feels her hips, they are scales. She gropes her breasts. They are still flesh, but with a thin slimy film. The bottom rises up. Ella swims out of the path of the downward spiral. She breathes in again. Sea water fills her. She breathes out. Water surrounds her. She looks for the pearl and it is very close, resting, waiting for her to go fetch it.
Ella feels a sensation like hyperventilation, from the excitement of this, and wonders for a moment if what is happening in real life is that she has pulled the bedsheets dreaming of a real suffocation, a creative suicide. What a surprise for Ray, that she could be so creative. But her lungs refuse to explode. She is somewhere beneath sleep, beneath dreaming. She is at the bottom of wherever she started this process and has turned into a creature that can breathe through her skin. A mermaid is a creature that is not complete. She is half one thing and half another. Is she still female? Are all mermaids female? Ella gropes at where her cunt should be. Scales. She pushes her fingers under the scales to find her cunt. More scales, then a thick rubbery skin, fish membrane. She eyes the pearl that is resting just beneath her as she fans her huge tail back and forth to keep from touching the ocean bottom, to keep just above it, to swim just a little longer since it is now the swimming that has replaced the act of suffocating, swimming for that extra terrible moment before something more urgent than death overtakes her. She digs at the scales where her cunt should be with her fingernails. She tears at the filmy membrane. Shreds of the membrane rise in front of her as she digs at herself to expose her cunt. She has torn a hole in herself but keeps digging. There is only more scales and more membrane. Blood now rises mixed in with the shreds of membrane she has torn away from herself. She has gouged a hole in herself, but she has no cunt.
Ella squirms in the water from the pressure of the realization that she has turned into a different creature and within moments of doing so, she has damaged herself permanently, disfigured herself. She has been given a gift of a new life without a cunt and within moments, struggled to regain her old self. She holds her breath in a desparate attempt to revive the bubble, to make her lungs explode. But it is a futile effort because here, inches away from the pearl at the bottom of the ocean, she no longer has human lungs that could suffocate this way, she has unknown anatomy. And now, disfigured anatomy. Do fish have lungs? There is nothing certain here. She either sinks or swims.
This is the first decision Ella has had to make in years. Sink or swim. Through the blood and shreds of skin rising up around her, Ella sees the pearl within reach. If she just stops swimming she will sink down and can rest in the ocean bottom alongside the pearl, wrap herself around it, close the clamshell, live happily ever after. She positions herself so that the pearl is very close to the hole she has gouged in herself, so she can see if it is the fake pearl or a real one. It is the real one. All's she has to do now is surrender. Just sink, Ella, just stop struggling against the wild currents that have brought you here. You aren't Ella anymore, you are a graceful mermaid, protector of pearls. Ella feels tears welling up in her eyes which seems impossible at the moment - if mermaids really can cry, who would know? Who would see the tears? It occurs to her that the mermaid herself would know. But for anybody else to know it, the mermaid has to swim up to the surface and let that part of herself, the human half, rise above the surface and call out for help to the strangers having picnics on the beach. The strangers would not see a disfigured mermaid, after all, they would only see that part of her that is a woman crying and waving her arms and screaming for help because she is drowning.
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