Content Note: body transformation/horror

Irene traced her gloved finger down the window, following one of the raindrops as it slid left, its path forced by the speed of the train. The water stretched the sodden afternoon landscape into streaks of grey and green and brown. In her mind’s eye, she could see the layers of color she would use to build the scene, how she would tint the yellow underpainting to mimic the storm-filtered light, how she would scumble blue atop rich greens to give the misty copses their depth. Each drop a tiny world unto itself. Why hadn’t she studied rain before this, why hadn’t she spent more time thinking about water and all the marvels therein?

Because she had thought she would have more time; because she had thought that somehow she would get to live like everyone else.

Across the aisle were the only other passengers in the car, a woman and a little girl. Not related: a governess and her charge? Only they were on this train, and the last stop was—

But no, no, there were other stations before then. Normal villages, where people led normal lives. And when had a child ever come to them from outside?

The woman had a large book spread open on her lap; the little girl leaned against her as she read aloud. As Irene herself had done with Mother, long ago. Only Mother had never read them stories like this.

“The next morning the prince went to the man and said to him, ‘No one shall be my wife except for the one whose foot fits this golden shoe.’” The woman’s voice was pitched over the clacking of the train; the rhythm of the wheels gave a strange urgency to her words, one that made Irene shudder. Though why should she care? It was only a story, and a terrible one at that.

“The two sisters were happy to hear this, for they had pretty feet.” At the phrase pretty feet the little girl held up her own foot, wiggling it. “With her mother standing by, the older one took the shoe into her bedroom to try it on, but she could not get even her big toe into it, for the shoe was much too small for her. Then her mother gave her a knife and said, ‘Cut off your toe. When you are queen, you will no longer have to go on foot.’”

Cut off your toe. Surreptitiously Irene turned her hand over in her lap, staring at her gloved palm. The moisture was spreading outward from the center, making the dark fabric glisten. She flexed her hand and felt liquid squeeze out from between her fingers, like her flesh was made of wet sponge. What prince would take such a woman?

Not that it mattered, for there were no such things as princes, or clothes that could change your fate.

“Rook di goo, rook di goo!

There’s blood in the shoe.

The shoe is too tight,

The bride is not right!”

The little girl made an oh of—horror? Astonishment? Irene couldn’t say. Another thing that didn’t matter. The stories, the lessons, they were always the same. Everyone chopping at themselves, contorting themselves, doing terrible things just for a chance at the life they wanted. When it had never been up to them at all.

She pushed on her palm with her other finger, watching as the slimy moisture rose up through the cloth. When it was all done, would she be able to hold a brush at all? Would she even know what she had lost, would she even know herself?

The questions made her stomach knot and she swiftly pushed them away. There had to be time. There had to be. And if not—

If not, she might still be heard, she might have a kind of justice. Even if it was too late for herself.

The train began to brake. The woman closed the book with a snap and gathered up their parcels. As the little girl sidled down the aisle, she looked at Irene uneasily. Irene smiled at her, but the little girl didn’t smile back; she pressed against the seats, keeping out of Irene’s reach.

“Silly creature, go on,” the woman said, exasperated. “There’s the paper if you want it,” she added to Irene, then pushed and clucked her charge towards the carriage door.

Cool evening air gusted through the car as the woman and girl left. No one else boarded; no one else would, now. Carefully Irene got up and reached over to snatch the newspaper from the opposite seat. Her dress was sticking to her body, crumpling beneath her arms and bunching around her thighs; she knew the seat was wet beneath her. All she had to do was get off without comment—though with the village’s reputation, would they even say anything? Or would they just give her that somber look she remembered all too well, like they were looking at something already dead?

She spread the newspaper open and tilted it towards the window. It was the city gazette, it should be in there, somewhere—

And then she saw it.

Artists Join in Exhibition

Over twenty young artists will be showing painting and sculpture at the King’s Hall. Opening talks will be given by two distinguished professors from the National Art Academy. The exhibition will include International Prize winner Thomas Beckwith, son of Sir Ralph Beckwith; a promising sculptor of the human figure whose work is under consideration for the new Centennial Square; and a gifted paintress of landscapes.

Irene’s stomach twisted again. Paintress, she mouthed silently. Was it that much of a strain to acknowledge her, that they had to make up a diminutive? Of course Thomas would get his name in, being a Beckwith. But she had won the Prize before him, and Edouard the year before that. Why weren’t they worthy of naming?

A paintress, of all things. For a moment she envisioned her life as a paintress: the relentless dismissal, the arguments to merely be recognized, the constant admonitions to do something smaller, more practical, more womanly. She thought of how hard she’d had to fight to even be included in the show—all to become an afterthought in a back column. She envisioned it all, past and future, and she thought, perhaps it’s better this way, perhaps I’m better off out of the whole business. But even as she thought it she wanted to scream.

Instead she closed the paper and pressed her face against the glass, looking at the rain again. A swan song before she had even begun. Her mind’s eye travelled over the brushstrokes of her entry, reliving the pleasure she had felt in teasing life into the grasses, turning the most delicate, precise flicks of the brush into sprays of bluebells. All to be a mere curiosity. Like a plant withering before it had a chance to bloom.

She started to lay the newspaper on the opposite seat, but the bottom edges were wet now from brushing against her skirts and there were stains where she had gripped it. With a sigh she wedged it between the seat and the wall instead. Cut off your toe. Glancing around the empty carriage, she pulled her carpetbag out from under the seat and checked inside.

The pistol was still there, nestled under her clothes. Loaded. Ready.

And then Irene turned and looked out the window once more, watching the rain paint the world as she would never do again.

###

It was dusk when the train reached her station. The end of the line; Irene smiled bitterly at the double meaning. Just a little further down the track was the great turntable where they would quickly rotate the train for its return. She remembered, hazily, when they had first extended the line this far down the peninsula, how frightened everyone had been; but it had turned out to be a moot concern, for no one wanted to come here. It was an instinctive revulsion, like the little girl keeping out of reach. And could she blame them? When she rose to disembark, the whole of the seat beneath her was soaked through, the dark stain like her own shadow, sensibly staying on board, the better to return to the city and the only happiness she’d ever known.

But she couldn’t go back, not like this, not with so much more to come. Unless.

She tied her cloak on and took up her carpetbag. The moment she stepped onto the platform, the train was moving again. Instinctive. The cloak hid the sodden mess of her clothing but it proved unnecessary, for there was no one else on the little platform. Really, she was lucky the train had stopped at all. Often it just rolled slowly through; that’s what it had done on the day she ran away, she’d had to sprint after it and leap for the steps. And of course there was that story of another girl who had run away long before Irene, only she missed the step and got caught under the wheels and crushed to death. No one could remember her name, however, which had always made Irene wonder if the girl had existed at all, or it was merely a tale to dissuade them from attempting the same.

That day. Catching her breath on the seat. Everything she owned, everything she could steal, in a single pillowcase. The name of a teacher at the National Art Academy in her pocket, torn from a magazine she had pilfered in the village store. Betting everything on a stranger’s generosity. There had been no conductor until after the next station, and when she explained where she had gotten on, he had gaped at her, then shoved a ticket in her hand and hurried away. Wiping his own hand on his pants like he had touched something foul.

The rain, at least, had tapered off, leaving behind dark clouds like bars across the starry sky and full, rising moon. The night air was damp and cool, the kind she had savored as a child. That hint of brine in the air. She inhaled deeply, then hated herself for doing so, hated how delicious it tasted. No more water, she had promised herself when she ran away. No more water, ever. Yet here she was, gasping like a beached thing, longing to paint the rain.

The station was the same tiny, dark cabin she remembered, its only ornament the carved fish over the door. No name, no signposts, just that thick, scaled body curving like a dome, glistening in the dim moonlight; in daylight, Irene knew, it would be a blinding rose gold. Poideu. The fish found only in their bay and only for the briefest season, its rose-pink flesh prized for its rarity and flavor. Too rare, in fact; Irene had been surprised to learn how few people knew of it in the city, how many of those assumed the word meant something else—a kind of dish, perhaps. But the village had never been able to agree on how to sell their one and only commodity. They were too afraid of scrutiny, too afraid of inadvertently breaking the covenant upon which they believed their whole existence balanced. The village had no pretty beaches or fertile soil, not even a name to put on a map; the roads were often impassible in winter, the train tracks flooded regularly. There was only the poideu—and the horror of its spawning. All dictated long ago, if the stories were to be believed, by something that could only be described as god.

Inside the station, the ticket window was closed, the little grill over the opening rusted now. The fitful moonlight revealed dust, cobwebs, a floor of intricate, scale-patterned parquet speckled with rodent droppings. They weren’t even pretending anymore. In her youth, they had drawn lots on the village green for who would man the ticket window each week, just in case. But no one had been here for months; perhaps no one had been here since she left. Five years ago now.

Five years, and suddenly there was no more time. In the darkness, Irene took the pistol out of her bag and tucked it into the pocket of her cloak. The weapon felt good in her hand, its weight like a promise, though of what she couldn’t say.

Out on the road, she began to walk to the village. Again the sea air blew over her, and was that the surf she heard? But it couldn’t be, she was too far inland. Yet the mere thought of the waves seemed to make her pores ooze. Her skirts stuck to her legs, twisting with every step; her blouse crept up her back. She felt smeared, as if some unseen hand was trying to work her into a different shape. Back in her rooming house, there had been a claw-footed bathtub, its snow-white hollow like an embrace after a long day—but what she had loved most was the toweling off afterwards, how wonderfully dry and normal she had felt. The laughter of the other girls as they cajoled her into hurrying up, their teasing as she swanned out cocooned in every towel she owned. Here comes Queen Irene, they would laugh, she would laugh, all of it a laugh—

But she was no queen. She was the stepsister who had tried to make the shoe fit, and it never, ever would.

Around her the sparse woods were budding, she could see it even in the darkness, the dashes of color muted by the night’s heavy shadows. One of the first things they had commented on at the Academy: how sharp her eyesight was, how she could pinpoint the minutest shadings in the scene before her. Have you thought about hiring out as a miniaturist, one of her instructors had suggested, it’s good work for a woman. All that she had risked in running away, to still be told what she could be.

Thomas, their first night out, showing her off proudly to his friends: this is Irene, lads, she’s like no girl you’ve ever met. Another thing that tasted bitter now.

The sea air blew over her again and she breathed in deeply before she could stop herself, like a drowning swimmer breaking the surface at last.

Still she plodded on. She had forgotten how far it was from the station. Distant cottages huddled behind windbreaks of poplars, dark and formless. An owl called out. With every step her thighs stuck together, the skin almost gluey with moisture.

And then she felt something slide out.

Irene stopped in the middle of the road, pressing her legs together, tears stinging her eyes at the sudden rush of humiliation. With a furtive look around, she hobbled into the brush alongside the road and behind a tree. There she dropped the carpetbag, gathered her skirts in one arm, and with her free hand pushed her bloomers down. Everything wet with viscous moisture, strings of it ran from her thighs to her clothes—

And in the crotch of her bloomers was a cluster of pink ovoids, glistening obscenely in the moonlight.

Eggs. Bile jerked in her throat. Flesh of my flesh, Mother would intone, handing out a precious few to the most ill congregants. Every living thing that moves, wherever the rivers go, will live. The whole of the room whispering amen, amen. Everyone knowing that one of the girls would soon go to the sea.

Never had Irene thought that she herself—why had no one told her that they came out of there—

Bracing herself against the tree, she reached down and scraped the sticky mass into her fingers, thankful for her gloves. The spheres firm to the touch but not hard. Like little globs of gelatin, just as she remembered, only now stuck together with more of the mucus. That salty burst on the tongue. Did Mother wash them first, she thought, then bit back the rush of hysterical laughter that threatened to undo her. They were hard to grip, she had to curl her fingers to keep them in her hand. Their combined mass no larger than a walnut. She held them up to the moonlight, fascinated and horrified all at once; she waved them under her nose and oh! It was the sea again, that rich briny odor, almost arousing. She breathed it in, and again—

And then she saw herself from without, huffing these things that had been inside her, and flung the whole mess into the brush with a cry. She worked her bloomers back up and seized her bag and hurried back to the road, head up and heart racing. She never saw them. It never happened. Save that her glove was still tacky with their residue; save that she knew these were but the first of many, unless she could find a way to make it all stop. At least in the darkness no one could see her weeping.

###

The village was silent and dark, the handful of buildings shuttered, all the lamps extinguished. It was also smaller than she remembered, but how could that be? She had only been gone five years. Or was it that she saw it now with different eyes, fitting the stone houses and shops together like so many shapes on a canvas? For the first time, Irene understood how much of painting was also about control, about imposing her will upon the world. Shapes on a canvas couldn’t force this destiny upon her; it was she who forced them to bow to her design. Shapes couldn’t look at her like she was already dead, couldn’t flinch when she spoke to them, as if they hadn’t expected a thing to have words. We’re not saving anyone, we’re just another kind of fish to them, she had wept in Annie’s arms after their first outing to the village. I will never go to the sea, never. Biting her fist to smother her sobbing while Annie tried to reassure her. And how had she known to speak of herself thusly, how had Annie known to rock her and soothe her, two children who still had to stand on chairs to wash their dishes?

Irene paused in front of the village hall, gazing at its carved pediment. All people and fish and swirling water, the people holding hands like one vast and joyous family, the poideu leaping into the nets of their own volition. In daylight it was gaudily painted, the colors as bright and flat as a child’s toy. At night, however, it was a dark, menacing swirl, where the people seemed chained to each other, the fish trapped between sea and net. It was Thomas who had introduced her to the idea of sketching at twilight or dawn: when there’s less light you can focus on the true shape of things. And here was the true shape of the village. Had she always sensed it? A gifted paintress.

She walked on, her feet squelching, her fingers sliding in her gloves. Would she even be able to hold the pistol? She had to; she had to. She would only need to fire twice, if it came to that.

At last, she ascended the little rise at the far end of the village and saw the silhouette of the church steeple like a knife held up to the sky. As it had appeared that last dawn when she looked back; as it had appeared at their first outing when she had seized Annie’s hand and tried to run back to it, terrified of having to face the people who believed their very survival required this—

Irene pushed it all down, down, tightening her grip on the handle of the carpetbag until liquid squirted through her fingers.

As she started down the church path, she tried to imagine all the ways this might go, but she kept seeing it as pictures: the beams of moonlight streaming in through the leaded glass windows, the quiet kitchen with its oaken table, the shadows of branches cutting across the nighttime ceilings. Perhaps that was part of her undoing, perhaps in trying to see everything as pictures, she had narrowed her vision until she could no longer imagine possibilities, alternatives, choices. Even when she had run away, it had been to pictures: the picture of herself in an atelier, hunched before an easel; the picture of herself among the male painters, accepted by them, one of them; the picture of herself posing with one of her fabulously expensive canvases; the picture of herself, late in life, painting in her own elegant garden. All like she had seen in the art magazine. All those pictures, and not once had she painted the sea or the village, Mother or Annie or any of the other girls. As if mere omission would save her from ever having to go back, as if she could somehow paint out the future.

Except now the future was opening the church door and raising an oil lantern in the darkness. A beacon for the wayward ship that was Irene, for where else could she go, now, like this?

“Irene.” Mother’s voice carried. “At last. I was starting to fear the worst.”

The sound of her voice, the cadence, it all bathed Irene’s nerves in ice. She tightened her grip on the pistol. As she drew closer, however, she realized that the silhouette in the doorway also didn’t match her memories: too small, too hunched. Nor did the face, when finally they were looking at each other in the light of the lantern.

Mother had grown old. The woman Irene left five years ago had arrow-straight posture, salt-and-pepper hair forever pinned into a helmet, a tanned face lined but still strangely youthful. This Mother was nothing more than a little old lady, crook-backed and with a cloud of thinning hair over a face so wrinkled as to seem shriveled.

For a moment, Irene’s resolve wavered; and then she drew out the pistol and pointed it at Mother’s heart. “I want you to make it stop,” she said. Her voice was loud in the night, why was she speaking so loudly? “There has to be a way to make it stop.”

“Oh.” Mother looked at the pistol, then at Irene’s face. “I see.” She hesitated, then nodded to herself. “The kettle will be boiling by now.”

And with that, she turned on her heel and walked back inside, taking the light with her.

That turn. How many times had she turned so in Irene’s life? At every fury, every demand, every sob, the response as precise as clockwork: the look followed by a flat declaration, you can come to the kitchen, to the sacristy, to my bedroom, if you want to talk about this. And then the turn. And Irene would follow her, all her incandescent rage ebbing with every step, until by the time they reached the chosen room she could only feel the same dull misery as always.

But that had been when she was a child, and Irene wasn’t a child anymore. She squared her shoulders, tightened her grip on the pistol, and followed the woman who had made them call her Mother on pain of punishment, holding tightly to her jewel-bright anger.

###

Inside, the church smelled of must and something else—a kind of bodily sourness; old woman, Irene realized. Nothing else had changed, however: not the few worn Bibles scattered haphazardly in the pews, the motley cushions for kneeling, the two weathered oars nailed into a crucifix and draped with nets, the altar cloth with its appliquéd waves and leaping, rose-gold fish. All the windows plain leaded glass, the largest of them facing the sea. There was a sign outside that read Chapel of the Holy Fisherman, but it had been overgrown even in her youth, an afterthought for outsiders. Mother was to the right of the nave, heading for the hallway behind; Irene followed but more slowly. Five years, yet it felt like decades had passed. When had she last worked here, sweeping, dusting, polishing? Who did the chores now? For the first time, it struck her that while she remembered older girls, there had been none younger than herself. Annie, Paulette, Bebe: they had all been of similar ages.

And now, Irene realized, Mother was alone.

She quickened her pace down the hallway and into the community room at the back. There was a large kitchen alongside with a wide serving window that doubled as extra counter space. In Irene’s time, it had served both the congregation and their makeshift family, everything neatly segregated into two sets of cabinets, two separate pantries. How the congregation ladies would wipe the taps before touching them, how they would let the water run before filling the pitchers. Now the serving window glowed from an oil lamp, a warm yellow light that deepened the shadows in the larger room, making the shapes of the chairs and tables into something ghostly, almost dreamlike; her fingers itched for charcoal to capture that eerie light. When there’s less light you can focus on the true shape of things. As she drew close to the kitchen door, she saw cobwebs weaving among the chairs’ ladder backs, a haze of dust over the scarred tabletops.

Inside the kitchen, Mother was pouring hot water into two teapots. The smell reached Irene and she dropped the carpet bag to cover her nose. “I won’t drink that.”

Mother looked at her and oh! there was a hint of the woman Irene remembered: that hard stare like iron. “Irene, you’re dripping,” she said. “And the moon is full tonight. This will help.”

“By stopping it?” Irene demanded.

“By easing the change.” She put the two teapots on the table, followed by two cups. As she moved around the kitchen, she said, more conversationally, “Another day and you wouldn’t have made it back.”

For a moment, Irene envisioned it: trying to get to the train station while dripping, oozing. Eggs spilling down her legs. The stares of people, and if someone called the police… She pushed the image away with a shudder and instead pointed the pistol again.

Mother paused, the sugar bowl in her hand. “I never expected you to be one of the angry ones.”

“Surprise.”

“That is, I always knew you would run. I just thought, when your time came, you would be more sensible…” she trailed off. “I had them order that magazine, you know.”

She had started to drag one of the chairs back, but stopped again when Irene lurched forward. “What did you say?” she whispered.

“That art magazine. The one in the store. I asked them to order it.”

Irene stared at her, trying to comprehend. She understood the words clearly enough; it was the meaning that was eluding her. “You asked the store to order Art Monthly,” she repeated.

Mother nodded. “Yes. The one with the pictures, and the list of schools.”

“But why? Why would you do that?”

Her voice was shuddering; still Mother replied calmly, “I wanted you to know what places there were, what might be possible.” Her face was expressionless. “I thought I could give you a few good years.”

“And then snatch them away,” Irene cried.

“Better a little life than no life at all,” Mother retorted, raising her own voice. “But I also thought when your time came, you would meet it with dignity. Set an example for the others.”

“By laying down and dying?”

“By accepting things as they are, rather than clinging to fairy tales.”

“Like the one we tell ourselves about the poideu?”

Mother’s hand struck the table hard, the smack so loud Irene couldn’t help but flinch. The room rang from the blow; the eyes that locked upon Irene’s were iron-hard once more. “Would you deny the truth of your own body?” Mother said, her voice now low and icy. “Because it’s not denying you, my girl. It’s already here, no matter what you want to believe.”

Irene could only stare at her, her lips parted. The silence stretched, punctuated only by their ragged breaths, each panting as if they had been running—

—And then Mother dragged back the chair and sat down, wincing as she did so. “Arthritis,” she muttered. With another glance at the pistol, she began pouring tea from the first pot: dark green, smelling of brine. Irene’s stomach cramped, though from revulsion or hunger she could not say.

“There is no cure, Irene,” Mother said, taking up the other pot now. Black tea, plain and bitter. “Or if there is, I’ve never heard so much as a whisper about it—and not a one of you has found it yet. Your choice is either a bad death out there—” she angled her head at the window— “or going to the sea. That’s the only choice you’ve ever had.”

Irene took a breath. “That cannot be true. There has to be—”

“No,” Mother cut in. “No, there doesn’t have to be. Nothing has to be, Irene. Maybe someday someone will figure out a way to stop it; maybe someday it will just stop happening. But nothing has to be.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Sit. It’s a long walk from the station.”

 Before she could think, Irene found herself sitting down. Instinct, to obey that voice—and to smother her wince as she felt more gelatinous spheres push out between her thighs. Carefully she laid the gun on the table, her gloved fingers resting on the grip.

Nothing has to be. What, then, of the letter she had left for Thomas, the careful explanation she had labored over? In my village, girls born at a certain tide in winter are believed to have a destiny. Trying to sound sensible, logical. Willing him to believe her. Only she had thought she would have more time…

“You can take those off, you know,” Mother said, nodding at her hands.

Irene carefully peeled off one glove—and couldn’t help her audible gulp. The inside of the glove was coated with mucus, and stuck to the mucus were tiny patches of her skin. There was no other way to describe it, no other explanation for the pinkish spots that peeled away from her palms, leaving behind darker, neatly textured flesh. There was no pain, no sensation, just that greyish skin—and was there a hint of gold in it? Without willing it, she pinched a torn edge of skin and peeled more away from her palm, revealing a pattern of curving lines, not the chaotic scribbles of human skin but precise ovals layered like roof shingles—

Scales.

“Thy will be done,” Mother said quietly.

Bile filled Irene’s mouth and she swallowed hard. She started to pull off the other glove only to whimper with fear as her knuckles cracked and split, revealing green-grey tendons. With a cry, she lurched out of her chair and hurried to the sink, heaving and gagging, pressing her fist to her chest like it was broken. For her hand was broken, her whole body was breaking, she was breaking and would never, ever be normal again.

She hung her head over the sink, gasping for air, and suddenly she was remembering—two months ago, Thomas had surprised her with dinner: a crisp white tablecloth over their rickety table and new candles lit, fine wine filched from his parents’ cellar; and when he had brought in the platter and whisked off the napkin with a flourish, she had felt this same bodily revulsion at the steamed, whole poideu resting there. How it had been swollen with moisture, the scales a deeper pink from the cooking. How the sightless yellow eye had stared at Irene in accusation. The smell alone had turned her stomach; she had thought, is it Paulette’s? Claudine’s? And when he started to cut into it—

She gagged then, now. Behind her, Mother as silent and still as stone. And then Irene took a breath, and another, and reached for the tap, watching the skin of her splayed fingers tear delicately up the sides, revealing a thin grey membrane stretching between the digits. Each new reveal a little less shocking, a little less nauseating. She turned on the faucet, letting it run over her face, letting it fill her mouth and wash away the sourness. When she stood up, Mother had seemingly not moved, but a clean kitchen towel now rested on the edge of the sink and Irene wiped her face dry. More skin came away on the towel and she thought, perhaps I can still stop it. I can bear being scarred, different.

Turning back to the table and she thought, I can kill her at any time. Shoving down all her other feelings, her fear and her revulsion, as she had taught herself to do. I can kill her, she thought again. I can kill her and myself.

As she sat back down, Mother pushed the brine-smelling teacup before her and spooned more sugar into her own black tea.

“I told you I’m not drinking that,” Irene said softly.

Again that hard stare—not iron, Irene had been wrong; Mother’s eyes were hard like the grey of a storm. Her mouth a narrow brushstroke of disapproval. The spoon clacked against the sides of the cup as she stirred and stirred until, finally, she shoved the black tea forward. “Suit yourself,” she said. As Irene picked up the teacup, Mother nodded at the gun. “Do you really know how to use that?”

“Yes,” Irene snapped. Thomas had shown her last summer when they had rented the cottage. As it turned out, she was an excellent shot. Those eyes, he had said wonderingly.

Last week, how she had woken up and seen in the mirror the first hint of golden yellow swirling in the white, just in the corner—

What would her eyes see, when it was all done?

She took the teacup in her cracked, smearing hand and sipped it—and nearly gagged, so sour was the taste. As bad as her own bile. “What is this?” she demanded, seizing the pistol again. “Are you trying to poison me?”

Mother sighed, and Irene wanted to slap her for it. “It’s tea, Irene,” she said. “Plain tea, one sugar, like I always drink. You know that, and you know why it tastes different.” When Irene only stared at her she gestured to the other cup. “Try that one. Just a sip.”

Slowly, Irene put the black tea down and picked up the other cup. Oh, she knew, she knew, and yet she didn’t want to know. Even as she put it to her lips, she was salivating in anticipation—

Oh God the taste—

She shuddered with pleasure as she took a long, steady swallow. The liquid filled her, energized her, left her tingling. As delicious as her first taste of wine. She swallowed, then looked at Mother. The compassion in her face; Irene wanted to spit at it and drain the cup all at once.

“Your body is changing, Irene,” Mother said. Her voice was caressing now, the way she would speak when they hurt themselves, why had they been so foolish, they wouldn’t ever be so foolish again. “And thus your taste is changing, to help you know which foods you need. Do you remember the crackers?”

The crackers. Green, bone-dry disks that had looked like hardened mold and tasted about as pleasant. No rhyme or reason to when Mother issued them, save that they started to appear after a twelfth birthday. They would just be there: sitting on a dinner plate, stacked on a bedside table. Sometimes daily, sometimes not for a week, but when they appeared, every one of them had to be eaten. The punishments for trying to get rid of them worse than the sickening taste. Like rotten liver, Annie had said. Every mouthful a battle against vomiting.

And thus your taste is changing. When had Thomas surprised her with the poideu? Two months ago. Had she been changing even then? The anger on his face when she refused to touch it. Do you have any idea how much I had to suck up to the old man to get this? And you won’t even take a bite? Not hurt but angry, as if in refusing the poideu she had been refusing him.

Would he come at all, would he even read her letter?

The bride is not right!

“I think you would find the crackers different now,” Mother was saying in the caressing voice. “I think you would find them rather pleasant. They are the kind of food you need… and everything is easier on a full stomach.” She leaned forward, earnest, caring. I can shoot her, Irene told herself. I can pull the trigger right now. “Irene. Have you looked at yourself, truly looked at yourself? You are drenched. You’ll be releasing eggs soon, I’m sure of it, and your eyes—”

“Don’t,” Irene said thickly. Mother’s face distorting from her rising tears. Like the rain, she thought. Why didn’t I ever paint it before? The world as seen through a scrim of grief, and that lamp is like a tiny, dying sun, look how it tints the countertops yellow.

“Irene. Child. Do what you will. Shoot me if it will make you feel better. But please, please, go to the sea today. Live, child. Live as you were meant to—”

“Live?” Irene stared at her, aghast, then burst out laughing: harsh, bitter laughter, so strange at first she didn’t realize it was her own. “Live like that? Live like an animal?”

“Like a goddess,” Mother said.

“Never,” Irene retorted.

Silence fell, thick and smothering. Irene’s fingers curled around the grip of the gun once more as Mother took the black teacup back. “You know, of all my children,” she said, looking at the tea, “I would have said you were the one who might well discover a cure. Being in the city with all those doctors and scientists.”

Her words seemed to take all the air from Irene’s lungs. The tears rose up again and this time she couldn’t stop them, couldn’t do anything but weep silently, her trembling lips pressed together. She hadn’t thought to. She hadn’t thought, not once, not until last week. All she had wanted was to get away. She had believed that somehow distance—from the village, from the sea—would be enough to keep it from happening. She had believed this, and she had painted, and drunk, and danced, and gone with her lover to the countryside, and not once thought about what was to come or those she had left behind.

Not until last week. And would it even matter now, would Thomas even find her letter? Or would he just take up with another girl?

She looked at her bared hand, its meshwork of scales, its tendons glistening like wet seaweed. Too late. Everything too late.

“Drink your tea, Irene,” Mother said, and Irene took up the cup and drank it down, down to the grimy, green-black dregs.

###

“Where are they?” Irene asked.

“Where is who?” Mother looked over her shoulder from the dishpan, where she was washing the teapots and cups. They had drunk their tea in silence as night deepened, drinking cup after cup until the pots were empty. Like it was their last, Irene had thought, but why would Mother be drinking so?

“The others. The younger ones.” Never could she remember there being fewer than seven, eight of them at the church, sometimes as many as a dozen—though there had been a point when little ones stopped appearing at the door, when had that happened? She had been too caught up in her own anger and fear to pay attention; by then she had hardly noticed the others, even Annie.

Hardly noticed, but hadn’t she been training for such oblivion her whole life? How everyone would look away when one of the older girls began to change, ignoring those first drops pattering down, pretending that everything was fine. Not seeing the hidden wads of sticky underclothes when she was cleaning under the beds or looking for something in a cabinet. That deliberate blindness had been the only solidarity they could display, until the girl herself vanished at low tide.

“There haven’t been younger ones for quite some time,” Mother said. “Bebe was my last. Hadn’t you noticed?”

“Don’t tell me I’m the last ever—”

“No, no. You’re just the last of my children.” She took up a towel now and began drying a cup. “The younger ones are all with the new Mother now. She was chosen soon after Bebe came.” Her movements too vigorous, she was practically scouring the cup with a towel. “Time was the new Mother would have joined me here, and we would have continued raising you girls together. But this one has ideas.” 

The last word was pronounced with such bitterness that Irene laughed aloud before she could stop herself. “Heaven forbid she have ideas,” she said.

“But that’s just it, Irene. Heaven forbid. When things start to go wrong, the answer isn’t to change things further. The answer is to become better at our duty.” She shook her head. “This one thinks we shouldn’t teach you so many subjects, for why should you know anything about the world you’ll leave behind? That, and now she’s declared we should raise you closer to the sea, so you can hear the water all the time.”

Irene shuddered at the thought. To have had that relentless lapping in her ears, day and night; it would have driven her mad; it would have driven them all mad. “What do you mean, ‘when things start to go wrong?’”

Mother carefully put the cup away and then paused, her shoulders visibly sagging. “Things have been getting worse, Irene, the moreso since you left. Oh, everyone else of mine has gone to the sea as they ought, and there are still girls born at the winter tide, perhaps more each year now—or so the new Mother claims.” She shook her head. “But there are fewer poideu every season, no matter whether a girl goes to the sea or not. And still they spent all the town’s reserves on a new church close to the beach,” she added bitterly. “No matter that year after year every sign tells us we have been found wanting…”

She curled herself around the teapot as she spoke, running the towel over and over every curve, as if drying it was the most important thing in the world. As if it mattered, as if any of it mattered.

“So it’s all pointless?” Irene asked, her voice loud in the kitchen. “You want me to give up my life, everything I’ve worked for, for nothing?” 

“Not for nothing! For them!” Mother flung her arm in the direction of the village. “For your people! Everything is for them, Irene. Even that stupid church, her stupid methods. At least she remembers what it’s all for. At least she remembers the bargain we made.” Her mouth became the narrow line again. “Oh, I know all about what they teach in the cities. About a man’s importance—and it’s always a man, don’t tell me they’re welcoming you with open arms there, I’m not that provincial, my girl—about forging his destiny, about achieving his potential. While around these wondrous men thousands of people suffer and die without even being seen.”

She leaned forward on the table, her eyes boring into Irene’s. The color of a storm.“Well, I see. I see every face in our village and not a one of them is more or less than you or I. We are all equally important and equally unimportant. And when we are called, we answer. We were called two centuries ago and we answered then and we are answering still. We were chosen. We are grateful for our purpose. We may be struggling now, but we have struggled before and I promise you, someday, when the cities are engulfed in war from all those glorious destinies being forged, we will still be here, struggling but surviving, because each and every one of us does our duty.”

Irene’s face was burning. Liquid gushed down her body and splattered on the floor beneath her; she had a sudden, swift vision of shooting Mother, again and again and again—

“Well,” she said, her voice trembling, “perhaps I have another purpose, and perhaps you’re a fool for answering. The world is changing, Mother, and this place is doomed—this place and whatever it is that makes us become this.” She jabbed a finger at her own face.

But Mother simply replied, “If you truly believe that, then you have that gun.” A smile split her mouth, baring yellowed teeth, a gap in the molars. “Though it seems a terrible waste to come all this way, to have the great mystery but a few hours off, only to blow my brains all over my clean kitchen.” She peered at Irene, smiling that terrible smile, like a cat eyeing prey. “Aren’t you just the littlest bit curious? To see what lies beneath the waves? What you will see, feel, even create? Divinity is within your reach, Irene. Can you look me in the eye and tell me you don’t want it?”

Irene opened her mouth to say just that—

She opened her mouth, but what came out instead was, “If everyone answers, what the hell are you doing here alone? Why haven’t you gone to the new church?”

The cat-smile broadened. Slowly Mother stood up again, her eyes never leaving Irene’s face.

“Because you are my last, Irene,” she said. “I was waiting for you. You aren’t the only one whose time has come.”

Irene blinked. It took her a moment to understand what Mother was saying, the import of her words. “But—Annie, the others—”

“I told you, Irene. They’ve all gone to the sea—save for you.” She gestured to the kitchen, the whole of the building. “When the tide changes, I will walk with you to the sea, and they will take the last things over to the new church, and they will strip this building to its bones. As it should be. As it has always been.”

And there were many things that Irene nearly said then, everything from a dozen protests to just simply sorry, but she bit it all back. She would not give Mother the satisfaction of either argument or sympathy; that, and what was there to say, in the end? This building would cease to be, and she could not imagine Mother anyplace else. Nor, apparently, could Mother imagine it, or change of any kind. And wasn’t that a necessary part of life itself: the ability to imagine something different?

So you would know there were places to go, what kinds of things were possible. And she had, and she had tried, tried so hard to make herself fit—

She raised her bare hand to the moonlight, watching the scales flex over her palm, the tendons slide beneath fine grey-hued membranes. What else was happening beneath her sticky, wet clothes?

There’s blood in the shoe!

The bride is not right!

Mother had turned again and was wiping down the counter. “Would you like to see the new church?” she asked.

“No I would not,” Irene snapped.

And braced for another angry outburst, but Mother only smiled again, a kinder smile. “Oh, Irene,” she breathed. “I have missed you.” She looked at the window. “We have a few hours before the tides change. I am going to rest; you should do the same.” When Irene remained sitting, however, she shrugged. “Or you can do as you please. Perhaps that’s enough for you.”

And she was gone then, striding out of the kitchen and towards the dormitory. Irene lurched after her, seizing the pistol as she rose, wanting suddenly, desperately to hold it in her hand and see that hesitation in Mother’s eyes once more—

But as she rose, she felt her bloomers sag from the eggs oozing out of her, saw the patch of skin that stayed stuck to the table where her wrist had been pressing against the wood. She sat back down then, feeling defeated: by her own body, by her own stupid fantasies, by what lay beneath the waves, in whose likeness she was being remade.

###

Alone in the kitchen, Irene began unbuttoning her clothes, thinking to change into the dry ones she had in her satchel. Off came the fitted jacket first, and that wasn’t so bad, it was just sticky in spots. Threads of mucus stretched and broke as she drew it off and hung it over the back of the chair. What made her tremble was what she felt underneath, the sensation of small patches of something sliding against her naked body.

She still had one glove on. Now she pulled it off, only to wince as it seemed to take her whole palm with it, revealing an expanse of scales, an iridescent green-grey shot through with threads of rosy gold. Swallowing the lump in her throat, she held both her hands up to the moonlight, a wave of grief rising within her even as she marveled at the scales, the translucence of the webbing, how patches of her pinkish skin still clung like another set of rotting gloves. For five years she had bet her future, her life, on what her hands could create. Now they looked different, they felt different… and what if she had lost it all somehow, what if she took up a brush only to find it was all gone?

Her tears were falling now. She wept as she unbuttoned her blouse and let the sodden garment fall to the floor in a splatter. The skin of her bare arms cracked and split as she wrenched at her corset laces—

Thomas, unlacing her with that strange reverence in his face, his breath audible, his whole body trembling… oh, the other girls had stopped wearing corsets, declared them passé, but Irene had continued just to see that hunger in his face, to feel herself desired, wanted…

Never again to see that, feel that. Never again.

Off now with the heavy twill skirt, pushing it down over her bloomers, only to find it all so wet she nearly pulled them both off, part of her hip peeling away with the fabrics. The crotch of her bloomers sagging with eggs. Like being a child again, she thought bitterly; like she had shat herself. Her breath was audible now, ragged and hitching, her nostrils so swollen she had to huff air through her mouth between the sobs she tried to smother.

And then she drew off her chemise and let the bloomers fall to her ankles and stared at herself through her tears. The world through a scrim of grief. Her body was laced with cracks: dark lines coalesced at every crease and joint, all oozing. She touched the one running between her breasts and felt the skin on either side slide and jerked her hand away. The air in the kitchen was cool on her naked body but no gooseflesh rose. Never again. She turned one way and another, seeing where large patches had already come away to reveal the scales beneath, thicker and more pronounced than the ones on her hands. On her left forearm a flap of skin hung free, opaque and pink and dotted with her own dark hairs and yet there was no blood, no pain. With trembling fingers, she grasped the flap and pulled, pulled, freeing a long strip of skin in a splatter of liquid until it finally tore off near her wrist and dangled from her fingertips.

Thomas, peeling away the skin of the steamed poideu, revealing the reddish-pink flesh beneath…

Suddenly she couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t bear any of it. With a cry, she hurried to her satchel, pulled out her dry chemise, and yanked it over her head; she seized the pistol and went out into the community room.

At once, the silence was smothering. She walked down to the dormitory, her bare footfalls audible, her breath still ragged from weeping. In each empty room were the familiar bunk beds and little nightstands, all hollow with absence, the beds like so many stacked coffins. On the walls was the same crude print, over and over, of Christ walking on water, the rose-colored blood from his wounds falling into the sea. Only now did she realize he looked a little like Thomas: the same golden hair, the same build. The realization nearly made her laugh out loud and she wondered if she was losing her mind as well as her body, if she had been losing both for longer than she knew. Did they have the same picture in the new church? Or had it been replaced by an idea? Were girls like herself sleeping beneath that beatific smile, would they wake and wash and dress and crowd into the kitchen for breakfast where the new Mother would read to them before putting them to work or study? The new Mother supposedly didn’t want them to learn, but Irene would have bet what little she had that those girls still worked as she had for the villagers, washing clothes, sweeping homes and yards, beating carpets, turning over garden beds, cleaning fish and milking cows. That was one practice that would never change, that free labor. All while the villagers kept a careful distance from them, as if a destiny could be contagious—

And perhaps they had been right to do so, for who would want such a creature as herself near them?

Never again to be desired, wanted, hungered for. Never to be loved. The bride would never, ever be right.

At the end of the hall was Mother’s room, and what did it mean that her door was standing open? Always in Irene’s youth it had been shut, and to open it without permission was verboten. But now it stood almost completely open, as if Mother had forgotten.

Irene moved towards it, raising the pistol before her. The trigger worrying the skin of her finger off, her hand smearing the grip with mucus.

This room too was exactly as she remembered it, horrifying in its austerity: a plain, narrow bed, little more than a cot; the one small dresser; the little desk with the dusty barometer; the carved cross and poideu over her bed. Beneath the threadbare quilt, Mother’s hunched form rose and fell with her gentle snoring.

Where did my mother go? She had asked when she first arrived, and again, and again. Each time Mother answering I am the only mother you need. It had been months before Irene fully understood: whoever had birthed her, they had left her forever and walked away and forgot she ever existed. What need had she of parents like that? What need had she of any mother, real or otherwise?

Irene approached the bed, aiming the pistol now, first at the lump of torso, then at the cloud of grey hair. Not once did the snoring break its rhythm. She took a breath, steadied her hand—

from between her legs a small glob of eggs plopped onto the floor, and Mother muttered in her sleep—

and then the snoring resumed, the same gentle rumble.

Irene willed herself calm, focused. Did she need something to muffle the shot? She looked around for a cushion, though they were so far from the village, did it even matter…

And then she saw the picture.

She knew it at once. Not the plain wooden frame it had been placed in, or how it hung facing the bed, but the sketch itself. Done in the same hard pencils they used for their studies; done by herself, years ago now. It was of Annie bent over her papers across the table, her hair falling out of its knot at her nape, her expression a frown of concentration. Crude, awkward—Irene cringed at the hands especially, were those sausages supposed to be fingers—but there was something in it. Those eyes. Especially the soft curves of Annie’s face, she had done well there, had captured something of the gentleness that had seemed to infuse Annie’s whole body.

The way you look at me, Annie had murmured. Sometimes it’s like how they look at us.

Irene had forgotten that, how had she forgotten that? Forgotten it, and how much it had hurt to hear—a hurt that swiftly became anger. As so many feelings had.

Slowly, silently, Irene reached over and took the picture down only to nearly gasp in fright, for the picture had been covering a mirror. The face that met hers was still her own and yet not. Her eyes had become a yellowish swirl around solidly black irises; though the skin of her face was still familiar in its milky pinkness, it was laced with grey cracks, and her very hairline had slid back as if someone had smoothed it away, revealing a finger’s width of scaling at the top of her forehead—

She tore her eyes away and instead looked down at her hands, the one clutching the picture, the other still gripping the pistol. There had never been a cure. There would never be a cure, not for her. Nothing has to be. The bride will never be right. And what did it matter, in the end? What would change, what would be undone, if she shot Mother and herself? What kind of world was this, where their deaths wouldn’t change a thing?

We are all equally important and equally unimportant.

And then she was in the hallway, she was passing the bedrooms, she was going back before she realized what she was doing. The frame clutched to her chest, the pistol trembling in her hand. In the kitchen, she nearly skidded on her own wet mess of clothing as she went to the sink, tossing the pistol aside, and cracked the frame’s glass with a single blow. She pulled the drawing free, tearing it out, tearing it to pieces with her strange fingers, tearing and tearing until it was nothing more than tiny petals of paper, fluttering into the sink below where they darkened with moisture.

For a moment she stood over the sink, her breath rasping like that of a winded horse. Drips fell from her face onto the shreds of paper. A great shuddering overcame her and she shoved her fist in her mouth to hold back her wracking sobs, her whole body convulsing, grief contorting her until she thought she would faint—

And then it passed, leaving her empty and aching, taking everything that had once been Irene.

She looked around the kitchen at the mess of her clothing, at the splatters on the floor, the table, the counter. Hollow and dazed, she gathered up the sodden, sticky clothes, folding each as best she could and placing them on a chair. Under the sink, she found the dustpan and broom on their little rusted hook and scraped up the liquids as best she could, dumping panful after panful into the sink. When all was cleaned up, she put the dustpan back, filled the kettle, and lit the stove once more. Put the pistol atop the clothes and put two fresh spoonfuls of the green tea into the pot. The kettle warming, the mess of her dripping audibly in the drain. Through the wide kitchen window, she could see the first hints of dawn tinting the sky, a purplish hue that separated the dark landscape into fine streaks of tree trunks rising up from a carpet of mist. The clouds had broken up into scuttling puffs; a green haze was forming across the vista. Would she ever see such a landscape again? She wished then that she had brought her paints with her, to try and capture that astonishing light one last time—

Behind her, her viscous mess dripped audibly into the drain, like a finger tapping impatiently, and as swiftly as the desire to paint had come over her, it vanished. What would be the point, what had been the point of any of it?  What was the point of anything?

The kettle began to softly whistle. Irene poured the boiling water into the pot, and waited for the tides to change.

###

Outside the morning air was damp and cool and smelled of growing things. Irene had sat in the kitchen and watched the sun paint the world into life, each blade of grass glittering with dew, the scrim of fog rising and burning off. She had not known when it would come. She had released more pink eggs and scraped them into the sink; she had made more tea and furtively ate every cracker out of the rusting tin. Shocked anew at how delicious they tasted now.

And then, suddenly, she felt it: her whole body shifted, minutely yet completely. Sea-change, the fishermen used to say. At the same time, she heard Mother’s footsteps in the hall. Did she feel it too? Was it innate, somehow, or just decades of habit telling her it was time?

She expected some remark about the missing drawing, or that she was still clad only in her chemise, but all Mother said upon entering was “it’s time” and then, with a slight quirk of her mouth, “you can dress as you please, but I have a spare cloak.” Already she was dressed, pinned, swathed in her own cloak. Irene recognized the garment, more worn than she remembered, but still that same greenish hue as the tea, as the crackers, as the sea. The one draped over Mother’s arm was of the same cloth.

Silently, Irene drew on her dry skirt and blouse. She smoothed her hair only to feel a clump of it slide away into her hand; for a moment, she stared at the tangle of brown strands, feeling a dull echo of her earlier grief—and then Mother reached over, took it from her, and dropped it into the sink. Without speaking, she reached up and stroked the other side of Irene’s head, teasing out a second clump; then she peeled a little skin off Irene’s cheekbones.

“There,” she murmured. “Quite presentable.”

Irene could not speak for the lump in her throat. She nodded instead, then took the cloak and tied it on. With a last look at the kitchen, at the debris of herself, she followed Mother out into the world.

They retraced Irene’s steps from the night before, following the solitary path that led from the church to the village. The old church, now. As they walked, Irene felt herself a multitude: she was little again, going to the village for the first time, clutching hands with Annie and Bebe who were each holding the hands of other girls, the whole line of them clinging together; she was older, angry, plodding behind Mother to do her service and wishing the ground would just swallow her forever; she was running towards a life she could barely imagine, a handful of drawings and her only clothes all shoved in the pillowcase and her heart racing so hard she thought it would burst—

All these Irenes, and yet each time she had also seen: the shapes of people and plants and buildings and how they were lit and shadowed, the shades of blue and grey in the coastal sky, the curves of the windswept trees and how they arched inland, like her own hands reaching for a different fate.

Now, at the edge of the village, she stopped and nearly turned back. Her hand fumbled for a nonexistent pocket, for the pistol that was no longer there. For there were people lining the main street, all turned towards the path in expectation. Dozens of faces, children and adults alike.

“What did you do?” she whispered.

Mother glanced at her. “I did nothing, Irene. I never have to. We all feel it, just as you do. We all knew someone would go to the sea today.”

All those faces turned towards her, like so many muddy smudges; milky complexions were a luxury no one could afford here. Their clothes were more drab and shapeless than she remembered; some were holding out their hands in supplication.

As she watched, a man suddenly began howling, clutching at his head and falling to his knees as he screamed and cried… and then just as quickly disappeared from view as a half-dozen lumpish figures surrounded him and moved him away.

“One of the fishermen,” Mother said quietly. Her voice was as calm as when she would read to them. “He developed an attachment to Claudine, he followed her to the water. There are things we are not meant to see until our time.”

Irene was trembling, she realized, trembling from head to toe. “Can we go another way,” she whispered—and hated herself for the pleading in her voice.

Again, Mother looked at her, her expression sharp now. “Absolutely not. Would you deny them this? Would you deny yourself? This moment is as much a part of it as anything happening to your body.” She tucked her arm under Irene’s and drew her forward, her grip surprisingly strong. “Look at their faces,” she murmured in Irene’s ear. “Try to see past your own feelings, just for a moment. Try to see what a great gift you are giving them.”

“I’m not a gift, I’m terrifying,” Irene snapped.

“Exactly,” Mother retorted. “So we should all be frightened when we see how truly small we are—frightened, and humbled, and renewed in our purpose.” She exhaled, a short breath like a shot. “You are divinity made flesh, Irene. Let yourself be what you were always meant to be.”

Forced to be, Irene wanted to cry, but she dared not utter the words aloud for they were in earshot now of the villagers. So many people; she hadn’t realized there were this many. She recognized a few of the faces in the crowd, older now, weathered and drawn. It was only five years, she wanted to say. How can you let this happen, how can you do this to me, she wanted to say. To me. But she understood now that they didn’t see themselves as doing anything. That they saw themselves not as agents but as servants, like Mother, like the new Mother on the far side of the village.

As she and Mother walked slowly down the street, hands began to touch her cloak, her skirt, her arm. She heard the soft gasps as their hands came away wet, saw mothers dab the moisture on their children’s heads. Each featherlight touch making her shudder inside from a welter of emotions. Bless you, they murmured, and then: Bless you, Irene, and she looked to see who had spoken, who knew her name? A little boy ran forward and held out a basket to her and in it was a handful of prawns, a few still waving their antennae. Mother halted and Irene halted too, only to find herself pulled down into a bow.

“Thank you for your gift,” Mother said as they straightened. She took the basket and held it out to Irene who felt dazed, why was she so lightheaded? Because the prawns looked and smelled delicious; because she had a sudden urge to devour them raw. Would they bless her then? But that was the behavior of an animal. We’re just another kind of fish to them.

“Eat one,” Mother said in her ear.

“I will not,” she retorted. She started to walk forward but Mother jerked her to a halt again, her hand like iron.

“You will eat their offering and be grateful for it,” she whispered. “This is food from their table. This is gratitude. Eat one.”

“I don’t want their gratitude,” Irene whispered back, turning her face so they couldn’t see her lips move. “I won’t be fattened up by them, I won’t let them assuage their guilt with a shrimp.”

In the morning light, Mother’s blue eyes were watery, almost cloudy; no longer a storm, just a dull, foggy sky. “Irene, this is your duty,” she whispered. “Your sacred duty.”

“Fuck your sacred duty,” she snapped. The pleasure of seeing Mother recoil; she bared her teeth and nearly hissed, then caught herself. What was she doing? Behaving like an animal. She turned away, trying to collect herself—she was still a person—

only to find herself face to face with the boy who had brought her the prawns, tears rolling down his face.

“Please,” he whispered. “please, is it not good? It is the best we could get.”

A woman hurried forward, cringing as if Irene might strike them. “Forgive us,” she said, pulling the boy close to her. “Only his father took sick some weeks ago, he still hasn’t recovered, and we thought… that is, he hasn’t been to sea in almost a month, and my brother’s catches barely feed his own children, and the spring storms were so terrible… I’m taking in piecework but it’s nowhere near enough…”

She trailed off into weeping. Irene stared at them, then raised her eyes to the watching crowd. For the first time she saw not only how drab but how threadbare their clothing was, how gaunt their faces. There were adults missing limbs, barefoot children like knock-kneed skeletons. Their ages all indeterminate; there seemed to be no stage between bony youth and greying, stooped adulthood. In her time, they had been healthier, their clothes neater. Had the last five years been so brutal?

Irene stared at them, and then she reached into the basket, seized a prawn, and bit into it. The shell crunching in her mouth. Her whole body was tense with anticipation, readying herself for the sickening flavor—

but it tasted wonderful.

And for a moment she wasn’t standing in her village, halfway to a monster. She was traipsing through golden countryside last summer, herself and Thomas and a half-dozen others with hampers of food and folios of drawing paper. Lying in the warm sun, eating buttered bread spread with caviar someone had stolen and sketching the treeline in the distance. Everything perfect, everything right.

Irene remembered and wept with remembering. She ate and ate and it was every food she had ever loved, every meal she had ever reveled in. Stealing wilted salad from the Academy kitchen. Eating too-rich food at the table of wealthy families wanting to show off by inviting “up and coming” artists to their parties. Hunting for bread in the other girls’ rooms to soak up all the wine they had drunk—

she looked down at the head of the prawn in her hand, wiped her mouth and found her hand flecked with bits of shell and leg.

“Thank you,” the woman was saying, holding the boy close. “Thank you, Irene. Bless you.”

Slowly, dazedly, Irene licked her lips and placed the head back in the basket while Mother bowed her head and murmured something—a prayer? Irene didn’t know, and she realized too it didn’t matter, it was just words. What mattered was the reality of the raw flesh in her belly and that now, whatever happened, the woman would believe it was meant to be.

Irene walked on, slower now, letting the hands touch her wet clothes, nodding at the blessings and prayers. Another woman held out an infant and Irene touched its soft forehead and its mother began sobbing. She had fantasized, before, about receiving praise, accolades for her art; but never had she imagined the thrill that would come from those hopeful gazes, the sense that the slightest gesture from her could alter these people’s lives forever. It was thrilling and sickening all at once; she wanted it to be over; she wanted it to never end.

Further ahead was the man who had howled and screamed, huddled on a chair someone had procured, swathed in blankets. As she walked past him, he did not raise his face, contorted with sobbing and a kind of manic terror; instead, he flung himself at her legs, wrapping his arms around her and gibbering into her skirt. Mother was saying something sharply to a knot of bystanders, something about breaking covenants; but Irene found herself fascinated by the man’s bared head, the red, flaking scalp and sparse black hair heavy with oil. Almost wonderingly, she found herself placing her hand over his scalp as vulnerable as the baby’s; the man howled again at her touch. A hush fell over the crowd.

“Please don’t cry,” Irene murmured, and her own voice sounded strange to her ears. A cloud drifted down over her vision and she pulled away the flap of her own peeling skin, tossing it aside impatiently.

Slowly, his body shuddering, the man looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot and unfocused; she smiled what she hoped was an encouraging smile. And kept smiling as people prised apart his arms and pulled him back onto the chair.

Someone should have painted that, she thought, and then wondered at herself, when had she ever felt that way before? It was as if she could still sense how the scene might be rendered, but she didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to contemplate her own smeary movements and how they might be pinned down on canvas. 

With a harrumph, Mother tugged her along. More shellfish were put in the basket now, prawns and miserably small mussels and a few limp crabs, along with fistfuls of seaweed. She took up a strand of the latter and sucked the sea water from it and the brine was a curious flavor, not quite pleasant but not nauseating either. As they reached the end of the street, someone behind them began humming and then all the crowd was humming, a strange atonal sound that seemed to make the world wobble briefly.

She thought, the right gesture, the right utterance, and I could drive them all to despair.

Instead, she turned and raised her hand, thinking to give a kind of acknowledgment, and the humming raised a pitch, filling her, making her tremble in time with its vibrations. It was to that unholy fanfare that she turned and continued on the path to the beach, glancing back over her shoulder.

“They won’t follow,” Mother said as they crested a grassy hillock. “Not after what happened last time.”

“I’m surprised more haven’t tried, over the years.”

Mother snorted. “Few truly want to look directly at a miracle, Irene. The moment you do it ceases to be one.”

She looked at Mother. “Then why are you here?”

At her question, the older woman flinched and looked away. Irene thought to press the matter, but the sun was gloriously bright now. She raised her face instinctively to its heat; more of her skin had come off, she could feel it warming parts of her body more than others.

“Thank you,” Mother said. At Irene’s glance she angled her head. “For what you did back there.”

“I didn’t do it for you.”

“I know,” Mother replied. “But I’m grateful anyway.”

And Irene could not think of what to say to this, so instead she took another prawn and bit into it, as savagely as she could, squirting blood and smearing her mouth with fragments of shell.

###

They walked down the beach path undulating through a little valley where the grass became sparse from the fine coating of sand that had blown inland. It was all as Irene remembered it: the sun hot on her neck no matter the season, the hint of glare in the landscape. Only now there was a strange form off the path to her left, past the sparse brush bowed and distorted by the winds: the new church, its paneled sides already weathering, a tarp still pinned down over a last section of the roof. Irene saw small figures digging a garden patch and felt another wave of grief cascade over her. She had forgotten; she had forgotten it all, or perhaps she had made herself forget. Working alongside the others, how they would tease and joke and laugh together, how they would hurry to help when one of them faltered. Even with this fate hanging over them, she had felt… could she call it happiness, in such moments? No, not quite happiness, she knew that now. Then, however? What had she known then? She had not been happy, but she had thought herself such, in those moments. They had been a family, for what was family if not a kind of shared fate? The only family she had ever truly known. And she had left them all and blocked it from her mind. Telling herself it was the only way to save herself. The only way to be free.

She tried to think of Thomas, of the life they had been creating together, of her letter, her pleas for his help. No one shall be my wife except. It all felt distant now, like a story she had once been told.

The little girls paused in their digging to look at them and Irene swiftly averted her face, though they were too far to see anything that mattered. “I thought we weren’t supposed to see anything, not until our own time came,” she said to Mother.

“The new Mother has ideas, remember?”

“You think her wrong?”

“I think,” Mother said after a moment, “that while I have regrets, keeping all of you from witnessing this was not one of them. It can do no good,” she burst out, looking back at the children. “They will worry it like a loose tooth from now until their time, it will consume what years they have.”

Irene looked at her then, at the wrinkled face contorted in sorrow. “You think we didn’t think about it always, every moment, every day?”

“You were able to forget, for a time.”

And there it was again: the stark truth of her fleeing. How she had thought she could become the princess after all, when none of them could escape what they were. How no matter where she went or what she did, she was set upon a path already trod by all those who had been born on the wrong tide.

As if she could hear Irene’s thoughts, Mother laid her hand upon Irene’s forearm, giving just the briefest squeeze.

The path wound its way up and down yet again. Before the church disappeared from view Irene looked back once more at the tiny figures still standing motionless, the ovals of their faces still turned in Irene’s direction. What were they thinking, seeing her so? Did they glimpse the grey patches of her new skin, how her clothes were stuck to her?

If by some miracle Thomas did come, bringing help as she had asked… what would become of them?

“What do you regret?” she asked aloud.

Mother was silent; and then, her voice soft, “I have regrets about many of you, individually. About things I said, or did. So many girls, and all of you so different… but it’s all done now.”

And there was a note of relief in her voice, a note that Irene felt deep in her own belly. Perhaps I’m better off out of the whole business. Things would happen, or not happen. Thomas would come, or not come, or come too late. It was all done now; it was out of her hands.

Her hands. She held one out to the sunlight, gray-green and scaled and with a kind of pebbling atop her knuckles. The fine grey webbing between her fingers delicately translucent. For the first time that she could remember in her life—from the moment she had first awoken in her dormitory bed, small and terrified and drenched in her own piss, with no recollection of who she was or how she had gotten there—she felt a strange frisson; it took her a moment to realize it was pure excitement. For what came next. For having a sudden stretch of decades, perhaps centuries, before her. She felt it, and she felt ashamed; but she felt it anyway.

###

On the last rise before the beach, Irene stopped and Mother stopped as well, for before them was the sea.

Irene had not seen open water since she left. The mere thought of the sea had filled her with trepidation, threatened to open the door in her mind and let all those memories, all those fears, come rushing back. Even the taste of salt water made her cringe.

Now, however, seeing the blue-grey waves to the horizon, how they mimicked the sky, oh! It felt as if some piece of herself was being returned, some wound being healed at last. Her chest ached, as if she had been sobbing; her body was wet from head to toe; in that moment, the crashing surf seemed the most beautiful sight she had ever beheld. Every inch of her changing, twisted body seemed to sing out at the sight of it, seemed to feel every wave in the rhythm of her blood.

Mother started to descend the dune and then paused when Irene did not move. “Nearly there,” she said gently.

Irene looked at her, at the kindly smile on her wrinkled face, at her outstretched, gnarled hand, and she had no words for her feelings then, that mingling of grief and pleasure. She dared not even part her lips for fear of what might burst forth. Instead, she gathered up her sopping skirt and descended the dune, pushing past Mother’s hand.

Here, then, was the beach, broader and smoother than she remembered. The tide had withdrawn further than she had ever seen, as if the whole of the ocean was draining away into some distant crevice, revealing ornate patterns of pebbles and shells, stranding seaweed and starfish. She walked to the center of that slick-smooth, brown-grey sand and looked around. Nothing but sand in all directions, perfectly smooth save for the tiny divots left by plovers—

As smooth, as expansive, as a newly-primed canvas.

Mother had followed her, and she winced at the twin lines of their deep, gouging footprints—but what had one of her instructors said? Work with what you have. Make the imperfections part of the work. She tried to envision what she might create around those dark holes, what they could represent—

When she heard a strange sound, like a hiccup, and turned to see Mother weeping.

“My daughters,” she breathed. Her eyes were scanning the horizon, so glassy from tears as to seem colorless. “My beautiful daughters.”

Irene looked at the sea. A figure was rising up out of the surf, and another, and another, their distant silhouettes like a child’s stick figures, each of them glistening grey and green and golden, the light catching their scales in sparkling patterns. Seemingly hairless, naked, their sex invisible at such a distance; Irene’s stomach knotted at the sight.

“At last,” Mother whispered. She suddenly put her arm around Irene’s waist, hugging her close, squeezing liquid down into a patter on the sand. “Oh, Irene. I have waited so long for this, so long…”

“What happens now?” Irene asked, only to shudder at the sound of her own voice, strangely flat and muted. There seemed to be a lump in her throat, an actual lump that was muffling her words. She raised her hands to her neck, pushing beneath the peeling skin to try and massage the lump away, feeling the scales flex and scrape.

“Don’t be afraid,” Mother said, and then caught her arms and turned her around. “Irene! Don’t be afraid. Everything has its time to die and its time to be born. I am ready—”

Her voice was drowned out by a single, high note, more piercing than any birdsong: the distant whistle of a train. Both women jumped in surprise, and Irene twisted in Mother’s grasp, trying to see—but of course she couldn’t see, they were too far from the station.

“There’s not supposed to be a train now,” Mother said. “The next train isn’t due until tomorrow.” Then, an edge to her voice, “Irene? Did you do something?”

Perhaps something; perhaps nothing. But Thomas was a Beckwith. At odds with his father, but a Beckwith nonetheless. The name itself could be enough to commandeer a train…

Had he believed her? Believed her, and cared enough to come for her?

“Irene?” Mother shook her, once and then a second time, hard snaps that hurt her neck. “Irene, did you do something? Answer me!”

In response, Irene broke free of Mother’s grasp and shoved her back, hard. The older woman nearly fell, then righted herself, but Irene barely noticed. She pulled off the cloak and flung it aside, then pushed her sleeves up; the movement tore off the last pieces of skin from her forearms, the shreds of pinkish flesh dancing away on the breeze. Now her forearms revealed themselves as grey-green, scaly and pebbled on their undersides; she raised her hands and ran her fingers through her hair and felt it sloughing off, watched clumps of her brown locks tumble over the sands. A last patch of skin behind her ear came away like the skin off hot milk. Everywhere her flesh felt textured, nubbly, firmer.

Did you do something?

Perhaps nothing, perhaps something, but all too late for her—but perhaps not for the others.

Before her the sand stretched, smooth and unbroken, and she saw it then in her mind’s eye, the lines and the texture. How she could perhaps leave one more letter for whoever might be coming.

“Irene?” Mother’s voice was querulous behind her. “Irene, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. Only there’s never been a train now, not on this day… my God, if an outsider sees, if they make it back, if they tell… oh, Irene! What have you done?”

Irene fell to her knees and began digging into the sand, now cupping her hands to gouge deep and dark, now trailing her fingers to make lighter stippling. Crawling about, straining to reach without damaging the lines, and with a cry of impatience she tore at her skirt and flung it aside, then her blouse. The sun warmed her wet body through the thin chemise, setting her alight. Now she could move more freely; now she could swing her arms in wide arcs, sketching what might have been her earliest memory: being held up in the doorway of the church and gazing out at the great shadow looming over the sea, over the village, blotting out the sun itself. What had she felt then? Not fear but a kind of awesome recognition…

Mother’s shadow fell over her. Irene glanced over her shoulder and saw the veiny legs beneath the skirt, the sensible brown shoes cracked with age; she glanced, and then worked faster.

“Irene, what did you do,” Mother breathed behind her. And then the shadow vanished, and she heard Mother cry, “Go back! Go back! Someone might be coming!”

Going to the village, the blank faces that received them. Bebe crying, how had Irene forgotten? How Bebe would weep each morning before they went out to serve? Weeping and weeping, unable to say why, Mother gripping her white-knuckled with frustration as she hustled all of them out the door.

The overflowing nets at the water’s edge, spilling onto the carts. The shimmering piles of poideu and Irene gritted her teeth in frustration, that she lacked even a hint of color to show how dazzling those mounds of gasping bodies had been. Like gold, someone would inevitably say in wonderment, gold straight from the sea. The fishermen all kneeling as each catch was hauled away, their prayers a counterpoint to the breaking waves. And then they would look at Irene and not see her at all.

Oh, but they would see her now.

“My daughters,” Mother was saying, her voice sodden. “My beautiful daughters, please go back.”

There was the slap of feet on wet sand behind her. Irene twisted on her knees to see more than a dozen creatures, standing where the surf rolled and crashed and drew away again, only several yards away. All of them standing on two legs, but awkwardly, as if pained by the effort. Their bodies layered in green-grey scales streaked with gold, their torsos identically shapeless, their heads crowned with stubby black tendrils tangled with seaweed, their eyes a solid yellow split by black that darted over the landscape, over Irene, over Mother. All of them smelling of salt, of the sea.

So this is what I am becoming, Irene thought. Comprehension like a dull weight inside her. She felt tears filling her eyes once more—

And then one of the creatures met her gaze and raised its hand, wiggling just the tips of its webbed fingers. It was a strange gesture, almost obscene, yet it made Irene bark with startled laughter through her tears. “Annie?” she whispered, and then, “oh, Annie.” For the wave was an old joke between them: it was how the mayor’s wife used to wave when they were little, after the blessing of each catch. Like she thinks herself a queen, Annie would sniff. The queen of nowhere.

Queen Irene, the boarding-house girls whispered in Irene’s mind, but they were distant and faded now, less real than the heat of the sun and the lapping of the sea. Like a story she had told herself about being a famous painter, having a nobleman’s son for her lover. A story about stealing someone else’s fate…

Hadn’t there been something about a foot, a bloody foot?

The train whistle broke the air again, closer now. To the north, a pencil-thin plume of smoke rose into the sky. All too late for her, but maybe not for those staring, silent girls; she drew faster. As if in response Mother cried again, “Irene! What did you do?”… but there was nothing after it, no more commands, no more questions.

No apologies.

Beneath her hands, the images kept appearing. The new church, and the little girls working there. Herself and Mother walking to the beach. The half-circle line of the beach, defining the peninsula’s curl—

Like a nest. Like the peninsula was the edge of a vast nest.

Eggs trickled down her thighs and the lapping of the sea seemed a kind of physical pull. Her eyelids kept fluttering closed, she kept wanting to crawl into the waves. Like a vast bathtub fitted to her body, like the shoe she was born to wear. Just a little longer, she mouthed. A stronger wind cut across the beach, scattering sand over her lines and she growled in frustration. And then another wind, and another. Above her, the sun disappeared; she looked up to see clouds gathering, where had they come from? The sky had been a pristine blue that morning.

Suddenly, Mother cried out, a garbled noise that sound like no or perhaps not yet. Irene was putting the finishing touches on the bay, the figures, herself before them; she rose at the sound. Mother had fallen to her knees, clutching at her chest, bowed to the sea as if it was a god unto itself; and then she slumped on her side. There are things we are not meant to see until our time. But Mother’s time would never come now.

In the distance, far into the water, was a circle of churning foam, slowly moving towards them.

Irene looked at Annie, but she and the others were plodding through the surf towards Mother. They didn’t seem to notice Irene anymore, didn’t seem to notice when the churning circle drew closer and began to swell up, up, then finally broke into a dark shape obscured by clouds of mist. Taller than the tallest man, its body seemingly a writhing mass of forms like twined bodies interlaced with tentacles that kept twisting and rippling. Irene opened her mouth to speak, to cry out, but the lump only allowed her to make a gurgling noise. Every fiber of her being rigid with an ecstatic, horrified recognition: she was the princess after all, for her prince had come at last.

A crack of thunder came, breaking the spell of the moment, mingling with the last dying whistle of the train. The first fat raindrops splattered down.

“No,” Irene whispered, though it came out as a rustling noise.

The heavens opened up above her then and the rain began sheeting down. The lines of her drawing, all her work, began to muddy and distort; the waves began to pick up, each crash inching further up the beach, lapping at Mother’s unmoving form.

“No,” she said again, and she was weeping now, openly sobbing, though she could feel no more tears from her eyes, though the sounds she was making were utterly inhuman. She raised her hands to her face and they were webbed and scaly and alien; she rent the chemise from her body and she was no more or less than any of the things that had walked out of the sea.

Equally important and equally unimportant.

None of it had mattered. None of it had ever mattered, in the end. She looked back at her drawing, her last message to the world she had known, and saw it distorting and dissolving; she looked before her and Annie—was it Annie?—was standing there, baring a mouthful of teeth broken to points between black lips like leather. Her hand touched Irene’s face and Irene touched Annie’s face in turn, feeling the unfamiliar ridges and bumps, staring at eyes that were as strange as her own, now. Everything strange. She leaned into Annie’s touch, pressing her cheek against Annie’s palm like an animal craving affection, and in turn Annie drew her close and held her. Everything was washing away: Mother’s body, the sense of some commotion far in the distance. Annie guided her through her first stumbling steps into the water, towards the mist-shrouded column that had shaped her body, her choices, her very life, and Irene glimpsed through the haze many eyes embedded in textured grey-green flesh, dozens of yellow-ringed black orbs that looked at Irene with an intensity she had never before known.

All of the others crowding around now, touching her, hugging her. The hiss of breath, the gurgling that mirrored her own noises. The water around her feet was cool and soothing, softening everything with its inexorable lapping. She tried to look back one last time but she could see nothing; she tried to say Mother but could no longer form the word. Scaly flesh embracing her, sliding around her like a cocoon, like a shoe that fit perfectly.

And if from the beach there was a cry of “Irene”, it was carried away by the wind, by the water, by the embrace of all she truly was here and now and forever.

___

Copyright 2025 L.S. Johnson