The Refrigerator Monologues

by Catherynne M. Valente

  “Are you a mermaid?”

  “That’s racist,” I snapped. My head was starting to spin. Crowjack was right. The air was amazing up there.

  He backpedaled immediately. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it; I don’t . . . What happened to your eye?”

  “Bad boyfriend,” I answered, and touched my face. Still tender.

  Then it happened. I couldn’t help it. I laughed in this weird way that had nothing to do with me, this soft, coquettish, flirty laugh like a fucking sea lion in heat. Gross. It’s the air, you know. Everything that came after, I blame on that stone-cold bitch oxygen. She hates me and wants me to suffer. I loved him. I loved him like breathing. I loved him because I was breathing. I was reeling on the whiskey-wind, my vision gone to oil and honey as I pounded shot after shot of pure unfiltered sky.

  We screwed under the stars on the beach below his lighthouse. It wasn’t very good for me. He didn’t vibrate the water with his legs to signal his interest. His torso didn’t flush that delicate shade of blue that really gets me going. He didn’t clack his swim bladders against each other to make the secret song of Atlantean sex. He didn’t even have claspers or a cloaca. We had to do it his way. It took forever. But it certainly was new. I straddled him and clacked my swim bladders deep in my throat and I could feel the blue coming on in my chest, lighting up his dumb handsome face with the light of another dimension. Afterward, we swam out together so I could sober up. He told me about himself. He was an orphan, found screaming on the shore by Angus Heron, the old man who ran the lighthouse, and raised to keep that light on like it could save the world. It was romantic. Like a fairy tale. Like a song written by someone other than me. I told him about my music. Sang him a bit of “Lemuria Calling.”

  “I have a secret,” he said, floating in the shallows, little harmless green jellyfish glowing along the strand like stage lights.

  “Don’t we all?”

  “I want to tell you mine.” He looked at me intensely, through his long wet gold hair. He looked at me like I was the answer at the back of a math book. “I . . . I can talk to fish. Not just fish. Dolphins and whales and seals and eels and scallops and crabs. I can talk to them, and when they talk back, I understand everything they say.”

  I laughed. “So? Who can’t?”

  John looked hurt. He actually blushed. “Well, pretty much everybody on the planet but me, actually. The truth is, I’m . . . I’m a superhero. People call me Avast.” I crooked one crystal, scaly eyebrow. “I fight . . . you know . . . injustice and villainy. I’m part of a group. The Union. With a bunch of other guys. Kid Mercury, Grimdark, the Insomniac, the Unstoppable Id, Chiaroscuro.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. I didn’t care about any of those stupid names. They sounded like particularly shitty scene bands. “I’m on the planet, John.”

  But he was still in a huff because I wasn’t impressed by his little party trick. “On the planet. Not under it.”

  “That’s such a mammalian thing to say,” I sighed. “ ‘The planet’ is seventy percent water, you know.”

  John’s face broke apart. He gave in. He cared that much what I thought. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You can talk to fish. Fine. Can you breathe underwater? Or at least hold your breath for a really long time?”

  Slowly, John Heron nodded. I narrowed my eyes. My catch of the day was starting to smell suspicious.

  “How old are you?”

  This was clearly the big one. He didn’t want to say. John couldn’t look at me and talk at the same time. He fiddled with some invisible thing in the water. “About . . . about eighty-five?”

  He didn’t look a day out of college.

  “Let me see your feet,” I sighed. But I already knew. You have got to be kidding me. What are the fucking chances?

  I hadn’t noticed before. I know we had sex and everything, but I’m not really into feet that way. I checked under his arms and under his hair. John Heron, alleged human male, had webbed toes, gills, and tiny vestigial skull-fins the color of the jellyfish on the beach.

  “Mystery solved,” I purred in his ear. “You’re one of us. Half one of us, anyway. Welcome to Freak City. Watch out—it gets real stupid here.”

  • • •

  And indeed it did get real stupid, real fast.

  I shouldn’t have gotten knocked up. It’s so easy when you’re doing it with other fish! If it’s not mating season, I’m not releasing eggs and it’s all good times and kippers for breakfast after. But John’s got a lot of mammal in him, and I guess the rules are different. Probably what happened to his poor mother, whoever she was. Girl thought she was going topside for a bit of blow and strange and all of a sudden—BAM. Egged up something terrible. Atlantean girls go from zero to mum in about six weeks, so I just . . . stuck around. I couldn’t face my mother or Platypunk or Crowjack. I couldn’t face being on stage screaming out “Atlantean Idiot” with a big ol’ baby belly. It is the opposite of punk rock.

  The best part of giving birth was the look on John Heron’s face. I don’t know what he saw in his sex-ed filmstrips, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a green girl squatting in the ocean in broad daylight while she pushes out an aquamarine egg the size of a dinghy and tries to hide what’s happening from the kids in their floaties and swim trunks. He thought the daddy’s job was to smoke a cigar and change a couple of diapers, not to wait until nightfall to drag the egg onto the sand and secrete a nutritive acid from his eyes to dissolve the shell. I don’t think I ever loved him again as much as I did while he wept over our son, fire-colored gunk hissing and popping on the eggshell, laughing at the total bugfuck absurdity of what was happening to him. When the glassy blue egg had half-melted away, I reached my arms down into the last of the glittering yolk. I felt tiny fingers clutch my hand.

  Look, I have never been anything but hardcore since I said my first swear, but when my son grabbed onto me for the first time, it was like a harpoon in the heart. Nothing ever hurt so much or felt so good. I lifted him out of the egg and held him in my arms. He didn’t cry. He held on to my hair in his fists.

  Of course, he wasn’t him yet. Atlanteans are born hermaphroditic, telepathic, about as far along as a human two-year-old, and completely transparent. We pigment up over childhood. In kindergarten, most of us still have clear patches all over. I counted diamond ribs through crystal skin.

  “It’ll be a boy in about a year,” I whispered to John.

  We both stared at our child. I was amazed any creature could be so perfect and beautiful. John was amazed that his kid looked like a glass Christmas ornament of the baby Jesus.

  We named him Angus. John insisted, after his foster father. I only gave in because everything else about Angus was all me. You’d never know he had any mammal in the mix at all. When he cried, it sounded like whale song. But when we were alone I called him Azure. A proper pedigreed Atlantean name for the secret prince of the sea. Because I still hadn’t told John who I was. Who my mother was. I liked just being Bayou for somebody in the world. Just being loved. But after Angus was born, we had to go home. Hatchlings just can’t live on land. It’d be like filling a baby’s bottle full of rum and cramming it up his nose all day. A growing boy needs salt water.

  This is the part you’ve been waiting for. I know what stories fill the seats, and it’s not the one about the punk rock alligator princess getting knocked up. That’s what happens before the real story. Or offstage during an act break. Babies just sort of happen to heroes at random moments, like a new superpower, and then they’re off to the real excitement. But Angus and I happened to each other. Lucky accidents. All the way down, his gentle little voice spoke in my head, and my rough, air-shredded whiskey-whisper murmured in his. I kept looking over at John, swimming so beautifully, like he’d never walked in his life, wondering if he could hear us. But I guess he was too human for that.

  Mama, what are those?

  Those are orcas, Azure. We�
��ll sneak out while Daddy’s sleeping and play hide-and-seek with them, just you wait.

  Mama, why is the ocean blue?

  Because blue is the color of love, my darling. Everything good is blue.

  We glided up the long road to the palace, and for once, it looked wonderful to me, in all its rusted trash-heap glory. I was going to present my mother with her first grandchild, with the chorus to a song I hadn’t even known I was playing, with the future. I flushed pink with pride. She’ll love you, I told John, though it was even money she’d hate him. Don’t be nervous. You’re coming home. Atlantis never turns away her own. Maybe we’ll even find your parents. One of them, anyway. You look kind of like this girl I know who plays the drums in Zombie Starfish and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

  But the doors of the palace were shut. Not just shut, barricaded with the masts of the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste. Not just barricaded but guarded by two burly Atlanteans, a giant squid with anger issues, and a great white shark. Not just shut and barricaded and guarded but sporting a big sign with scrawly, terrible penmanship:

  COMMONERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF MEGALODON

  (AND ALSO BAYOU WHO CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF)

  Six weeks is a long time to be gone, I guess. All the clubs had shut down till further notice. Platypunk and his family had gone into hiding. No one had any plankton and no one had any hope and no one had any idea what the hell was going on. Half the royal family was in lockup—Davy Jones’s Memorial Hospital for the Violent and Insane. And some asshole named Megalodon ruled Atlantis with an iron fin. But no one had seen the boss himself, only his muscle. So, what did we do? We did what anyone would do when they’re young and in love and looking after their first baby.

  We beat the shit out of a shark.

  It felt good to fight side by side. People always forget that we did. Anything he can do, I can do upside down and holding a baby in one arm. He was only ever half-Atlantean. I am a full-size candy bar. I laid out one of the guards with a barroom dirty kick, then tied the ’roided-out squid’s tentacles together in a big party bow. I looked over and John had crushed the other guard’s green skull with his fist and was riding the shark like a mechanical bull, banging the poor fella into Megalodon’s sign. Into the word BAYOU. Over and over until the great white passed out cold and the barricade buckled.

  Inside. Down the long hall of the Bismarck’s hull. My home. I was born there. I was made of glass there. And from the Bismarck into the Titanic’s tenth ballroom, to my mother’s silver-teapot throne. On one side of the thing, Platypunk crouched miserably in a cage with a marine research tracking collar around his neck, chained to the floor. On the other, my mother, Delphine Tankerbane the Fourth, lay flat on her face, her beautiful hair trailing up behind her, collared and leashed at the neck, the wrists, the ankles, with her blood floating around her like a black jellyfish. Too much blood. Too much blood for this to be a dream I could wake up from and have my mom call me BeeBee and snuggle me like she did when I was a little glass guppy and we’d never had a single fight and I didn’t even know how to play the conch yet.

  On the throne sat Crowjack.

  Only he wasn’t Crowjack anymore. Not completely. His legs had fused into a thrashing thick tail. His emerald-plated head was almost fully transformed into the maw and dead eyes of a prehistoric shark. He snapped his massive rows of teeth. When he saw me, his suddenly broad, powerful chest began to glow electric blue. The blue of love. The blue of mating.

  “Crowjack! What the fuck? What did you do?”

  “I found it, Bayou! I found a way back home. To our own dimension. This is what we’re supposed to look like! This is what we are! The greatest predators in any ocean in the universe! It feels amazing. It feels right. It’s your stupid mother and all the fish-gut aristocrats who keep us trapped in miserable half-primate bodies! I’ll show you. I’ll show you the way. The sea . . . is full of doors, Bayou. And all the doors lead to power. And what the shit is that thing you dragged back?”

  “Call me Avast, cruel villain!” John cried. “Wherever injustice rears its hideous head, wherever tyranny casts its baleful gaze, wherever evil sails the sea, there you will find Avast ready and able to strike it down!”

  Megalodon blinked. I gawked at my husband. “Is this a joke?” snarled the shark-thing on the throne. “What are you talking about? Sit down, Shakespeare; this is between me and my little princess.”

  “The lady is mine,” Avast growled. It was like we’d gotten zapped into one of Crowjack’s shitty performance pieces, throwing around purple prose and noble angst like beach balls.

  I didn’t even get a chance to say I wasn’t either of theirs. Crowjack wasn’t stupid. He saw a child in my arm and a stranger at my side and suddenly I didn’t exist anymore. Just his rage. Avast’s righteousness. It wasn’t about me anymore and it never would be again. It was about halibut and fatherhood and the pressures of masculinity. Megalodon lunged at us and we fought him, and I suppose if you could have sat up in a balcony seat, there would have been some elegance to the fight, some beauty. Fighting can be like that, sometimes. Megalodon yelled out lines from his own terrible plays and Avast bellowed about justice and freedom in a way that made me seriously question my romantic choices and I stayed grimly silent, clutching my son to me, swinging wild, aiming for my ex-boyfriend’s eyes.

  I should have found a place for Angus to hide. I should have put him down. It all happened so fast. I thought I could protect him. And one moment it all seemed to be going so well, and in another Megalodon shrieked beyond human hearing and turned on me, snatching my glass boy from my arms and swallowing him whole. Angus’s voice went out in my head like a blown pilot light. Mama, mama, it’s so loud—and then nothing. The emerald dinosaur freak sitting in my mother’s chair laughed at me. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, then spun round, bit off Avast’s arm, and swam through the ceiling into the dark water, screaming Avast Avast Avast like a curse, like a need, like a promise, like the reverb fading out at the end of a furious song.

  Oh, the arm grew back. We’re like starfish; it’s a thing we can do. And it all went on like you’ve heard, Avast and Megalodon, their endless undersea boxing match. Submarines full of other men, Union men, with masks and costumes and hard-set jaws. Oaths to fight to the death, to never yield, to never surrender, to never stop. But in all those oaths and boasts and proclamations of might and right, Avast never said our son’s name. Oh, yes, he would have vengeance, but for “my son.” As though I didn’t exist. As though Angus, as though Azure was nothing but a stolen painting or a bloody nose. A blow to Avast’s pride.

  All I felt was nothing. I could fight as well as any of them. And I did. Up there, he’s a superhero. Down here, I’m Queen of Atlantis. I command the seas. You can call me a sellout if you want. I deserve it. Platypunk did. He tried to get me to run off with him to the Indian Ocean where none of this absurdity could find us, and I said no. What was I supposed to do? My family was dead. Atlantis was well and truly fucked. I told myself it was just another stage. Just another costume. But I knew the truth. Punk dies the day the mortgage comes due. I slipped out of my sturgeon-skin coat and fishhook earrings and into my mother’s pale green glam gown of glitter and responsibility. I let them put the Abalone Crown on my head. But I wouldn’t grow my hair out. Never. They couldn’t make me.

  God, I made all the Union boys so uncomfortable. I got in between them and the mirror they liked to preen in, the mirror that showed them all as Kings of the Known Universe. They all felt safe with their girlfriends’ ambitions—artists and actresses and scientists. Girls you could brag to the alumni magazine about, but no one they ever had to compete with. They were the sparkly shiny special ones in their houses. After all, science is great, but who can compete with superpowers?

  Well, the Queen of Atlantis can.

  To tell you the truth, Avast hated Atlantis. Up there, he was a hero. He was totally unique, from New York to New Delhi. Down here, with me, he was just like everyone else
. He got so angry at me, over nothing, over everything, over having to spend another second in a place where no one cared that he could tell a whale what to do, where no one knew he was a star. He never touched me anymore. If he came home and saw my chest light up with blue at the sight of him, his lip curled up in disgust and he buried himself in his workouts.

  They never once asked me to join their little club. Even after Megalodon opened the floodgates and half a dimension’s worth of our redneck cousins poured through. Even after I defeated Whitewater and the Werekraken in the Battle of the Bermuda Triangle. Megalodon only barely escaped that one. He holed up in Guignol City like a trust fund baby for months after, licking his wounds. Even then, my husband and his friends never said, Hey, you’re pretty handy; wanna learn the secret handshake? And fucking hell, they hated my crying at night. I hated my crying at night. But I couldn’t help it, could I? John Heron never heard Angus’s little voice in his head. His father was still puttering around, replacing lightbulbs in his cozy little house. Easy come, easy go. They hated hearing the word baby. Child. It messed up the blocking of their play about themselves. Avast could scream, I shall destroy you for the death of my son! and his boys would all cheer. But if I so much as touched my stomach and whispered that I missed my baby, oh, how they’d sneer!

  I did everything I was supposed to do. I ruled a nation and battled the forces of aquatic evil. Wherever injustice reared its hideous head, wherever tyranny cast its baleful gaze, wherever evil sailed the sea, I showed up to work and punched my card. But still they whispered about me. In the grottos, in the shallows where they could all breathe easy after dinner, half off their faces on my mother’s sixty-year squid-ink scotch.