by Lucy Taylor
“Mir, you ok?” He looks down. “Your ankle!”
“Just skin scraped off, I’m all right.”
We fall into each other’s arms and, for that moment at least, it’s as though he’s forgotten I have gills. Or, if he hasn’t, it no longer matters.
We’re silent, getting our breath back, until as we’re walking back to the truck, he says, “So, does this mean you can you breathe underwater?”
I want to laugh at this inane question, but he just saved my life, so I don’t. “No, Papi says they’re vestigial. They don’t work like real gills. And, yes, for the record, when I was nine, I dived down to the sea floor and tried to breathe water and almost fucking drowned. My brother’s gills worked fine, though. He had eight sets—gills behind his ears, in his armpits, around his ribs, next to his scrotum. I was so jealous. Ma thought she’d given birth to a monstrosity, but Papi was all excited. He said their baby was one of the first human amphibians.”
While he’s still looking stunned, I offer him one more piece of unwelcome truth. “I carry the same genes as my brother. If you and I fuck each other, who knows what will pop out?”
He nods and for now, we leave it at that.
There are more urgent things to deal with. For one, the truck’s control panel is a baffling array of starship-like levers and switches and dials. “If we’re going to get out of here, we have to figure out how to drive it,” I tell him.
“Give me a couple of hours. You go get your father.”
When he says that, all is forgiven. I realize if I didn’t love him before, I do now.
*
A gray, chemical-scented rain is slashing in from the east, like the pencil strokes of a demented sketch artist, by the time I get home. Papi’s nowhere to be found, but I spot the wheelchair upended at the edge of the cliff. When I gather my nerve to look down, relief washes through me. Papi is alive, using his powerful arms to haul himself over the algae-furred rocks the low tide has exposed.
As fast as I dare, I descend to the beach and wade into a warm, shallow stew of brown sargassum and podweed. Kelp fronds lasso my ankles and tiny, needle-nosed fish pluck at my toes. Trilobites fist into tight, protective balls as I approach.
Papi has beached himself on a sloped concrete slab that might once have been part of a bridge abutment. The surface is slick with algae and littered with the crushed exoskeletons of the trils he’s been munching.
I wade toward him, but stop with some space still between us, staring at him. Appalled.
He is naked and bloodied from the brutal crawl over the rocks. His once sturdy legs dangle limply. I would feel pity for their pathetic flaccidity were it not for the fact that his penis is anything but.
He lifts a half-eaten tril to his mouth and sucks out what’s left of the meat. Beckons me. “Come here, daughter. Look what the sea has brought in.”
“Papi, what are you doing here? You have to come back to the house.”
I tell him Jersey and I have a truck to take the three of us inland, but his attention is focused on trying to wedge his fingers into a rock crevice where an enrolled trilobite tries to hide. Only when I tell him about Old Four Legs does he nod with a grim understanding. “It’s happening, Mir. Evolution gone mad! Do you see?” He gazes skyward, arms spread. “The Celestial Magician waves his god-wand, and the waters arise and destroy us. He waves it again and the sea creatures slither onto the land. What next?” His voice falters and for a moment, he appears mute with confusion and pain. “What’s happening, daughter? What’s happening to me?”
I have no answer.
He shifts position to show me his back, which has worsened dramatically, rows of thick, cartilaginous ridges colonizing his spine. The growths remind me of the grotesque, malformed fins of a cod I caught once, milk-white and dying, poisoned by chemical swill. I don’t tell him that, though. Instead I jabber about settlements with doctors and remedies for Blister Rot, but whatever this is, I know it’s a mutation more ghastly than Rot and it defiles more than just his physical body.
Beyond him, a fist-sized ball possessed of an unnatural symmetry bobs in a bed of sargasso weed. He points to it eagerly. “Look at that, daughter, see how the sweetling floats closer to catch my eye, how it longs to be eaten. Fetch it for me.”
A part of my brain, feral and ancient, recognizes a danger eons old, but his voice and the flat gaze of his predator eyes cast a spell. I wade out toward the tril. As I pass, he snatches my arm and yanks me down next to him on the slab. The reeking water washes over my legs. The arm he drapes over me presses down like a wooden beam.
“Let me go, Papi, so I can bring you the trilobite.”
He presses me against him, wet skin on wet skin. This close, I can see the teeth that have grown in to replace the lost ones—dark little triangles in twin rows along the sides of his misshapen jaws. Strong enough to crack a tril’s exoskeleton or sever my arm.
“This is where your mother released the baby and drowned herself. She was a good woman, but she couldn’t adapt. Not meant for this new world.”
A wave slaps my face. “Please, Papi, the tide’s coming in!”
“You’re different than your mother. You’re strong. Think of it, daughter, what our offspring could be!”
The tril is so close now, floating in on the tide just a few feet away. I lunge for it. He pulls me back.
“A shame we won’t have any children, though.”
I should be relieved. I am not.
He exhales a groan, wheezy and orcan. “What’s wrong with me? This hunger torments my body and muddles my mind. Confuses my heart. I want you with me, my daughter, my sweetling, forever.” He puts his wet mouth to my forehead, a swift sizzling contact, more a curse than a kiss. “We’ve waited too long to go home.” For a mad instant, I think he means the house on the cliff, and I want to weep with relief.
Then he says, “Our home is the sea, and it’s time we returned. Together. No, sweetling, don’t try to wiggle away. I want you with me.” Another kiss, one that brings blood. “Inside my belly, my sweetling, every morsel of your ambrosial flesh.”
A wave shatters over us, stinking rain and sea water flooding my mouth. The force of it pitches me forward. My scrabbling fingers close on the trilobite, clawing for the notch where the barbed legs retract, digging in. A starry, hot shock of pain as the spiked legs spring out, slashing my palm, and the stranger who once was my father mashes me to his chest. I slam the trilobite into his face with a force that shatters the exoskeleton and impales his eyes, nose, and lips on the spines. Scarlet stripes bisect his forehead. Gouts of blood radiate from his eyes like a gory sunset.
He paws at his face, plunging the razor-spines deeper. An eyeball skews off center, strings of flesh drip from his cheeks.
Not Papi, I tell myself. Not my father!
Only when he begins lunging wildly, flailing his arms, reaching for me, do I come back to myself and flee toward the shore. His roar thunders across the sky, where clouds pile up in tall towers of ivory and cream, serene and untouched by his agony.
*
In my absence, Jersey has figured out the control panel and moved the truck off the road out of sight. When I tell him Papi fell from the cliff, he doesn’t ask for details, but his lips quiver with some secret emotion that might be grief or suppressed celebration.
We argue about whether or not to take all the food. Jersey says we have no choice, that if we drive back to the settlement to share it, we’ll lose everything, including the truck. Suspicion might even fall upon us for the death of the driver. I suggest leaving a portion behind on the road to be discovered by whoever passes, but there’s little force in my argument and I let Jersey persuade me that our survival demands we take all of it.
Much later, when everything changes, I will wonder if that was the moment—when we decided to steal the food from our neighbors and friends—that we both became monsters.
*
A few days into our journey, the truck bogs down in a marsh and we
have to abandon it, carrying as much food as we can. Soon after, we encounter a band of Road People heading south. They talk of settlements to the west and feed our desperate desire for hope by describing fields full of crops and fat women who squirt out healthy babies. They carry with them warm bottles of Quench, which they share with us before going on their way, but that night, two of the men come back and beat us and rob us of what little food we have left.
We trudge on. Days unfold like clouds drifting. Jersey says once we cross over the mountains, we are sure to find towns, but no matter which road we follow, what new route we explore, the water creeps up on us, blocks our way, forces our meandering path to become ever more narrow, our detours longer and more circuitous. Not sea water now, but shimmering expanses of wetlands and streams that whisper across the ground like a network of capillaries and veins bringing blood to a comatose body.
A map we found in the truck shows a route over two-lane roads into what used to be eastern Kentucky and a string of settlements in a long, narrow valley. For two weeks we struggle to get there. Finally, we crest a rise and are blinded by sunlight on a vast inland sea, where refuse has clumped into debris islands like the ones I remember from home. They tower above the lake like glittering pagodas of aluminum and plastic and copper. Bright, creaking temples to terrible gods.
On the befouled, porous shore of this New Lake, Jersey and I build a lean-to from rubbish we take from the islands. There are mounds of human bones, too, picked clean by sea birds and trilobites. One child-sized skull fascinates me, with its crystal ball smoothness and twin rows of tiny, sharp teeth. I stick it on top of a post outside the lean-to, but when Jersey sees it, he becomes furious, takes it down and buries it under a cairn of stones far from the beach.
We see no other humans on this desolate waste-shore, only herons and gulls and herds of small, skittish deer. Once, I get a glimpse of an Old Four Legs; it scuttles down the hill where it had lain watching me and dives into the lake, the water parting before its metallic blue hide as if for a sea god.
Which in this new world, perhaps it is.
The first babies the boy and I make are twin females—strange yellowish creatures, their limbs stunted and flipper-like, lacking ears but each gifted with eight sets of gills. One dies as she washes out of me in blood and afterbirth, but the other splashes out gasping and flopping.
The boy and I seldom speak now, and when we do, the words are paltry and halting, quickly hushed by the silence. My thinking unravels and frays. Memories dip below the mind’s shiny surface into a languid, animal realm.
The boy’s name is Jersey. Jersey. Often I want him. Sometimes I love him. When he holds me at night, I luxuriate in the lavishness of his textures and scents: sleek, oily skin with the tang of sweat and sea salt, the old pennies smell of his wild, rushing blood, the rich, fresh oyster taste of his semen.
His name is Jersey, though often I forget why it’s important that I remember.
We struggle to survive, yet I revel in the vastness of this wild, spacious place, where my fish-daughter crawls in the shallows, hunting tadpoles and popping dragonflies into her mouth.
Days pass—the boy’s name is Jersey—while a hunger fiercer and more urgent than lust thrums between my legs, in my belly. I chew the stringy flesh of sea turtles and suck fat snails out of their whorled shells, I crack open a trilobite, gobble it.
To no avail.
This Hunger is old. It catches me by the throat and savages me, unleashes an ancient appetite. Hunger for the Food that moves on two legs, muscle sliding over bone, heart pumping, blood crooning, while the ghostly blue eyes regard me with trepidation and awe.
Tonight I wait in the shadows of the lean-to where the Food sleeps and dreams and sometimes, disconsolate, cries out in pain. Mir, it sounds like.
I wait for the Food to come outside and give himself to me, but I cannot remember his name.
About the Author
Lucy Taylor is the author of seven novels, including the Stoker Award winning The Safety of Unknown Cities. Her most recent work includes the collection Fatal Journeys and the novelette chapbook A Respite for the Dead. She lives in the high desert outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is at work on a collection of New Mexico-themed horror. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Lucy Taylor
Art copyright © 2017 by Miranda Meeks
