The Pisces(41)

“So much,” I said. “More than anything. More than anything I would like you to come out of the water.”

“I’m scared,” he said.

He looked like a little boy when he said that, scrunching up his nose and squinting.

“Of what?” I laughed. “Are you scared of me? But you just had your face in my pussy.”

“I have some imperfections,” he said. “I have—something is wrong with my body. I’m afraid for you to see.”

“I think you’re beautiful,” I said. “You are a gorgeous creature. I would never judge you. Anything that could be different or weird about your body I would only see as even more special.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said. “About what you see.”

Now I wondered what it was that was wrong with him. Did he have a shrunken lower body? Was he missing a leg? Was it just a small dick?

“I don’t like people,” I said. “I have no friends. I have no one to tell.”

This was a lie. I would surely be telling Claire at some point about the pussy-eating in detail and, I figured, probably every inch of his body. As soon as she was better and ready to hear it. It would probably even cheer her up.



“Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t like it, there is nothing I can do about it. If you feel frightened by it—by me—I can only go back into the water and swim away. I won’t be able to see you again.”

“Come on,” I said. “Would you stop? I won’t not like it. There’s nothing that can scare me.”

That wasn’t entirely true, but I believed it. It’s an art to believe your own lies. Some people think you have to actively convince yourself in order to believe your own lies, but in that moment, I just didn’t know any other reality than everything being okay—no matter what he showed me. I knew only that silence and the wanting him to come up on the rock with me. I didn’t think I could be scared of anything. I just wanted him to be with me.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

He put his beautiful white arms on the rock and hoisted himself up, then flipped himself over so that he was sitting next to me.

Around his pelvic region was a thick beige sash, like an oilcloth. Below it was the wet suit: scaly and coal black, covered in barnacles. At the bottom were what looked like a pair of fins or flippers, of the same color as the suit, connected to the rest of the black rubbery scales. He looked more like a scuba diver than a swimmer and more like a thick piece of cod than a scuba diver. The suit seemed old—like it had been soaking in the ocean for years—with all of the barnacles attached to it, bits of seaweed. It wasn’t sleek or shiny like I had seen on the surfers. It almost looked like the rocks we were seated on. Like he was part of the ocean landscape.

The flippers too really looked like fish fins: thick by where I guessed his ankles would be and then fading to a translucency at the bottom. Sheer black. They reminded me of a black bubble-eye fish I had at thirteen who died while my father and I were traveling to visit Annika at college. When we returned home, the fish was floating on her side at the top of the water, the tank stinking. I remember feeling embarrassed and not wanting to show my father she had died. I wasn’t afraid he would blame me for her death, but something about her curvy little body, just floating there, made me feel exposed. It was as though I were lying at the top of the tank, naked and smelling, too intimate an experience to share with my father. I remembered how her tail had already begun disintegrating, and a tiny piece of it had detached and was floating next to her. This is what his flippers looked like.



Then something turned in my eye, or the eye of my mind, like when you look at one of those psychedelic posters that can be seen two ways. For a while you look at something one way, but then, all of a sudden, the image flips. Once you see the second way you can’t go back to the first. What I saw was that this was no wet suit at all, but somehow a massive, slimy, heavy tail. It was literally connected to his body. Maybe it was his body? Underneath the cloth were what I assumed might be genitals, then, if he had them? And just below that was an area where the tail, or whatever this was, met his skin. It did not meet in a straight line like the top of a pair of pants, but blended gradually. First there was an area that was mostly skin with a peppering of black scales, like one or multiple birthmarks. From there the scales became more raised, almost like moles or lesions. They began to cluster closer together until they became a solid mass, like rubber or the thick skin of a fish. It looked like time happening, like a wave gradually rolling up on the sand. It was as though whatever this was had happened over time, like some kind of infection—gradually taking over his body.

Except this wasn’t an infection. It was like he was part fish.

“Are you grossed out?” he asked.

“No,” I said. What the fuck was this? Was Theo a mermaid?

“Freaked out?”



“No. Just shocked and wondering if I’m crazy. How did this happen?”

“I was born this way,” he said. “I am what you are thinking I am. Sort of.”

“What do you think I think you are?”

“A merman.”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I was thinking that.”

“I don’t call myself that. None of us think we are that. But to humans we are that.”