The Pisces(42)

“Holy shit,” I said. “This is fucking crazy. So, like, there actually are mer-people? And Sirens?”

“Sort of. But not the way you conceive of us. Well, we are sort of the way you conceive of us. I mean, obviously I’m very sexy.” He laughed.

“You are!” I said.

“Ha, not really. But I mean, we aren’t like the Siren myths and stuff. It’s not like we are trying to kill humans or keep them imprisoned on an island. We aren’t like the way they are in The Odyssey. Homer slandered us. But we do live a long, long time. Youthfully. Hundreds of years. We spend most of them looking like we are in our late teens and early twenties. I think it’s the saltwater. It preserves us in some way.”

“So are you mythic? Are you a mythic creature? Is this a joke you are playing? Am I hallucinating you?”

But from the look on his face I knew it wasn’t a joke. There was no way the place his skin met his tail could be fake. The gradations were too rough and eerie. There was no makeup or costume in the world that could do that. He really was part man and part fish. Or something. Had I lost it at some point along the way? Was I worse off than I thought?

“You aren’t hallucinating, not really,” he said. “I mean, you are kind of hallucinating in the sense that your perspective has shifted. But in a way you were really hallucinating before you met me—in the sense that there was only one part of life you could see. You believed only that which was in front of you. Most people do. Most people believe that which you cannot see or know could not possibly exist. Humans are very arrogant. I don’t think you are arrogant, but I think it’s just your nature to only believe in what you can see.”



“I don’t even know what to say,” I said. “I have so many questions for you.”

“Let’s start slow,” he said.

“Are you real?” I asked.

He laughed. “I suffer like I’m real. I have wants like I’m real. I fear that I will be unliked or unloved. Men, women, I think that maybe everyone wants the same thing.”

“Men want sex,” I said.

“Don’t you?” he asked.

“I do,” I said. “Maybe. But I think I mistake it for love, or something.”

“How do you know when you’re mistaking it?”

“I think when I get high off it.”

“Well, why not? That could be love,” he said. “Can’t you get high off of love? I don’t think I want a love that doesn’t make me feel amazing.”

“I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.”

I was surprised to hear him say that. I felt that surely he must always be the one doing the disappearing. Merman, fish fillet, whatever the fuck he was, I still thought of him as a surfer who worried about nothing. Someone who was very free to just disappear off into the night at any time.

I wondered what he looked like to the mermaids under there. Were there mermaids? Was he beautiful for the sea or just average? I didn’t dare ask. Surely the mermaids must be beautiful—breathing in and out under the ocean. I imagined them long-haired with little waists and shells on their tits. I imagined them all like Aphrodite. I wondered if perhaps they all looked the same and he’d eventually grown bored of them. Maybe that was why he wanted a land woman with calluses on her feet, plain as I was. I was nothing like Aphrodite. But maybe that was the point.



“You’re not going to abandon me now that you know what you know,” he said. “Are you?”

“Me? No!”

I was delighted. Did it take a mythological deformity to find a gorgeous man who was as needy as I was?

“Good,” he said.

He put my chin in his hand and gave me a wet kiss.

I could smell the difference between the top and bottom of him. His head, shoulders, and neck had a clean smell, a fleshy, wet-skin smell. He smelled human, but better. Once in a while, the scent of his bottom half would waft up and it smelled like a fish market—not exactly dead fish, the way my fish-tank emergency had smelled in my youth, but it smelled like blood, the ocean, shit, seaweed…a little like pussy, actually.

I felt almost as though his bottom half were some sort of pussy, although it was phallic in shape. Maybe because he was insecure about it, and I had always felt insecure about my pussy. Maybe it was because in seeing it, this part of him, the part he had concealed, I was, in a way, entering him. I thought about dominance and submission—how in some ways he had been the submissive one in eating my pussy. Yet in other ways I was dependent on him emotionally now that I had let him see me like that: splayed, surrendered, thrusting in his face. I was attached to him more than before, because I had opened for him like that. Maybe he felt that of me. Maybe he needed that before he could show me his tail.

I wondered what was underneath that sash around his pelvis. I wondered if he had a cock. Did fish have cocks?

“May I touch you?” I asked.

He nodded.



We began kissing again and I ran my hands through his hair, tickling the back of his neck. I rubbed his chest, smooth as a sculpture, fingering each of the nipples. I wanted to tease him, treat him like a girl a little bit, because I still felt vulnerable and also because I knew, somehow, he would like it. His nipples hardened like pellets under my fingers and he gasped.