The Pisces(58)

Soon there was blood on his face. I closed my eyes and rode his face. I came very quickly, for me. He had my blood dried and smeared across his cheek. I put my fingers in my pussy and smeared blood under his eyes like No Glare. It was funny to be dressing him up in my blood. Here he was, a man with a tail, and I was making him look even more bizarre. I was used to the tail by now. To me he was just a man or a boy or a boy-man, and I wanted to paint him with so many of my fluids: sweat, spit, blood. I wanted to brand or mark him.



I imagined that in the ocean, blood would never stay in the entrance of a pussy. When I took baths with my period, or went swimming, my blood always stopped. We learned this in junior high school at swim practice: that your blood stops in water. Perhaps it just slowly dissolves, or maybe it stays up in the uterus. Maybe it trickles out so faintly that time slows down and that’s why you never see any trail of pink in the bathwater.

Did mermaids menstruate? Perhaps this was part of Theo’s attraction to me, my feet in the dirt and the blood in my pussy. My feet on the desert sand, dirty feet, dirty legs, bloody legs, blood dripping down my legs and onto all the earth. Both of us dry on our chests, but me wet in the pussy like a red hearth: the only wetness for days, no other water. Did mermaids even get wet in their cunts? Was it hard fucking them in the water, as beautiful as they were? I remembered trying to fuck in a pool years ago at a motel in Phoenix. It wasn’t easy. You got dried up from the water and couldn’t slide around right. So what would happen in the ocean? What did they use for lubrication?

I gasped when I saw his cock. It was harder than I’d ever seen it, thick and pink, aiming straight at me like a meaty arrow. I gasped again when I saw the pool of blood on my sister’s white sofa. I was not so blinded by passion that I didn’t care if I had ruined it. I couldn’t destroy Annika’s house just because my new boyfriend was a merman with a penchant for period sex.

But Theo saw the stain as a memento and looked proud: as though we should both autograph it. Saltwater stained boats, but in a beautiful way—weathering them, rendering the wood a soft, gray color. So too was our stain to him an act of nature. Perhaps he saw it as a triumph, even, a miracle marking our existence together on land, rather than any cause for alarm. And so I pretended to own my bodily secretions, as though I was proud of what we had made, instead of feeling inwardly ashamed. I pretended to celebrate by kissing him. With his tongue in my mouth and little bits of dried blood flaking off of his cheek, he put his dick in me. I couldn’t believe how strong it was.



“Fuck me,” I said. “Fuck me with your Triton spear.”

We both laughed. We were looking in each other’s eyes and he was rubbing my organs from the inside. My flow was very heavy and he was sliding in and out, pumping inside me. I had never come from sex before, but maybe I would this time. Maybe I would.

“Oh my God, I’m either going to come or piss,” I laughed. “I’m either going to come or piss, I don’t know which one.”

“So come and piss,” he said. “Come and piss!”

But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t let go, or maybe I wasn’t about to come—only piss. Whatever it was, I couldn’t reach it. But it felt so good to fuck him and I felt so connected to him and to all of the lovers throughout time. Missionary was so classical: simple, romantic, and ancient.

I can’t believe his dick is inside me, I kept thinking, that it is his dick inside me, that it’s your dick inside me. A beautiful look came across his face: flushed cheeks, glazed eyes, lips wet and full. He looked intoxicated, and I felt so proud to be the one intoxicating him. Or was it simply being in a pussy, a wet pussy—not dry-wet from seawater, but wet with secretions—that made him look so drunk? Could it be anyone’s pussy? I wanted to believe it was me and that he felt about my pussy like I felt about his cock: amazed, because of who it belonged to. It was me alone: my body and my spirit that made this beautiful creature look so high. In that way I felt that I was beautiful now too.

And then his expression changed again. Now he looked more pained, or perhaps engulfed in a pleasure that overwhelmed him. He was moaning “ungh, ungh” into my mouth, but not like the guys in porn saying stupid, phony lines like “Fuck me, bitch.” This was pure sound. It was as though his mouth emitted pure nature. His mouth was like a shell that you could put to your ear. Or maybe we were nature together? Were we shells or were we animals? Or one shell and one animal? No, we were two fish swimming in circles around each other, playful and spared of memory, unaware that we had ever been born and that we would ever die. We were connected now not only with all of human history—all the human lovers of the past—but with animal history as well. I’d been having sex for years. I’d had it hundreds, maybe even thousands of times, but now it was like I finally understood what sex was. There were only so many things in our lives that connected us to all of our ancestors, to all of humanity and to the animals. Poetry was one thing that bridged generations. But this was the big thing. This encompassed every species. Otherwise what was there? There was birth and death. There was eating food, drinking fluid, pissing and taking shits. There was this.



And what of love? I felt certain that this could be nothing but love, and if this was only lust or infatuation or a simulation of love—well, then give me lust or infatuation. This was how I wanted love to feel. This was the love I wanted. I didn’t want the other kind of love, whatever that love was. I didn’t want the “conscious” kind. Had anyone ever tried to strip Cupid of his quiver? Had anyone tried to send the Sirens to group therapy or Sappho to the UCLA psych ward? Homer gave the Sirens a bad reputation. Falling in love with a Siren meant certain death, but perhaps this was the greatest love: to die in feeling. This was the greatest annihilation—the highest purpose—and the Sirens themselves were not evil. They were simply giving human beings the greatest gift they could possibly give them, to die intoxicated by love and lust. What better way to die?