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They tell me I am the girl who went into the sea and came out undrowned, with seaweed and witch’s hair strangled around my throat and caught in my long wicker arms. They say I fought with death and bested it, that I keep whales for my kings and courtiers and that I let the squid leave its suckermarks on my neck from where we kissed and made up one drowsy evening (for all evenings are drowsy at the bottom of the ocean) and then laid together. The artists draw pictures of me, either demure and nice and lace-wearing or naked and being fucked senseless by octopi or mermen or great sweaty Dagon, one-eyed and elephantine and with a cock so big he can’t fit two-thirds of it into me. These last always make me laugh cause I’ve seen Dagon, I’ve held him in my arms and rocked him to sleep (he felt their motion much more easily than he felt the rocking of the waves, so far beneath the surface that the water is as solid as stone) and when it was time I put my hand in his mouth and extinguished him like we used to whip flies off the walls of our tent, back when we camped.
They tell me that I came out dripping wet and with a mouth like a shark’s, no, with eyes like a shark’s, big and black marbles rolling around in my skull, glossy and waterproof. They tell me that I have had to submerge myself in saltwater every day since or risk drying out and shriveling up and clunking to the floor like pumice, like Lot’s wife with a chunk taken out of her and thus losing stability and clattering to the ground and breaking apart. It was such a shame, too, for I knew the man who wielded the maul who knocked the chunk out and I knew Lot’s wife too, I knew all of them. I did not know god and I think he did not know me, for I looked back on Gomorrah and remained untransfigured – but perhaps all that could have been done to me already had been.
As you may suspect I am older than I look.
One man writes to me every week to tell me he loves me. I laugh and eat his letters and tell the little demons in my stomach to use the remains in the furnace (they pronounce it like a bad fake eye-talian, foornachey) to let me go on billowing smoke and steam and all sorts of excreta for another day. I have left my home and walk the streets at night but the men who stop me think I am what I am not. I look like one of the expensive women on television who wear outfits and sit on stages and promise ruin on each other but never follow through, but inside I am all carbon-fiber and folded anodized steel. I am clean enough to be used in surgery, although I have no clue what implement they would make of me. I have scalpel nights and breakneck days and long, wet, rainy afternoons that rust my stainlessness right through the lacquer my lover spread on me, to keep moisture from me.
I am deserts drowning themselves to keep from the rain; that is one line the man who writes to me wrote. About me, I mean, not about himself. I don’t pretend to know what he means – I can only feel, I can only put my tongue to the nerveless wires running through my body and feel the jolt like citrus, like adamant, like every sharp thing in the world at once. At night when I am supposed to sleep I sit up and watch the water rising outside my window and that old familiar darkness flooding into my world once again, and my body adapts so well it is a joy to watch my bones realign and pop into their sockets and flesh to expand and suddenly I am something with membrane and great fins and furls, something agile underwater but that can only die on land. Would they still want to fuck me, seeing me like this?
They tell me I usually go out right before the sun rises, to the old place where nothing grows, right on the edge of the city, before it all fades into desert, and I stare at the sun like it was somebody I used to know. They follow me, discretely, to make sure I don’t get into trouble. Usually I try to give them the slip and sometimes it works; when it does I run howling through back alleys, getting gore beneath my fingernails and around my mouth and letting my hair catch on lampposts and fences and all jutting things of the earth. I rocket off walls and spend my pent-up energy wisely and when I return I sleep like the dead and waken with innocent smiles and breath so sweet it falls like powdered sugar onto my chest.
I catch the sun in my claws and rend it to pieces every night, and that is why it is dark. The stars are just the bits I missed. I will get them all eventually.
They tell me I am beautiful; I do not see it. When I look at myself in the mirror I see dark eyes and hair like weeds and raven’s breath gusting from my half-open mouth. I see cheekbones like knives and teeth that come with promises attached, each one, and sharpness enough to fulfill. I want to say I am Botticelli-beautiful, that men love me, that women are envious of me, that I could make myself a living from sitting and looking pretty, but I cannot. Ever since I came out of the sea, they tell me, I have only made a living by ending the living, from the bacteria I exterminate in the depths of my furnaced gut or in the air-smelter of my lungs, from the animals I devour whole in order to sate my life-lust, to wire my nerves with the kill-thrill thus derived, from the men I murder with every sharp, sharp glance and leave sprawled on the sidewalks behind me as I walk on unmoved, scuttling on arthropod’s limbs, slithering with snake’s borrowed muscles, floating and flying and weaving every menace as I smile and smile and smile on.
They no longer exist, they tell me. They were in aid of me and now that I need them no longer, they melt. I tried to save them, little wee men, I put them in my freezer and turned it up full blast, but all that did was freeze their dissolving entrails and leave such a stink - !
They tell me I am the girl who went into the sea and came out undrowned, that I fought with death and bested him, but in that they are wrong, for I am just the girl who went into the sea and dreamed such dreams with her mind’s last iota of thinking electricity before my soul annealed itself and went missing for long, long, long, and now the stars are right and I find time to tell stories to their infants in nebula’s nursery.
But that is only what they tell me.