By Amanda JY Lee
When you enter the room, it’s dead silent, and you hear a quiet gasp. It’s only an excruciating second before the blaring music resumes, the polite chatter picks back up, and you can disappear into the sweaty mass of bodies. The stench is unmistakable, just as you remembered. A concoction of spiking anxiety, pumping adrenaline, and delicious pheromones that marked your high school life, reproduced in this familiar, throbbing mess of limbs and lips.
It’s inconvenient, to say the least, to try to socialize with your old classmates on dry land, lugging a tail fin around as you are. The architecture of the school gym somehow feels more hostile than before, when you had legs and regularly strained your asthmatic lungs through two-mile warm-up runs. You find yourself leaning awkwardly over the punch table, arms desperately trying to prop up your wet floppy body. You briefly long to return to the ocean, for freedom to shrug off the weight of gravity and wriggle your body toward unknown depths.
Mickie’s face contorts into one of shock when she sees you. Her lips form themselves into a perfect O, dark red lipstick outlining the letter. You picture her lips on your arm, pressing identical circles over and over into your skin, creating a pattern akin to an octopus’ tentacle, its suction tugging at your skin. The same way Mickie used to cling to you, kiss the back of your palm, and suck like she was trying to inhale as much of your body as she could, then spit you out onto the shore. She never wanted to get her feet wet, would never agree to follow you into the water. Instead, she sat on the dry beach, fanning herself, sipping carefully from her bottle, careful not to spill even a drop.
“We haven’t seen you in years! It’s almost like you disappeared off the face of the earth.” You remind her that you did. The earth’s face was humid, hard, solid, and so you’d traded it in years ago for its body — cool, soft, weightless.
Mickie is here with her husband, you learn, and a familiar ache scratches at your chest. Dehydration, you think to yourself, and empty a cup of water over your head. She excitedly shows you pictures of her children, ages three and five, with sun-kissed skin and crooked teeth. Fine kids who’ll grow up with dry heads and feet planted firmly on the floor.
A hand reaches around her, and instinctively you see the hand dragging her down, the way you desperately desired to drag her into the waters with you. The hand, however, rests comfortably on her shoulder. Your eyes look over to see that her husband is Ron. That Ron. It sends a chill up your spine and down your fin. His very presence is a phantom pain on limbs that no longer exist. His eyes are flashes of unwanted caresses, threats to make you spread your legs, made with all the ease and confidence of a teenager who treated rejection as another challenge. He looks at you with a smile that does not reach his eyes, his gaze darting from your face to your fin. Almost like he’s sizing you up, deciding how he can still tear into you in this new form.
You think about how you refused then. You shut your legs so tight for so long. Willed them into never opening again. Till skin and muscle knit together. You wrapped yourself in scales, tight and sharp enough to draw blood. A fin so securely bound and impossibly strong. And, when nobody would join you, you disappeared into the ocean alone.
Amanda JY Lee lives in Singapore. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cosmic Daffodil Journal, Asterales and Yin Literary (amandajylee.carrd.co for more).
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