I have slaughtered an irredeemable number of jellyfishes. I didn’t believe Heather Dunn the first time she told me we could touch them, that they glowed green when you slipped your fingers through their tentacles. We weren’t supposed to be at the waterfront, but I’d always been one of those campers who functioned more like a counselor. They made me the youngest program director in Quinipet’s history three years later. I attribute that promotion to a faith in human authority I was supposed to have in God.
Humans didn’t get much higher up on the pedestal than Christian Camp Counselors, at least not from my fifteen-year-old, one-piece swimsuit at midnight, perspective.
The second time Heather Dunn told me the moon jellies didn’t sting, I was already covered in Henry’s guts. He wasn’t named Henry before she threw him, but as I scooped several of his bright green limbs from my goosebumped left thigh, I swear he called in his teeny tiny North Atlantic death rattle, “Call me . . . Hen . . . ry.”
Never doubt your gods or you’ll wind up covered in Henries. Heather called from her perch on the floating dock to jump into the water, to wash the little guy off. I stood up on the sailing dock and launched feet first into the Blue section.
When swims like these were sanctioned, in the wee hours of the morning, with the wee-est of overnight campers, they were called “Polar Bear Swims.”
I hated Polar Bear Swims. They were too early, too bright, too cold. But this nighttime sneaking off to the beach with the counselor-gods and the moonlight and the anticipation of gelatinous carnage? As soon as I hefted my one-piece suit off that dock and toward the sky and then the ocean, I knew this was home. This kingdom of air right between moon and spider crab, covered in dying things, this is where I would reign.
I kicked off the bottom and popped back to the surface. As my ears bobbed above and below the water, I heard first Heather’s palm-suppressed giggling and then that clicking the sea makes if you know it well enough. Shaking salt out of my eyebrows, I spread my arms like an octopus, spinning on the surface and counting the green lights left in my limb-wake. As fast as I could kill them, they were fading away. Heather was still laughing.
I swam over to the floating dock, hoisted myself up the ladder, and kneeled at the edge next to Heather, who had finally quieted down and closed her eyes. I wish I could tell you I prayed for all these massacred Henries right then, that I gave myself fifty Hail Marys, swam back to the beach, and was asleep in my cabin before the clock struck one. Instead, I knelt and cupped both hands under the ocean, waiting for something to glow. It took longer than I expected. My knees had just started to ache by the time I felt a little gel pocket slide against my thumb.
I chased it with my fingers, slowly, just barely catching it and pulling it up into the air. I could feel it die as the water fell back and the body stayed in the bowl of my hands. I almost ate it. I almost buried it back in the sea. It was so big I could feel all of its arms slick against both wrists. How many algae blips had it eaten to take up this much space? How many flooshes had it fluttered before I caught it, turned it on, lit it up? Its entire life glowed before it, all to end here, bright as it had ever been, bright as I had ever been, quiet and magic. I spun around fast and pulled the top of Heather’s suit, trapping Henry II against her back and slapping his corpse right between her shoulder blades, in a place no god can reach.
Sam Ferrante is a queer poet, teacher, and editor who received her MFA from Butler University in 2020. Her manuscript, No More Odes to My Mouth, won the 2020 First-Book Scholarship from Gasher Journal. Her work has appeared in Hobart After Dark, Turnpike, Foundlings, Ghost City Review, Blowing Raspberries, and elsewhere. She is currently the Manuscript Matchmaker with Tinderbox Poetry Journal and cannot wait to read your work.
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