You notice it in the shower, which is where we most often notice strange things about our bodies.
It doesn’t trouble you at first. You find it with your finger when soaping up your back—trying to, anyway, wondering as usual why evolution hasn’t elongated human arms over time to finally enable us to wash our backs by ourselves—and you dismiss it as a scab or one of your many little moles. Anastasios appreciates your moles and freckles. He likes to trace their patterns along your arms and shoulder blades, saying they’re like constellations before he kisses them tenderly and tucks you into his arms.
You forget about it by the time you step out of the shower. And, typically, you don’t think about it again—until the next morning, of course, when you find yourself again in the shower, soaping up your back.
This time you pay a little more attention, craning your neck to get a look. You feel it above your tan line. There’s a speck of flesh there that feels different from the rest, no bigger than your pinky’s fingernail. Rough around the edges, smooth at its center. Maybe you nicked your back while swimming between the island’s many inlets.
You’re lucky. No bruising, no blood. Nothing to see here, really.
You go about your day as usual, filling your satchel with books and locking the door (habit, not necessity) of the tiny rental house, stepping out into the clear morning. There’s a sky so blue you could drink it and a sea so pure you could inhale it. The cobblestone path leads you through a labyrinth of whitewashed walls, the blinding concrete punctuated by earthen pots brimming with rosy-red bugambilias and aromatic basil. Occasional breaks between the buildings reveal the postcard-perfect backdrop below and beyond the island’s elevated town: golden grasses, rocky soil, rugged olive groves, a picturesque harbor brimming with colorful boats, and beyond them all the endless blue-green calm of the Ionian.
The school term will be over soon. The island has few permanent inhabitants, even fewer children. The first batch of tourists will arrive and soon the island will be swarming with them. Though you can’t begrudge them— you know the island depends on tourism to survive—a crowded island doesn’t appeal to you. You’ve grown accustomed to the quiet. Land feels less tarnished when trampled by fewer feet.
You go to the little stone-walled school, you introduce your handful of students to a simplified overview of Homer’s poetry, and you head back home, stopping along the way for a coffee with a friend, before returning to Anastasios’s arms, strong and tanned and just possessive enough, and you feel like an islander.
But feeling is not being.
At first, Anastasios is amused. You’ve cultivated an aversion to meat, shaking your head and barely restraining yourself from vomiting when you sample your former favorites—souvlaki, gyro, giouvarelakia. You’ve developed a craving for seafood and greens. You seriously believe you could live off mussels and shrimp for the rest of your life. Lucky you live on an island, lucky your man’s a fisherman, lucky he feels flattered that you all but pounced on the octopus he brought home yesterday.
You sliced and diced it, and, before you tossed it into the pot, you secretly ate a few pieces. Raw. Delicious.
The expected heatwaves of early summer have not arrived, but you’re drowning in your own heat bubble. You drink lots of water and rinse your face every time you go near an indoor sink or outdoor spring. Your period— usually regular as clockwork—is considerably late and you’ve taken three home pregnancy tests purchased from the town pharmacy, swearing the pharmacist to secrecy.
You aren’t pregnant.
You don’t sleep well at night. You’ve begun waking up in the bathtub, vaguely remembering walking through the door and turning on the faucet. The water is always cold, even though the nights can get chilly here, but somehow you don’t mind. It’s so relaxing in the water. Occasionally you skip the bed altogether. It feels good, but you sense it isn’t. Otherwise, why make excuses for your lover not to sleep over?
Perhaps a swim would do you good. You only started swimming again recently, here on the island. Before the ferry brought you here, before you met Anastasios, the sea was a roiling beast, a monster with endless gaping maws that consumed ships and human flesh gluttonously. Anastasios showed you otherwise; the sea took yet also gave, nourishing those who knew how to tame it. It took care of its own, secreting life in both deep and shallow pockets. Unlike men, it slaughtered without mind or malice. The frothing seams of wave crests showed a patterned patchwork of life and death, and the sea did not dictate when those seams ripped open and devoured.
This may explain why you’ve been avoiding the beaches. What if a seam rips and you fall through? What if you cannot emerge? What if you don’t want to?
More recently, when you wake up and get dressed and go brush your hair, the face that looks back at you from the mirror is foreign. Your gleaming eyes are black like the bottom of the sea, your face seems longer and more angular, your teeth are sharper. The hand that holds the brush has claws instead of nails. You brush and brush until the color and whiteness returns to your eyes, your face grows rounder, and the claws recede into your fingers.
The first time you saw your reflection like this, you dropped the hairbrush and nearly fled outdoors before you reconsidered it. You haven’t told anyone. You’ve gotten used to it now—there’s something mesmerizing about this other face of yours—but you sense that other people wouldn’t share your tolerance. This eliminates all sleepovers.
Anastasios is worried now. He wonders if there’s someone else. That’s awkward, because everyone knows everyone on such a little island. He thinks you’re hiding something from him.
Aren’t you?
On the last day of school as the kids flee outdoors, shrieking delightedly, relief floods you with the force of a hurling river. Usually you hate the last day. Usually you miss your kids. You’ve always savored it when they run up to you and fling their arms around your neck and kiss your cheek, when they surprise you with a flower or some homemade cake their mother gave them to give you. You don’t even mind when they giggle when chalk rubs off on the butt of your skirt or when you trip on a pencil while walking down the aisle. They seem to love you more because you’re so human, so relatable, so quick to laugh at yourself. And you love them too.
Today, though, they remind you of the kids that Anastasios wants to someday have with you—kids you don’t want, aren’t ready for, can’t fathom having, though you always feel bad admitting this (if only to yourself). Now, watching them go, their kisses still burning your cheeks and their discarded books sprawled on desks and floors, you feel that you can finally breathe.
You feel freed.
Anastasios is expecting you. He took the day off, knowing it was your last day of school and your first day of summer. He’ll want to spend time with you, strolling around the streets, stealing kisses beneath willow trees, unlacing your bikini top at one of the secluded beaches. You want that, too, and badly, for this is a man who has wooed you seven months, fusing chivalry with seduction in a way that makes your body moist and your knees weaken.
But no one must see you topless now, least of all a killer of fish.
You won’t go home. You can’t walk that far. Impulsively you loosen your hair from its hairband, hating the restriction, wondering if that’s why your head aches. Your knees feel weak, and Anastasios isn’t to blame this time. You leave your things at your desk and walk outside, wandering downhill instead of uphill, not sure where you’re going until you wind up at the dock. At this windless hour, with the early afternoon sun shafting through the translucent water, it seems as if the moored boats are floating in turquoise-colored glass, detached from their underwater shadows. Few people are around; they’ll emerge when the sun lowers and the day cools.
You sit at the edge of the dock, your legs trembling visibly now, and manage to slip off your sandals. You plunge your feet into the water, realizing you’ve been craving this for the past six hours. For the past two weeks. A sigh escapes you.
It feels so nice.
You should be afraid. You were terrified, not so long ago. You think about all the things you’ve been Googling on the one school computer ever since these tremors started: overactive thyroid glands and brain disorders and premature Parkinson’s disease. You mentally check off symptoms: poor coordination, loss of appetite, sensitivity to heat, tremors, a skin disorder that has expanded along your lower back and encircled your belly. If your mother knew, she’d say you’re not eating enough (the go-to leading cause of everything), she’d call the family doctor (because you can never be too cautious), and she’d call her sister Eugenia to perform the banishing-evil-eye ritual (desperate times call for desperate measures, and Greek aunts will attempt to exorcise the devil over the phone if need be).
But your mother is not here. She drowned with your father when a cruise ship capsized ten years ago in a freak storm. You learned to cope with that. You finally faced your fear by accepting the teaching position on this island, far from the Greek mainland, surrounded by water. You fell for a man of the sea who taught you to smile again and to swim and to accept the kindness of hospitable, gossipy, superstitious islanders.
Like Aunt Eugenia, they would not understand. No doctor or priest can heal this. No one can exorcise what you are. And you know it’s what you are, because you are no longer afraid even though perhaps you should be.
You close your eyes and listen to the chirping of sparrows and the squalling of seagulls. The laughter drifting from the kafenio along the road that encircles the beach beyond the harbor, the tinkling of glasses and the rattle of die on backgammon boards. The soft, sweet, seductive splashes of the water, nearly but never fully motionless, sloshing against the wooden dock and against the sides of the floating boats, slipping around your ankles like manacles and fusing flesh with flesh, whispering, whispering, whispering your name.
You slip forward, feet first, into the water.
You peel off your clothes as you submerge into the shallows and open your eyes. The marks that begin from beneath your breasts materialize now not as scabs, but scales. There is agonizing pain, suddenly, a fierce sense of being stretched as if two creatures are pulling you apart. You writhe underwater, closing your eyes, and scream until the water consumes you, entering and filling you in places you had not known of.
The pain ends, only a memory, and you open your eyes to marvel that you’re not drowning. You take in the sight of your length, the sinewy lower half of you that stretches for over two meters and tapers in a forked fish tail, blue-green and glistening and camouflaging perfectly with your surroundings. A powerful kick propels you through the silky waters, far from shore. You slink delightedly into deeper, bluer waters, your scales reflecting their hue. The new mechanics of your body filter the water you breathe in. Your long hair billows behind you like a swarm of black eels. You chase a school of sardines, herding them for the fun of it and testing your speed and agility before seizing
a few in your razor-sharp teeth.
You’ve never had sardines like this before.
There are many things, surely, you’ve never done before, when you were stifled in a gilded cage, lonely and tethered to land. Devil and deliverer, the sea is a liberator as much as it is a monster, opening portals to a new world. A different world unfolds Below, bubbling with more life and color and mystery than you’ve ever seen Above. You sense that you could—and will—explore it all your life and still wouldn’t—won’t—see it all.
There is no future with killers of fish, but Anastasios will seek you. You will remember his kind eyes, his strong arms, his crooked smile. He loved as best as he could, though he never filled the emptiness inside you. Someday, maybe, when the joy of reuniting with a lover overrules the terror of beholding a monster, you’ll meet again.
Only once do you pause, breaking the surface until the water laps your breasts, and look back. The distant island juts above the sheets of water like a paperweight, steady and safe, containing familiar faces and spaces. It’ll be here when you return.
If that’s what you desire.
Angela Panayotopulos is a Greek-American storyteller, coffeeholic, and graduate of George Mason University’s Creative Writing MFA program. Her publications include The Art of War: A Novel (among The National Herald’s Top Books to Gift, 2017) and The Wake Up (recipient of a Readers’ Favorite Book Award for Supernatural Fiction, 2020). Her short stories have also been featured in Inscribed Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Reedsy, and Literally Stories.
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