Becoming

CODY KLIPPENSTEIN

The monstrous fish that lay beached outside of Pilier was the colour of milk glass, with a wilting, membranous fin that ribboned down its spine. It was at least as long as three men laid toe to head. The tide, Céline noticed, was on its way in, and every so often a wave caressed the tail end of the carcass. A trail of fine scales remained on the sand when the water receded again.

Céline sidled as close as she dared. She’d ducked off the end of her own father’s funeral procession just so she could see it; the last thing she wanted was evidence all over the hem of her mourning dress.

When the fish was discovered by Madame Moreau’s brood of six earlier that week, shining at the edge of the shore like an offering, it had seemed a kind of miracle. There was a touch of divine about the shifting colours of the scales, how they seemed to emit their own warmth and glow at night, despite the carcass being long devoid of life.

But a rash of dying flared up in the village the next day. These were stupid, mundane deaths—eating of spoilt meat, rusty hook piercing skin—of which the children suffered first and quickly. Then misfortune fell upon the parents: Madame struck by a skillet that fell from its shelf and wedged itself beneath the base of her skull; Monsieur already at sea but now never to return. Next, the gawkers who had looked upon the creature’s remnants—death by fall from tin roof, by foot caught in trawler net, by ox-crushed genitals. Pilier’s midwife, the only doctor one could call upon for kilometres of coast, warned all those land-bound to stay away from the fish until a decision was reached about what to do with it.

Céline had understood, and Céline had complied. But now, with her father dead, her mother nothing but a fable, and the whole of Pilier giving the latest drowned man a proper send-off, who was going to forbid her anything? Like a biologist afield, she was free to see for herself.

She held her shoes in one hand, toes buried in the sand, back bent like a fishing pole over the specimen. The head was indeed missing—an ill omen. A smell rose from the place where its gills dissolved into the black jelly of its insides that was so gut-churning even the gulls hadn’t bothered testing their stomachs on it.

Talk of the town was right: This was not a fish at all. She wasn’t sure what name to give it, though a name did come to mind.

It wasn’t the conclusion she’d hoped to reach. Were her fair-weathered friend from the mainland here, he’d see the spook on her face and shake his golden head. Superstitious hooey, he’d tell her. Your brain’s full of it. You’re just about made of nonsense, aren’t you? And then he’d make her agree.

She tried to focus on what was in front of her, but the stench bordered on supernatural. What a stench! The worst of them paled in comparison. Clam ferment. Squid meat off ice. Split whale intestines full of fish offal. Céline brought her hand to her chest and drew it reverently down to her navel. Then, she brought one shoe to her face and buried her nose in it. Nothing helped. When the putridity started taunting her gag reflex, she backed away from the carcass one step at a time. She did not turn her back until it was little more than a phosphorescent puddle muted by the coming dark.

The following afternoon, when the sun was high in the sky, Linus’s sailboat dropped anchor in Pilier’s cove as if Prophecy itself had summoned him. All night, the Atlantic had beaten itself dead against the coastline, so he and his dinghy made easy sojourn to solid ground.

On the beach, he inspected the sprawling length of the fish with one hand clamped over his nose and mouth. Rumour had made its mainland rounds and his cohort at the Université all bet on false alarm, but here it was: an unidentified species bigger than kelp or crustaceans or polyps, his for the claiming. What luck.

He’d have to be quick. There was no telling who among his peers would be next to shirk their lackey duties—cleaning labs and sorting stacks, grading firstyear reports, approving travel funding by forging their mentors’ signatures—and set out to investigate. He put on his lab frock but quickly shrugged it off again; it was billowy and unbecoming. Onto the sand it went, beneath droppers and jars, a thermometer, a length of sailor’s rope, a waxed gunnysack. If this shore were any other, he’d have to be more careful, but here, his things would keep where they were. All but one of the villagers were afraid of him.

He found Céline where he’d left her last spring: greasing tabletops inside the shanty town’s shanty watering hole. Linus had made the mistake of tasting its fare on his excursion last spring—his first—and he wouldn’t make the same mistake again. The place served only blackened, bony fish, mealy winter potatoes, and its

own questionable brew. With the trawlers out for at least a month now and all able-bodied men with them, the porthole windows kept their coats of grime. The weathered, wooden chairs, most with backrests like badly-healed broken fingers, had been left as they were last used, pushed back and askew.

Linus swung the door open and closed, open and closed, knocking its strung-up bell against the wood. He watched the skin of Céline’s shoulders slide over bone as she turned toward the sound.

“Surprise,” he said.

She worked her mouth like a fish. “It’s you,” she tried. “Linus.” Her French had that funny quality he’d noticed was inherent to her people. It was as if she spoke with a round, smooth stone on her tongue. He smiled at her, exposing both rows of his straight, bright teeth.

“I happen to have need of an assistant again,” he said. “If you have need of my company, that is.”

Two Rhodophyta-red splotches appeared over Céline’s ears and nose. She brought her apron to her face as if she could buff them away. Sixteen this year, but hardly changed: skinny arms, skinny legs, black dress beneath an apron of canvas, neckline gaping at the breast because she couldn’t fill the darts. Black hair gone ropy from the salt-soaked air. Skin that was tinged green in cold light, like the spittle of a wave.

It was an ungenerous evaluation, he knew. To practise objective observation, as his advisor insisted he do, he’d purposely passed over the reflective quality of her eyes. Her full lips, too, always just-bitten, which had bewitched him into thinking her somewhat lovely on his first field excursion.

“So, you’re back,” she said.

“That’s right—and already eager to get to work.”

“What timing.” She touched her fingertips to her throat. “Could really use a friendly face around here.”

“Let’s take a look around together, shall we? Will you come now?”

Her eyes flicked over the bar. She’d do just about anything for him, he was sure. Last spring, she’d watched him nosing about the shore for hours from afar before he coaxed her forward. When she took interest in his tools, he’d let her wear his white frock, play the student, carrying his droppers and sample slides while he scratched at shale, plucked infant crabs from beneath their algaed rocks and held them aloft with tweezers.

Once again, Linus noticed the way she looked at him and toyed with the idea of fucking her. He had had the sleeping quarters in his little boat—a gift from his father—outfitted extravagantly. Silk and cotton, bark dye, India ink. He would be generous to her, give her a proper story to tell.

But that could wait. Céline worried the buffing rag between her fingers, folded it into a small, flaccid square. Then she set it down upon a table resolutely. Linus held the door. The chime and clank of the bell was plaintive at her back. She hesitated— but only a moment. Only until he cocked his head and touched her.

Remember, like the tide, to whom you return: an old saying, after which the utterer closed their eyes, dotted the centre of their clavicle with the tip of the finger and dragged it like a drowning man down the depths of the sternum.

Remember, like the tide, and so on: The last rite of a funeral and a marriage ceremony; the first of a baby born.

Céline’s father—gods bless him and whatever shore he landed—had been a gruff and sulky drunkard. The same pebble-washed bottle had carried his spirits for as long as she could remember; it remained lashed to his hip by sailor’s rope throughout the off-season, when the trawlers stayed docked for months at a time, whether he was spooning cold gruel against his whiskers at first light or naked and unconscious on his cot, a smell like cod oil rising from his thick body hair, linens stained clot brown where his body pressed against them.

He had little to do with his daughter during all the years of their shared life. Though they’d eaten and slept and bathed inside the same tin-roofed, open-room house since Céline’s infancy, he hardly looked her in the eye. She was told she had a mother on the mainland whom she was supposed to look like. When he had to address Céline, he did it with his gaze directed over top of her dark head, as if any wall were its own horizon.

But his rage was precisely aimed when he’d returned home from the open ocean last spring to village whispers about Céline and a blond stranger in a white coat, poking and prodding the shore with glass and metal, their heads together, his hand, on occasion, reaching around her waist to evaluate the bumps of her spine.

She levelled her gaze at him and objected. Nothing of the sort had happened, she said. It was a dumb story, a story fabricated by nosy neighbours and day-drinkers like you with nothing better to do. Nosy women, their husbands at sea; nosy old men, longing for a bit of titillation and willing to take it any way they could get it.

Her father yanked the pebble-washed, loose bottle from its knot and let it fly. It sailed over her head and hit the wall, landing on the dirt floor with a dull thud. This was the first and only disagreement they’d had—the lengthiest back-and-forth since she was a toddler—and already it had disappointed her. Nothing breakable had shattered. She’d hoped for that much, at least.

Her father jabbed a finger at the knob-less door and the shore a ways beyond it. Men from that place, he said—the cold, imposing tour d’ivoire across the water— were no better than jellyfish: where one showed up, many more would likely follow, and any of them could eat unsuspecting young Céline alive, absorb and convert her with such learned and excruciating efficiency that she wouldn’t even know what was happening to her.

“Convert me to what?” Céline wanted to know. She laughed because she knew it would infuriate him.

Her father approached the bottle in the corner of the room. It lay on its side, empty. He clenched and unclenched his flaky fists but did not bend to pick it up.

When he was younger, he hadn’t once bothered to imagine a daughter—nor did he believe much in monsters before he met the capricious mother who bore said daughter. A boy he could have taught everything he knew. He would speak and a boy would listen. What was he supposed to do with a girl-child? What was he to do with her when she became a woman?

His daughter clenched her own hands into fists. He looked at them. Her knuckles were small and ridged, like a series of froth-capped ripples at low tide.

“Convert me to what?” she demanded again.

Now, she stood ankle-deep in the sand, face pinched, arms outstretched, as Linus coiled the long bulk of the dead fish around her elbows, neck, and chest: a human spool for monstrous thread. She’d been told not to even look upon the thing, yet here she was entwined with it. If others had been punished by death for much less, what exactly would happen to her?

The fish was shedding scales, oozing all over her dress. Its fin plastered itself against exposed skin and made it shine like a blister. Beneath its rotten heft, her body had gone unreasonable, muscles tensed, ready to bolt. She shut her eyes and willed the bile back down her throat.

Linus’s golden curls were sweaty and stupefied against the crown of his head.

He blew a forceful stream of air from his mouth that puffed out his cheeks. Upon their return to the shoreline, they’d found the sea had somehow done away with his beached dinghy. The two had watched it float out past the cove.

“Don’t say it,” he’d sneered. Omen. His pale, symmetrical features stretched themselves thin, and the lines cast across his forehead by a wicked sunburn stressed their presence. The contortions made him appear older and more familiar, like a smaller, sun-bleached variation of any weathered face she might serve at the bar in Pilier. Céline looked away.

With the dinghy gone, they had no choice but to gather the great length of the fish like a lead-line, bag it, and swim it to his sailboat—but when Linus drew the gunnysack around her arms and tried to pull the fleshy coils from her body, they stayed firmly suctioned to her frame. His hands came away lacquered with scales. Céline lifted her chin and tried to take a gulp of untainted air.

“Linus?”

He frowned, palpating an archipelago of slimy bubbles that formed where the skin of the fish met the skin of her neck. “We need to be gentle,” he said, “so gentle. Otherwise, we’ll damage the specimen.”

She began to speak, but Linus cut her off. “You’re fine. Don’t be such a child, Céline, else what are you good for? We’ll fix it with tools; everything we need is on deck.”

He gathered the bulk of the sack in one hand and used the other to run his pocketknife across its bottom. “For you,” he explained. “To protect my prize from damage when you swim it over.” He held the sack open while Céline stepped uncertainly inside, fitting her legs into the new opening.

“And since you’ve already ruined your clothes—”

He proffered the knife as if expecting her to examine it. Then, quick as a gutter, he took it to the seams of her dress. Céline went rigid as he peeled the linen from her jutting shoulders, back, sternum, the sound of tearing cloth violating the swish and gull-calls of the beach. Her vision blurred. Her face burned. Tears threatened to spill over the rims of her eyes.

“I can’t wait to see what you look like under all that fish,” he said. He ran a teasing finger along an exposed notch of bare spine; Céline cried out, dug her fingers into the carcass, and pulled it closer. Linus withdrew his hand and rolled his eyes.

“What a fuss!” He sighed. “Don’t you work in a bar full of old seamen? Isn’t one of those men your father? Don’t tell me you can’t handle a little handling. I know you people. I know who you are.” He tossed the blade on the sand and tied the sack tight under her arms with sailor’s rope.

“My father is dead,” she said, and went very still. Saying the words aloud made her realize they were true. But Linus didn’t hear her—or if he did, he preferred not to. He gestured to the limp waves of the cove. When she didn’t move, he added: “After you. No, really.”

She took a step forward. Then another, carcass shifting against her shoulders. The Atlantic was frigid and black, but as the sediment of the shallows left her feet and Céline began to swim, the cold cleansed her of the fish’s slimy touch. Goosebumps spiked her naked flesh instead. The sensation made her gasp. Gods, she thought, I want to be made of armour. Gentle waves licked her chin and teeth.

“Not much farther,” Linus called over his shoulder, breaststroke cutting through water. The white swell of his boat loomed ahead. As he hoisted himself up and over the edge, Céline tread in place. She pointed her chin at the mouth of the cove. Far beyond it, the tower of the Université nestled like a pearl into the thinnest folds of the mainland.

The rope cut into her armpits. She wriggled out of it and let the gunnysack fall away, watched it spread and waver in the water like a bloated body.

“I was going to keep that.” Linus’s voice above her. “We fight tooth and nail over a trickle of funding and—oh, why bother telling you all this? Come on.”

He knelt on the deck, extended a hand. Scattered drops from his hair. Surface disturbances. What slept below them kept on sleeping. Free of constraints, now, Céline closed her eyes and exhaled wetly. She poked at her sternum with a salt-soft nail, drew the line from the divot of her collarbone into the depths until she could no longer see it.

She looked down at the water: its white glance frothed and died and shifted to green. She looked down at her arms, her colour-changing torso, the rippling carcass that matched her movements as if it were a second skin—no, her skin: her spine bowed, her nerves flashed; when she felt the tail end become her tail end, it sprung to life, revitalized, and whipped the water into frothy waves that rocked the boat. “Céline,” Linus said. “Jesus.” He flapped his hand at her impatiently.

Turning, she kept on swimming. It was easy. She moved with the sureness of a current.

“Céline!”

She heard Linus jump back in before she dove underwater. He was a strong swimmer—there were lessons, he’d told her, when he was younger, sport ribbons, and clock timers—but she was stronger. When she surfaced again, a few strokes away, he was already there, splashing and grappling, clawing at her shoulders and hair.

“Whatever dumb thing you think you’re doing,” he sputtered, “stop now.” Céline said nothing. She grabbed at his wrists and held his stiffened fingers aloft. Water slapped at his face while it patted hers. The slackness of her expression, its lack of consternation, enraged him. He kicked and kicked.

“You won’t take this away from me,” he said. “I’ll kill you before you take this away from me. I’ll drown you right here, you pathetic little bitch.” He laughed even as he struggled against her. “No one would come looking if you never came back to shore. Your shitty ghost town would shrug and forget you.”

Céline’s eyes widened. Her pupils silvered and shone like mercury. She smiled, revealing both rows of sharp, bright teeth, and pressed closer.

Linus gasped; he tried to shrink back while fighting against the pressure of her hands pinioning his. How could he have failed to anticipate this barmaid had some rotten animal heart hidden away inside her? Just look at her! She was thrilled by the violence, buoyed by it. Though on land he was much taller, she loomed over him in the water. This close, she smelled like death, too—it rose from her skin, from the sea around them. Linus coughed, muscles spastic, throat ringed red and white with the effort of fending off such a wicked offence to the senses.

She reached out and gripped his face with her sticky, milk-white claws. Céline’s irises had disappeared; those pupils were sheet glass, and when he met her intent gaze with his own he could see right into the wet black cavern of her insides. She blinked and drew ever closer still. Closer. Closer! He opened his mouth to scream, but his will had become hers, and he surrendered his arms to her instead.

Yes, he thought, I know that look; a kiss, that’s what she’s after. Isn’t it? He tried to take a breath before water swallowed his mouth. Even through the blear of the salt that assaulted his eyes, he could see her body shining.