Desire Screams
By Turi Sioson
Someone has to have salted skin. It’s always the first lesson.
But my mother did not bear me into waves. I came out human, sinking into the spray of the neighbor's spring-fed pool. It opened into Texas sediment; the perfect water for stalking salamanders.
I knew of transformation from my first clear breath that afternoon. I didn’t know, at the time, what you would turn me into.
~
You moved down from the coast on my 21st birthday, taking a flight by yourself for the first time. You made a comment to the clerk at 7-Eleven that Texas skies looked like the sea, and he took your money from you with a contempt you would keep with you for the rest of the week until you sought out the water as a condiment to the heat.
You didn’t do your research. You had to dig around the bottom of your purse for an extra $1 bill, had to buy overpriced water because you underestimated the potency of our sun. But you did bring goggles, which I would later tell you was endearing, my tail dragging loose scales along your legs crossed at the ankle.
You jumped in feet-first, like a vintage metal-man diver; you were shocked by the cold.
I was chasing young salamanders in the coldest corner — I couldn’t stand the chill for long, not even for an afternoon. When I brought myself back up, tail and fingertips stiff, my flipper spasmed and knocked you sideways.
You didn’t see what hit you, just kicked yourself back up for breath and gasped, “Jesus!” like a meteor had struck your chest.
“Ah, sorry,” I said, thrashing my tail back underneath my body. “They don’t tell you to watch your surroundings for nothing.” I was laughing a little hiccupy, the water from my gills tickling the underside of my chin.
“Well, wouldn’t the same go for you?” You still didn’t see it — couldn’t see it — through your pink-filtered goggles.
Flushed, as if unaffected by the water. Lips parted on chattering breaths. You had a piece of algae stuck to your cheek.
I suppose I could’ve lifted my throat above the water then, cleared my lungs of the spring, let you think I had torpedoed into you with my little human body — a prank I never grew out of.
But I sank myself down to my nose instead, quirked my mouth and scoffed, blowing bubbles out toward you. Looked you up and down. Dove again.
And you followed me.
~
I beat you to the ladder, so that by the time you surfaced, pulling the goggles off your face, it looked as if it were the algae you swallowed that gave you the impression I had anything but long legs. I watched a little dizzily as you pulled yourself out of the water, sandy curls flattened against your skull, chin raining with every jerky movement.
You were staring at me, panting, holding yourself sideways like offended royalty, as the occasional choking cough forced its way through. I remember my lips parting. I could feel the air against my teeth.
“Would you like to grab lunch with me?”
~
You had joked, on our third date, asking if I was a siren, if I had sung the local men who looked at me funny to their deaths.
“Sirens aren’t real,” I told you earnestly, licking my fingers clean of your half-eaten donut's powdered sugar. “Well, maybe the Greek ones are real — the ones with the wings — but mermaids have never been sirens. It’s just a myth.”
But when we got to your apartment, my breath was more than enough to draw in your kiss.
~
When I told you the way it feels in my mouth, ajar on sound I was apparently ignorant to, you got this vagrant look and your hands went limp. My little hypnotist, you mumbled over and over against my damp skin, whenever you would snap out of it.
My tail would stab scales into your ankles and forearms and chin. Once, I caught my gill on your hair as it closed, and was still coughing up blonde in the evening.
I’d come over to your moldy apartment smelling of direct sunlight and algae muck and summoning. Someone told me that all girls born by the ocean have secrets. I was too afraid to ask you yours, neck exposed to your heavy breath and one of my hands cupping your breast; I could feel you heed my pillow talk.
~
The change had always been coming. My mother described it to me as a dream. Either you would be yanked out of it with willful whiplash, or it would be one you never meet the end of, forever feeding on its stilted sugar.
When it started, I was in your bathroom, reluctantly washing my hands of your saliva. The drain had been clogged on and off for six weeks (you kept promising to get it fixed) and this time the water just wouldn't flow free.
You found me with my face submerged in the flood, tail knocking half-empty shampoo bottles off the edge of your tub.
~
I lurked in the deep of public swimming holes until they pulled me out by net at closing time; my gills persisted even after an hour of breathing air, having me sputtering but tailless on your roommate’s couch.
I left your text messages unread while I swam up and down the lazy river, eyes glazed with an unnamed haunt.
I lost my English after a while; in bed — when you could keep me there, pinned between your pale thighs and pink duvet — I would over and over whisper your name in a mishmash of syllables unintelligible to you.
~
When the gills would not retract, my mother dragged me, physically, to our swimming spot.
She let you cry in the backseat of her car, holding my head between your trembling hands. Dainty, stained at the tips, like you'd be eating cherries. You sang me my favorite songs on the drive over, and by the time I was pushed into the water, I felt like I had never once been sober.
~
Deep gulps
around vintage want.
(Screaming your name, scaring the locals.)
Your eyes, gone hazy under
kitchen light.
(Singing our shower song at night.)
Fingers tickling the surface of
double-filtered tap water. Begging
on my mother’s voicemail,
please where is your daughter.
A lifeguard pulling you
from 16 feet down while you
drown in watery breaths.
(I try to will my speech back,
to save you, let you rest.)
You prune yourself in
bath water gone cold,
willing a tail to appear
and gills to grow;
once, you write me a message in a bottle
and the lifeguard feels sorry for you
so she lets it clank against the rock wall
until the next day.
(She sees me at the surface
but she's too afraid to show me.)
~
You begin visiting me every Sunday. My mother has to drive you. You’ve become convinced you'll grow a tail the second you put your foot to the pedal.
At the surface, stupid side-long smiles and my wordless play commands for kisses. Stripping off your tee and diving lower and lower for me, until we’re both too heavy-lidded to tell how far we’ve come.
Cicadas’ chorus. Pressing heat. I try to will the spell away as you kiss my neck, but all I have are echoes and breaths and the salt from the corner of your eyes.
~
You tell me stories of the ocean, how sand feels around sunburnt feet. What the salt tastes like on a raw, bitten tongue. I say your name.
You keep wringing out the ends of my dripping hair with the tip of your cold finger. Sometimes, when you were a kid, you told your dad that you’d marry a magician who carved seashells. I say your name.
The sea’s voice is scattered, you tell me, and only the right person in the right century will be able to break all of the seashells in the world to give her back her voice. I say your name.
I don’t remember your eyes being green, an algae shade that makes it look as if my home has consumed you. I am trying to will myself not to stay, to force myself violently from our disconnection. Your mouth has parted and I am aware, distantly, that I’ve begun to sing.
Your name: flipped over and under my tongue, my throat, wrapped around my vocal chords. A refrain of rolling desire.
The visitors on the lawn are covering their ears but I am looking here, leaning toward you as you creep closer to the edge of the spring.
“Mira,” I sing.
And you already understand me. ♦