LJ Idol Week 25: Vision
My retinas were detaching. A side-effect of my medication, I think, or maybe it started before that, it’s hard to know. The virus and the treatment for the virus blended together. But anyway, my retinas: They were peeling away from my eyes. I wasn’t blind, but there were countless black spots and lines in my vision, drifting. If I tilted my head back and looked up, I could imagine I was sitting on a lake bottom, watching a school of fish circle overhead in the gloom.
Oisin hated when I said things like that.
He was the one who brought us here. To the lakeside where we first met, eight years before. It was meant to be a nice place to die.
While I waited for that, I spent most days on the balcony, staring out at the water, or what I could see of it. Oisin didn’t like that either, he worried about what was on my mind, but he would come out to join me anyway. We would sit side-by-side, his hand resting on the back of mine, and when he got up he left a kiss on my temple, rustling my hair.
When I was alone, my eyes wandered down the shore, to where I knew the pink stone flecked with quartz was nestled.
Sometimes, past the swirling fish, I could see dark shapes in the water. And what remained of what I was called out in yearning.
I probably would have done nothing, had it not been that when this happened, and I could sense that part of me again, that it felt entirely free of disease.
#
I waited until long after Oisin’s breathing had slowed before I began to move.
I didn’t bother getting dressed. I just took a light cardigan from a drawer -one of Oisin’s, light blue-and wrapped myself in it. My hands shook too much to fuss about the buttons. Then I stood by the bed, staring down at the man sleeping in it.
I couldn’t risk waking him. I considered leaving a note, but writing was no easier than doing up my buttons. So instead I took a few moments to drink him in, committing his form to memory, wishing that I’d left before my eyes started to go. The fish swirled before me, dark, relentless; I felt robbed.
I turned away. It couldn’t be helped.
I left the house, and picked my way down the path. When I reached the shore, I began to move west, wading in the shallows. It wasn’t long before I noticed dark shapes in the water beside me. I ignored them.
The rock was where I remembered it, tucked away close to the tree line, hidden behind a hollowed-out log, quartz glittering. I walked back onto the shore to go to it.
I heard a splash behind me, but I didn’t turn.
I worried that I may not have been strong to move the rock, but it rolled aside easily enough, and my goal was still there underneath it, perfectly intact. The small, smooth pelt of an otter, as lustrous as if it were just off the animal’s back.
My own skin was a mask of nettles.
I folded the pelt over my arm, as one does a shirt, and then stood and turned to face what was waiting for me.
Another woman stood waist-deep in the water, dripping hair running rivulets down her body, the moonlight making silver discs of her eyes. Her bearing was solemn.
I gathered myself up self-consciously (with my unwashed hair, nightgown, and cardigan, I could only imagine what I looked like to her), and said, “I want to speak with Old Mother. Will you take me to her, please?”
The woman nodded, and beckoned me closer.
When my feet touched the water she held out her arms to embrace me, and the thought occurred that I might recognize her, if I could just see a little better. I stepped into them willingly, and they wrapped around me, and she pressed her lips to mine.
I didn’t kiss back. The image of Oisin, still asleep in our bed, passed over my open eyes.
The water rose up around us. She held me tighter as it closed over our heads, lips unmoving but firm, and we were pulled into the lake like the tide.
We sank down, down, down, until finally she released me. My first instinct was to breathe.
Water flooded my lungs.
But I didn’t drown. Instead the old part of me, the part untouched by illness, burst and spread throughout my body. The aches and pain, soothed. My crawling itching skin, stilled. The dark fish scattered from my vision. I almost cried with relief. I had been parched, and the waters of life rushed back into me. Not a transformation, not yet, but a salve. A good salve.
I looked at the woman, with her shark-belly-white skin, the only thing truly visible in the gloom-
(I did recognize her; I caught her name behind my teeth before it flew out. We are not permitted to use each other’s names, though we may know them. We’d been friends, once).
--and felt embarrassed by my reaction to the kiss. She was just helping me, of course. I knew that, but I’d forgotten.
She looked back at me, pushing a floating strand of hair behind my ear.
“Humanity hasn’t agreed with you,” the selkie said.
“I caught something,” My first language came easily. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Unlucky.”
“I need to see Old Mother.”
“I should say so.”
Tenderly, she put one arm around my shoulder, and led me down into the lake, the way nurses had led me down hospital corridors. It was embarrassing, but I allowed it. I’d been an invalid for so long.
By the time my toes hit muck, my eyes were only just beginning to adjust. I could see that the water wasn’t black but dark green, and I could see towers of tangled seaweed swaying above us. I could see distant beams of light.
The selkie turned to face me.
“I’m going to get her,” she said. “Wait here.”
She fell back; became shadow; became nothing.
I waited. Beyond the ropes of weed I could see shifting blotches, pausing here and there as if to consider me. I hugged the otter pelt to my cardigan, and curled my legs towards my chest.
The selkie reappeared, white bursting from the smoke, and a second figure followed at a short distance, lingering among the weeds. I saw her face first, taut, skin stretched clear over bone, framed by a wild mane of grey hair. Her eyes were wide, impossibly wide, and pale, pupil-less blue. Blind.
I bowed my head to Old Mother.
She was not my mother, or anyone’s that I know of, but she was old. So old that no one was quite sure where she came from. Some believed she began as a human girl, drowned long ago by men, and after her death became something else altogether. They said she used to swim quite near the surface until she smelled her murderers, and one by one dragged them down to the lake bottom and devoured them. If any of this was true, she never said. She would only remark that she did not concern herself with the past.
All the same, we loved her, and feared her.
She bared her teeth at me.
“You smell like rot,” she said. “Spoiled juices. Iron and piss.”
“She’s not well,” the selkie said at once, drawing closer to my side.
“Of course she’s not,” The Old Mother lowered her head and turned it, like an animal straining to listen. The blind eyes stared beyond us. “She chose to die.”
“I thought I’d have more time to get used to the idea,” I said.
The Old Mother laughed. I bristled, and pressed on:
“I’ve come to discuss my options. I can still return to the water, I kept the pelt safe, but I don’t want to if I don’t have to. I need you to tell me my future.”
The selkie looked at me, stunned. It was a rare gift I was asking for, but not unheard of. I’d seen the Old Mother divine twice before, many years before Oisin. Both times, her hand darted out to snatch a fish, and she’d broken it in half and traced where the bones splintered, picking at the meat and pushing it into her lips while she read. I thought she would do this for me.
But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I’ll show you what there is to see. But not here. In the belly of the lake. You stay here,” she spat at the selkie. And then she vanished back into the weeds.
My friend looked at me, concerned, but I waved her off. I’d come this far.
She watched, miserable, while I made my first clumsy attempts to swim on my own. Pain sounded in my limbs, a distant echo, but it wasn’t overwhelming. I struggled forward, and when I reached the weeds I turned to her.
“Thank you, for everything,” I said, and immersed myself in the green.
Old Mother had left me no path, but I knew the way. It wasn’t long before the towers fell away, and I was treading water above the lip of a monstrous chasm. Old Mother’s distant, ragged laughter sounded from below -I pushed myself toward it.
When you travel down into very deep water, the darkness rises towards you like smoke, a separate but intermingled thing, like motes of dust on sunlight. You could mistake it for seaweed. The darkness curled around my straining wrist. The water was thick with it. I forced myself down anyway. Even when I could no longer see, I kept moving down, fighting every instinct I had, fighting the pain that was no longer an echo but a distant call, coming closer. The illness was returning to me.
The water here was filled with death, I suddenly thought. It’s touching me.
At long last, I seem to have swam deep enough, and the Old Mother’s voice penetrated through the deep, though I could not see her:
“Your human life is simple. You die,” she said. “Within a few short years.”
This much I knew. “Are they good years?”
“You are loved, and cared for,” she admitted, as if this were of little consequence. “As most people are. But over the course of short life and long suffering, your body will unravel.”
The floor of the chasm exploded into red, a cloud of bubbles rushing towards the surface. I screamed and threw myself back, the sudden molten heat rolling towards me, overtaking me. And the illness came back, no distant call but a roar, a battle cry. The dark fish, the heralds of the end, my end, were a maelstrom around me, turned hellish by the light. Old Mother was nowhere. Her voice came from everywhere.
“Your mind will be the burning core of a crumbling planet, until it is all that remains, and that core which was once your being will be nothing but an exposed nerve, a lidless eye, and you will witness yourself being shredded by the void without any strength to fight it. And for all your rage and pain and fear, the final insult is that you will appear peaceful. You die common, silent, and invisible. So must it always be.”
And the light went out. The pain vanished, again.
She seemed to wait for me to recover.
“But if I return to the water…” I said at last, shaken. “I won’t die?”
There was a chuckle.
“Well, you’ll put it off. The Earth itself is dying. Some of us will just be around long enough to grieve for it.”
“I want to see it to the end,” I said.
“And you can. But nothing human in you will remain.”
“Oisin…”
“You’ll remember him, if that comforts you,” she said, without emotion. “But you won’t feel as you do now.”
“This isn’t fair!” I said, finally overcome. “I should have had more time! I shouldn’t have to be in pain! I just wanted--”
“You have a choice,” Old Mother said simply. “That’s more than many could dare to dream.”
I opened my mouth to speak -said nothing. I pulled the cardigan tighter around myself. Hands reached out from the darkness and gripped me.
“You would not have come,” a voice said. “if you had not made your choice.”
The voice was Old Mother’s, but it was also Oisin’s. Male and female; human and inhuman; alive and dead.
Its tone was one of forgiveness.
#
Oisin woke that morning to a beam of sunlight in his face, turning his lids painfully red. He groaned, rolled over, and his arm fell into unexpected emptiness.
He opened his eyes.
Oisin hated when I said things like that.
He was the one who brought us here. To the lakeside where we first met, eight years before. It was meant to be a nice place to die.
While I waited for that, I spent most days on the balcony, staring out at the water, or what I could see of it. Oisin didn’t like that either, he worried about what was on my mind, but he would come out to join me anyway. We would sit side-by-side, his hand resting on the back of mine, and when he got up he left a kiss on my temple, rustling my hair.
When I was alone, my eyes wandered down the shore, to where I knew the pink stone flecked with quartz was nestled.
Sometimes, past the swirling fish, I could see dark shapes in the water. And what remained of what I was called out in yearning.
I probably would have done nothing, had it not been that when this happened, and I could sense that part of me again, that it felt entirely free of disease.
#
I waited until long after Oisin’s breathing had slowed before I began to move.
I didn’t bother getting dressed. I just took a light cardigan from a drawer -one of Oisin’s, light blue-and wrapped myself in it. My hands shook too much to fuss about the buttons. Then I stood by the bed, staring down at the man sleeping in it.
I couldn’t risk waking him. I considered leaving a note, but writing was no easier than doing up my buttons. So instead I took a few moments to drink him in, committing his form to memory, wishing that I’d left before my eyes started to go. The fish swirled before me, dark, relentless; I felt robbed.
I turned away. It couldn’t be helped.
I left the house, and picked my way down the path. When I reached the shore, I began to move west, wading in the shallows. It wasn’t long before I noticed dark shapes in the water beside me. I ignored them.
The rock was where I remembered it, tucked away close to the tree line, hidden behind a hollowed-out log, quartz glittering. I walked back onto the shore to go to it.
I heard a splash behind me, but I didn’t turn.
I worried that I may not have been strong to move the rock, but it rolled aside easily enough, and my goal was still there underneath it, perfectly intact. The small, smooth pelt of an otter, as lustrous as if it were just off the animal’s back.
My own skin was a mask of nettles.
I folded the pelt over my arm, as one does a shirt, and then stood and turned to face what was waiting for me.
Another woman stood waist-deep in the water, dripping hair running rivulets down her body, the moonlight making silver discs of her eyes. Her bearing was solemn.
I gathered myself up self-consciously (with my unwashed hair, nightgown, and cardigan, I could only imagine what I looked like to her), and said, “I want to speak with Old Mother. Will you take me to her, please?”
The woman nodded, and beckoned me closer.
When my feet touched the water she held out her arms to embrace me, and the thought occurred that I might recognize her, if I could just see a little better. I stepped into them willingly, and they wrapped around me, and she pressed her lips to mine.
I didn’t kiss back. The image of Oisin, still asleep in our bed, passed over my open eyes.
The water rose up around us. She held me tighter as it closed over our heads, lips unmoving but firm, and we were pulled into the lake like the tide.
We sank down, down, down, until finally she released me. My first instinct was to breathe.
Water flooded my lungs.
But I didn’t drown. Instead the old part of me, the part untouched by illness, burst and spread throughout my body. The aches and pain, soothed. My crawling itching skin, stilled. The dark fish scattered from my vision. I almost cried with relief. I had been parched, and the waters of life rushed back into me. Not a transformation, not yet, but a salve. A good salve.
I looked at the woman, with her shark-belly-white skin, the only thing truly visible in the gloom-
(I did recognize her; I caught her name behind my teeth before it flew out. We are not permitted to use each other’s names, though we may know them. We’d been friends, once).
--and felt embarrassed by my reaction to the kiss. She was just helping me, of course. I knew that, but I’d forgotten.
She looked back at me, pushing a floating strand of hair behind my ear.
“Humanity hasn’t agreed with you,” the selkie said.
“I caught something,” My first language came easily. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Unlucky.”
“I need to see Old Mother.”
“I should say so.”
Tenderly, she put one arm around my shoulder, and led me down into the lake, the way nurses had led me down hospital corridors. It was embarrassing, but I allowed it. I’d been an invalid for so long.
By the time my toes hit muck, my eyes were only just beginning to adjust. I could see that the water wasn’t black but dark green, and I could see towers of tangled seaweed swaying above us. I could see distant beams of light.
The selkie turned to face me.
“I’m going to get her,” she said. “Wait here.”
She fell back; became shadow; became nothing.
I waited. Beyond the ropes of weed I could see shifting blotches, pausing here and there as if to consider me. I hugged the otter pelt to my cardigan, and curled my legs towards my chest.
The selkie reappeared, white bursting from the smoke, and a second figure followed at a short distance, lingering among the weeds. I saw her face first, taut, skin stretched clear over bone, framed by a wild mane of grey hair. Her eyes were wide, impossibly wide, and pale, pupil-less blue. Blind.
I bowed my head to Old Mother.
She was not my mother, or anyone’s that I know of, but she was old. So old that no one was quite sure where she came from. Some believed she began as a human girl, drowned long ago by men, and after her death became something else altogether. They said she used to swim quite near the surface until she smelled her murderers, and one by one dragged them down to the lake bottom and devoured them. If any of this was true, she never said. She would only remark that she did not concern herself with the past.
All the same, we loved her, and feared her.
She bared her teeth at me.
“You smell like rot,” she said. “Spoiled juices. Iron and piss.”
“She’s not well,” the selkie said at once, drawing closer to my side.
“Of course she’s not,” The Old Mother lowered her head and turned it, like an animal straining to listen. The blind eyes stared beyond us. “She chose to die.”
“I thought I’d have more time to get used to the idea,” I said.
The Old Mother laughed. I bristled, and pressed on:
“I’ve come to discuss my options. I can still return to the water, I kept the pelt safe, but I don’t want to if I don’t have to. I need you to tell me my future.”
The selkie looked at me, stunned. It was a rare gift I was asking for, but not unheard of. I’d seen the Old Mother divine twice before, many years before Oisin. Both times, her hand darted out to snatch a fish, and she’d broken it in half and traced where the bones splintered, picking at the meat and pushing it into her lips while she read. I thought she would do this for me.
But she didn’t. Instead, she said, “I’ll show you what there is to see. But not here. In the belly of the lake. You stay here,” she spat at the selkie. And then she vanished back into the weeds.
My friend looked at me, concerned, but I waved her off. I’d come this far.
She watched, miserable, while I made my first clumsy attempts to swim on my own. Pain sounded in my limbs, a distant echo, but it wasn’t overwhelming. I struggled forward, and when I reached the weeds I turned to her.
“Thank you, for everything,” I said, and immersed myself in the green.
Old Mother had left me no path, but I knew the way. It wasn’t long before the towers fell away, and I was treading water above the lip of a monstrous chasm. Old Mother’s distant, ragged laughter sounded from below -I pushed myself toward it.
When you travel down into very deep water, the darkness rises towards you like smoke, a separate but intermingled thing, like motes of dust on sunlight. You could mistake it for seaweed. The darkness curled around my straining wrist. The water was thick with it. I forced myself down anyway. Even when I could no longer see, I kept moving down, fighting every instinct I had, fighting the pain that was no longer an echo but a distant call, coming closer. The illness was returning to me.
The water here was filled with death, I suddenly thought. It’s touching me.
At long last, I seem to have swam deep enough, and the Old Mother’s voice penetrated through the deep, though I could not see her:
“Your human life is simple. You die,” she said. “Within a few short years.”
This much I knew. “Are they good years?”
“You are loved, and cared for,” she admitted, as if this were of little consequence. “As most people are. But over the course of short life and long suffering, your body will unravel.”
The floor of the chasm exploded into red, a cloud of bubbles rushing towards the surface. I screamed and threw myself back, the sudden molten heat rolling towards me, overtaking me. And the illness came back, no distant call but a roar, a battle cry. The dark fish, the heralds of the end, my end, were a maelstrom around me, turned hellish by the light. Old Mother was nowhere. Her voice came from everywhere.
“Your mind will be the burning core of a crumbling planet, until it is all that remains, and that core which was once your being will be nothing but an exposed nerve, a lidless eye, and you will witness yourself being shredded by the void without any strength to fight it. And for all your rage and pain and fear, the final insult is that you will appear peaceful. You die common, silent, and invisible. So must it always be.”
And the light went out. The pain vanished, again.
She seemed to wait for me to recover.
“But if I return to the water…” I said at last, shaken. “I won’t die?”
There was a chuckle.
“Well, you’ll put it off. The Earth itself is dying. Some of us will just be around long enough to grieve for it.”
“I want to see it to the end,” I said.
“And you can. But nothing human in you will remain.”
“Oisin…”
“You’ll remember him, if that comforts you,” she said, without emotion. “But you won’t feel as you do now.”
“This isn’t fair!” I said, finally overcome. “I should have had more time! I shouldn’t have to be in pain! I just wanted--”
“You have a choice,” Old Mother said simply. “That’s more than many could dare to dream.”
I opened my mouth to speak -said nothing. I pulled the cardigan tighter around myself. Hands reached out from the darkness and gripped me.
“You would not have come,” a voice said. “if you had not made your choice.”
The voice was Old Mother’s, but it was also Oisin’s. Male and female; human and inhuman; alive and dead.
Its tone was one of forgiveness.
#
Oisin woke that morning to a beam of sunlight in his face, turning his lids painfully red. He groaned, rolled over, and his arm fell into unexpected emptiness.
He opened his eyes.