LJ Idol S11 Week 4: Impossible
Prompt: Impossible
She’s going to die.
Her vision starts to pulse and fade and she knows with certainty she’s seconds away from pulling that cursed involuntary gasp of seawater that will kill her, and she thinks, “at least I’m dying in the sea. I like the sea.”
Seawater rushes into her lungs and it tastes sweet. Satisfying. She breathes it. And then she wiggles her body free of the rigging that held her captive before, now floating around her like dead eels. She sees her life vest, too, floating beside her and still snapped shut, like she hadn’t just been wrapped up in it a second ago. Somehow she’s slithered out of that, too.
Nina’s lived on the ocean her whole life, sailed for most of it, swam in it and all its dangerous tides and creatures since birth. She knows this shape she’s become.
“I’m a god damned squid,” she thinks.
And then the shock ends and she’s at the surface again, and when she grasps at the ruins of her beloved little ship her hands are her own, ten fingers and mottled brown skin burned browner yet with the sun.
A coast guard ship is not a hundred yards out and heading towards her with lights shining and she thinks, “Oh, god I’m safe.” And then, “Also I was a squid.” Because both seemed equally true and equally impossible.
She goes home that night and visits her parents and her aunt down the street for dinner, like she does a few times a week, and it’s like nothing’s changed.
“Shame about your boat, but you’re damned lucky to be alive.” Her dad is a brusk man. A good man, but firm in what he believes and unwilling to censor himself. “Foolish of you to be out in weather like that, making the coasties come and rescue you.”
Her aunt shushes him and puts another heap of mashed potatoes on his plate. “We’re just happy you’re alright. Want any more ham?”
“No thanks, I’m really craving that fish, though. Pass it along?” She takes a full flank of it onto her plate and eats it in two bites. It’s flaky and the skin is on and the salt. The salt is like water, and she drinks it in, ravenously.
She doesn’t say, “Also, I believe I briefly turned into a squid and that’s how I survived my near drowning. Has anyone else in our family done that before?”
For three days, she pretends she hallucinated. She goes to work at the bar, sleeps in her little apartment, and visits with her friends. Hallucinating is a thing, after all. Near death experiences bring all sorts of people to all sorts of strange mental places. Why not her, too?
And then she dives off a pier to swim on a Friday morning when the water is cold and beautiful and when she looks at herself in the murky water of the inlet near her parent’s house and she sees not her bare brown legs kicking in the water, but a collection of long, pulsing squid arms.
“Ah,” she thinks. “There it is again.”
It feels comforting.
It shouldn’t. It should feel impossible, horrifying, or terrifying. Or some other “ing” word. But it feels right.
This time when family dinner comes around she does ask. “Say, something odd happened the other day,” she starts as her cousin Aggie loads up mashed potatoes onto his plate like the seven-year-old he is. That kid can eat his weight in potatoes.
“Oh?” her aunt asks, but she’s too busy trying to keep the potatoes on the plate and not everywhere else to really pay attention.
Nina pushes on. “Yeah. Yeah, I, ah, I turned into a squid.”
Her dad is smoking a pipe a few chairs down. Mom hates it and every so often goes around the house weeding the tobacco out of all its little hiding spots, but she was lax this week because he’s puffing away with abandon, and he nods sagely at her. “Thought it might be that.”
“This is... a thing?”
“Sometimes.” He shrugs. He’s always been painfully quiet when he ought to be talking, and painfully conversant when he ought to be quiet.
Meanwhile Aggie is staring up at her like she’s a transformer from that one movie he likes. “Seriously?”
She nods at him. “Seriously.”
Aggie goes swimming with her, after her dad convinces Aunt Emily that it’s okay, that she (probably) hasn’t lost her mind, and after Nina promises to keep them by the beach and not go past the buoys and only to swim during daylight. Aunt Emily married in. She doesn’t know the ocean like her family does.
It’s a clear day. The water is cold, but it always is, and Aggie splashes around just where his shoulders start to dip under the waves. The beaches here aren’t nice, exactly, but they’re a relatively safe place to get into the water, unlike the cliffs that speckle the rest of the coast here. Aggie is safe.
And she can hear his squeal from above the water when she submerges her face in a backwards dive and her entire body dissolves into squid ink.
They play for awhile. He tries to catch her arms, and then three or four of her winding arms will tickle his feet.
As soon as she breathes in air, her hair is back, her arms are back, and she’s Nina again.
“Think it’ll keep happening forever?”
They’re up on the beach now, away from the water and bundled into soft and enormous towels to keep the wind out as their bodies dry off.
She shrugs, until she realizes it’s an echo of her father, and then she says, “I don’t know. Maybe. Could go away tomorrow. Dad doesn’t really know, either, but it sounds like his brother could do this back in the day.
Aggie doesn’t seem bothered by the unknown of it all. He just nods along and chomps into the granola bar Aunt Emily packed for him. “It’s a pretty cool superpower.”
“Is it?” She hadn’t really thought so. It saved her life, and she thinks fish tastes amazing now, but that’s about it.
“Totally.” He says it with utter certainty, and Nina grins. Because sure. She can work with that.