Species

There is push and pull. Hands and fingers touching skin, hair, lip and fish scale. He wants to return her to the water, to the lick and glitter of the sea. He sees it as an act of kindness for one who is out of her element. Sitting tear-stained on the concrete harbour as she is, staring out, not sure how she has got there or how she can return.

But she does not want return. That is why she is streaming black-eyed as she looks towards the churning surface of her world, like an astronaut staring home from the moon. This was a goodbye as she waited for the change she had heard would come – tail to leg, fin to foot, scale to skin. This was that narrow no man’s land of time between one world and another, when she would become something else, something more. Another species. And never go back again.

One final shove and she is home. She feels the saltwater sting over the snags and rips of flesh, the small balloons of blood. Knowing without looking that there are the mouths of bruises over her arms and waist and breasts from the traps of his hands, the rough ropes of his fingers. She watches him and wants to tell him what he has done and that she can never leave the sea again. That there is only one time that it can happen and that was her time, just then, and now that moment has gone.

He watches the bob of her head on the water, knowing she would say thank you if she could, if her tongue spoke the same language as his. But it is not so. And so he takes the new, thin rivers of tears on her face for thanks instead. There is even the sparkle of sunlight in them, so happy is she now, so thankful and happy, so happy.