Submerged Read online

  I hugged her with tears in my eyes and bade her to come in.

  “I cannot stay,” she said, “but I have brought you a gift.”

  I unwrapped the parcel she handed me and time stood still. There, folded neatly across my hands was a blue woolen shift, the very color of the sea, with the finest byssus trim I had ever seen. I stared at it, my blood rushing though my ears as if I had just crested the surface after a dive. I could not move. I could not speak. When I finally shook myself free of the spell, my mother was gone and the door was closed as if she had never come through it.

  I shimmied out of my dress and put the shift on over my head, feeling the way the wool already clung to my skin, watching the firelight sparkle off the byssus. I imagined the feel of the wet fabric, shrinking to fit me like a second skin, keeping me warm in the depths of the bay as I joined the generations of women before me, collecting the precious excrement with hands I had spent my whole life keeping soft and callous-free.

  When the next full moon came, it would be time to face the council.

  In the short weeks to come, I made arrangements for the care of our family home. No matter what the outcome, I would not be returning to it. My cousin, newly married to another, farther removed cousin, eagerly took residence and made it her own. She had a knack for the garden, and the goats and cats seemed to really like her, so it put me at ease.

  When I left there, I wore nothing but the blue shift that my mother had made for me. I wonder if the wool had scratched her fingers after working exclusively with the smooth, supple byssus.

  I approached the gathering house of the village council and, willing my voice to stay steady and strong, announced myself. The men of the council excused themselves and left without meeting my eyes. The women remained, some looking patient, others pained.

  Our matriarchal elder barely let me pass through the doorway before she put her hands on me. She shook me by the shoulders and railed about my mother, how stupid, how disrespectful, how bold, how dare she let me think I could do this.

  The other women remained silent, although I heard their tears.

  With her pocketknife, the elder slit my precious shift down the center and pulled it off of me. Her voice howled like the storm that had drowned my father. She demanded that I look down at myself, behold my own body, and ask how I could dare to come before them as a woman, when I, clearly, was not one.

  Although my skin was smooth and hairless, although my shoulders had never become sturdy and square, my chest did not swell and neither did my hips; and at the juncture of my thighs that which I forever tried to hide lay exposed for all to look upon.

  My secret, finally bared, battled with the myth and the truth.

  That once, long ago, my mother had borne a son, I thought had been forgotten, perhaps misremembered, replaced with the reality of her somewhat odd daughter. But the elder remembered. She blazed with fury at the audacity that I assumed she had not. Here I stood before her, naked and on display, to be judged and deemed unworthy.

  The elder took her blade to the long, thick braid of my hair and sheared it free of my head, nicking my scalp as she did so.

  “Get out of my sight and go learn to fish. Go learn to be a man and maybe you can stay in our village.”

  Despite the hot tears that spilled over my cheeks, plucked and scraped until they were smoother than hers, I looked right at her. “No.”

  I took my shift from the floor and wrapped it around myself. I turned my back on her and walked out through the door. I did not look back as I went down to the dock and took a basket from the pile. I used a bit of rope to tie my shift closed before I dove.

  The water closed over my feet and surrounded me in its cold embrace and I found peace. I glided down to the seabed and checked every mollusk. I had somewhere lost my knife so I took a piece of sharp stone to cut with. I searched and searched until my lungs ached.

  But maybe, just maybe, the reason I had never seen the slime sweeping like cobwebs through the swish of the tides was because the elder was right. Perhaps my body had doomed me.

  I blew out a stream of bubbles and watched them float to the surface as I settled to the silty floor, stirring up sand and scurrying shrimp.

  I could not return to the surface. They would be gathered at the dock, now, waiting, ridicule on the lips of some, pity in the eyes of others, but judgment with them all. Because now they all knew.

  Let them find my body, I resolved. It never suited me, anyway. Let them say what they like and do as they wish with it. Let it be consumed by the creatures of the sea or the carrion eaters of the land. Let something somewhere find fulfillment with it that I had never known.

  Let me remain a part of this place, forever.

  I hugged my shift tight around me and thought of my mother, who had erased the name I had been given and gave me another, who taught me to braid and to weave, who treated me like a daughter and never gave my body a second thought. She had always believed in me. She believed in me, still. She would be waiting on the shore, waiting for my success, not my failure.

  I would be a disappointment to her for the first time in my life.

  I shuddered out a sob and it rose in an ever-shifting blob of air. I wondered if it would carry the sound all the way to the surface, or just break liked any other bubble in the waves.

  My vision sparked and shimmered, desperate for breath.

  I caught sight of silky strands that looked like seaweed, but pale as moonlight. I swam towards them before even deciding to move. I came within reach of them and saw that they rose from the surface of something large, something that pulsed and lived there in the darkest hollow of the bay.

  This thing before me was enormous, like a shark, but soft. Like a jellyfish, but with density and opacity. The fronds of floating mucus undulated in time with what seemed like breathing.

  It shifted its great bulk to regard me with round, black eyes, larger than I could put both of my arms around.

  This thing … no, this woman, for it undeniably thought of itself that way—no, she undeniably thought of herself this way, and who was I to argue or judge?—this woman greeted me with a gust of bubbles, then drew herself towards me to kiss my lips and breathe cool, fresh air into my lungs.

  She seemed, then, almost human, much smaller in magnitude, yet still impressive, and not unlike the sturdy fishwives of our village with her broad brow and prominent nose. Yes, she seemed more like a mermaid from a story than some massive, unknowable beast.

  She looked at my shift, billowing open despite the sash. I looked away and she gently drew my face back towards her. She touched the shift, lingering at the byssus trimming the neckline, the cut strands of it hanging loose and twirling in the current.

  She touched my unevenly shorn hair, it, too, swaying wildly and loose when it should have been orderly and bound.

  She ran her hand over my body, and although it appeared no larger than my own mother’s hand, I could feel the touch of it everywhere at once.

  I still held the basket, stupidly, numbly. So I showed it to her, hoping she would understand. With my other hand, I ran my fingers through my hair, pantomiming how long it used to be, all the way down to my waist. She repeated my movement and I could see the braid, drifting lazily in the salty water, as if an afterimage following a flash of lightning, before it was gone again. I touched the shift, tugging it closed and smoothing it down, trying to make it look whole and proper once more. I held up the basket again and pointed to one of the swirling masses of streamers that, at this point, seemed to be hovering in the water, attached to nothing.

  Woman? she asked without speaking.

  And I nodded. “Woman,” I replied, in a flurry of bubbles that gleamed and shone.

  She regarded me a long moment and then scooped me close to her. I felt her slick flesh, cool to the touch, but warm beneath.

  Woman, she agreed and stretched out her arm to bring the shimmering fronds within my reach.

  I had lost the stone, too, and desp
aired of being able to cut free what I needed. But she drew them into a handful with ease and placed them into the basket. With her other hand, she brought forth a bunch of seaweed, the yellow-green kind that grew in a bushy clump and was the main catalyst for the transformation of slime into gold.

  I took it, gratefully.

  She kissed my forehead and then my lips, filling me with another breath.

  I will see you again, soon, byssus-woman.

  She then turned me away and gave me a nudge, sending me gliding back in the direction of the shore. I hugged the basket to my chest and kicked my legs, not daring to look back at the creature, the woman, that resided there in the depths.

  When my head broke the surface of the water, my breath came from me in a shimmering blast like a dolphin’s jet, full of water and something that gleamed. I got my feet under me and stood, rising from the bay with my basket filled with promise. My shift hung wide open, the sash gone; I could not be bothered to care. I found my mother’s face in the crowd and let her be my beacon of strength. But I did not walk towards her. Instead I came to stand before the council elder. I put the basket down at her feet and stared defiantly into her eyes.

  “It isn’t for you to judge,” I said to her.

  She kicked the basket over in her fury, but all it did was prove to the village that it was indeed full of milky strands of byssus-to-be. She screamed her anger and reached out for me, her hands clawed.

  But she was stayed by the other councilwomen.

  “The goddess has spoken. This young woman knows our secret. She is one of the byssus weavers, now.”

  My mother made her way to my side, gathered up the fallen fronds of slime and seaweed. She stood beside me, pride in her eyes.

  “Welcome, daughter,” she said to me and put her arms around me in the fiercest hug I had ever received.

  I knew a myth, a truth, and a secret as a child. But not until I became a woman did I learn that they were all three the same thing.

  THE SEVEN NIGHTS OF SQUIDMAS

  Nicky Drayden

  Four standard months. That’s how long I’ve been trapped on this soggy excuse for a planet. The Southern Wades are where the humanoids normally congregate, though this time of year, the cold has driven all but the most freeze-tolerant species to the northern hemisphere. There are just a few of them now, in their thigh-high rubber boots, wading through the icy slush of this half-submerged tavern, fingers flicking to the bartender to continue the endless refills of steaming ale.

  “Your play, friend,” a Monodorite says to me. His thick, gray skin seems impervious to frigid temps and his legs dangle freely in the icy water below his bar stool.

  I fan my circular cards in my hand and look at the last cards played, then at the stack of Ytl’ssca cubes that comprise the current pot. I try to calculate if there’s enough there for me to get my tri-fracquer fixed so I can finally get my ship up and running and put this whole botched heist behind me. I raise the ante by a 50 note cube. “I’m in,” I say, and play a coral flush to beat his pair of whalebones. “Ytl’ssca!” I say with a smug grin.

  “I’ve never seen such luck,” the Monodorite says begrudgingly as I pull in my haul of cubes. “Especially from a beginner. Another hand?”

  A quick calculation of my new net worth leaves me slightly over my goal. “No thanks,” I say, eager to cash in my winnings. “It’s time I got going.”

  “What about if we raise the stakes? Make things a little more interesting, now that you’ve got the hang of the game?” The Monodorite opens his massive paw, and reveals a qua’ker’s gem—millions of facets gleaming under the cold blue light of the tavern. Not just any qua’ker’s gem, I realize as I look closer. The Magnus Qua’ker, the crown jewel of Queen At’Kachua’s scepter—the scepter I’d come here to steal. Heh. Someone had gotten to it right before me and apparently had doled out all 85 of the gems. Pity, that. It was such a magnificent scepter, worth much more than the sum of its parts, but to leave here with one of the gems, especially such a significant one, would more than make up for the tedium of sloshing away on this planet, never able to catch a break.

  “Sure,” I shrug. “Luck is on my side, as you say. But I don’t have much of value other than this meager cube stack. Surely that isn’t enough of a wager.”

  “What about that tri-fracquer you were talking about?” the Monodorite asks.

  “I told you it doesn’t work.” I shouldn’t have told him anything about it at all.

  “Dry tech is rare around these parts. Even a broken one will fetch a fine sum.”

  “Mmmm…” I say, pretending to consider the risks of the gamble. There is no risk. I look at the cards I’d played on the table. To the untrained eye, they look the same as any Ytl’ssca cards. Probably to the trained eye, too. But they are not like the others. A thin film coats them, a film comprised of my very being, sloughed away and shifted to mimic the face values I need to win. It’s not a perfect match, of course. The artwork on the cards is finely detailed, difficult to replicate even for me, but even a shapeshifter’s shoddiest work is good enough to fool a half-drunk Monodorite easily. “I suppose I could stick around a little longer.”

  “All right, Mr.…” the Monodorite continues to deal the cards. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t,” I say, looking at my hand. I keep my face blank, resisting the urge to wince at how truly awful these cards are. No matter. As soon as the game starts, I’ll shift them as needed.

  The Monodorite plays three wild tentacles. Statistically hard to beat, but no match for the four of a kind I’m about to shift. I will the face values of my cards to morph into four conch shells, but my cells refuse to cooperate. I try again. Nothing.

  “Problem, Traleel?” the Monodorite says with a grin. He knows who I am. What I am. And he’s got some kind of tech that’s keeping me from shifting.

  “No problem,” I say with a puckered smile. “Just an awful hand.” I lay my cards face down, as they were dealt to me. It’s then that I notice it: a soft glow floating in the water beneath his bar stool. I reach for it, pull it up—a little round fist-sized device that dies the instant it hits air.

  “Wet tech,” the Monodorite says. “A blubberphaser. Designed to keep lush sharks and other nuisances away from underwater cities, but has the curious effect of disrupting whatever it is your kind do.” The Monodorite taps his gray paws together. “Now, I believe you owe me a tri-fracquer.”

  * * *

  I dare not confront the Monodorite, because if he’s smart enough to know how to trick me, he’s also smart enough to know how to kill me. Instead, I secretly follow him and my former tri-fracquer through the slushy streets of Southern Wades all the way to a dry-tech exchange in a well-to-do area. I watch the storefront as my tri-fracquer is placed in the glass display, carefully above the waterline. It taunts me there, but tonight I will sneak in and steal it, no problems. I double-check myself, extending my fingers several inches to make sure there are no other blubberphaser devices in my proximity. I’m good.

  Just before the store closes, the street water in front of the store bubbles and several conch cars emerge from the depths. Water drips over the iridescent shells. On the side of each is imprinted the seal that I’ve grown to despise over my time spent here: the seal of the President of Squidadelphia.

  Her secret service exits the vehicles before she does, a mass of tentacles so tangled I can’t make out how many of them there are. Eventually, when the all-clear is given, the President emerges, tentacles aglitter, suckerflesh perfectly puckered. A jewel of the sea. She enters the shop. Moments later, I see her glittery tentacles touching all over my tri-fracquer. Then it’s gone. She leaves the store, parcel wrapped up in a waterproof bubble. She gets back into her conch car and the vehicles submerge into the depths of the underwater city.

  No. No. No. This isn’t happening. Not when I was so close!

  I dive in after them, shifting into the form of a lush shark, the fastest thing in this
underwater world that I’m half familiar with. I whip my powerful tail, trying to keep up. It’s dark down here, and my senses are muted. I make out the faint light coming from their vehicles, and follow it down, down, down into the depths. Detritus floats past me—scraps of plant life, plankton, small crustaceans. The occasional fish-creature conjured from my nightmares.

  Finally, I make out the highlights and shadows of a submerged city. It’s beautiful and sprawling and carefully crafted—everything the Southern Wades is not. The buildings are sculpted from bricks of brightly colored coral and rise up at interesting and precarious angles. The streets are wide, but not trodden. Tentacled pedestrians swim above them with grace, others barrel along in conch cars powered by wet tech. There’s something festive afoot. Groups of Squidadelphians sing carols about the spirit of the Season, the new chill in the water, the spicy taste of fish egg nog, and about some character named Jolly Saint Tentacleez, who is apparently pulled along by his five giant clams—the lead one with a giant red glowing pearl that lights his way during his undersea trip to visit all of the little squidlets to bring them gifts and joy. I laugh at this. There’s no way this Jolly Saint Tentacleez really exists…who in their right mind would go around giving things away when it’s much more fun to take? Perhaps it’s some kind of parental ploy, designed to get the squidlets to behave all year long.

  The presidential palace is hard to miss. It is the grandest building in all of Squidadelphia. Five coral towers stretch up, the centermost one twice as tall as the rest. I am able to shift into the form of a Squidadelphian, six pair of long sleek tentacles. I’ve spent so long as a humanoid, it takes me a while to figure out how to maneuver with them all. Once I’ve got it down, I make my approach. There’s a long line of Squidadelphians standing at the palace’s gates. I join them, trying my best to fit in, and snag some intelligence while I’m at it.

  “Long line,” I say to the squid in front of me. She’s half-distracted by the two squidlets she’s trying to wrangle.