The Wife Aquatic (1.4k words)

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Hi kitties <3 DFTT 4 is coming I promise! I'm tryna adjust my writing process so that it hopefully won't be such a mad scramble every month, but there are some teething issues. Anyway! In the meantime please enjoy another random short story from my archives.

The first time David kissed me, it felt like an electric shock.

“Ow! What the fuck?” I shrieked, “Ow!”

“Oh, fuck!” he gasped, “I’m so sorry!”

I batted his hands away. My heart was racing, and all my muscles ached like hell. My mouth felt burnt -- red hot and tasting like ash.

I fell back onto the couch.

“Water,” I coughed, “Get me water.”

“Fuck,” said David, “Yep.”

He rushed off and I tried to regain my breath. It took a second to even realise what had happened. I had just been electrocuted. Did this guy taze me? Mid-kiss? Was I about to get murdered?

“Do you want a twist of lime?” David called out from the kitchen.

“Just the water, thanks,” I croaked.

“No worries!” he said.

He came out of the kitchen with a glass of water in one hand and a lime in the other, which he noticed me staring at and quickly shoved in his pocket. I took the water and sipped it gingerly. My mouth still tasted like ash.

“I’m really sorry,” said David. He hovered next to the couch, unsure whether it was okay to sit, “It’s just…”

I raised my eyebrows at him. He didn’t seem like the type of guy to taze a girl on the first date, but this was gonna have to be an incredible explanation.

“My grandad’s an electric eel,” he said.

*****

*****

David explained the whole situation, still awkwardly hovering next to the couch. It was the least he could do after the whole electrocution thing. 

His mother, Sofia, was from Colombia, a small town about thirty miles off the coast of Cartagena. Off the coast, and under the surface. David’s father, Carl, was a merchant sailor, and they had fallen in love when Carl tumbled off his ship and Sofia saved him from a watery grave. Classic human-mermaid romance. 

I had never met a mermaid before (or anyone half-mermish, like David) but I had seen them on the news over the past few years. Australia had even appointed a Minister for Mermish Affairs (Tony Abbott).

David’s grandad being an eel was a little weirder, but according to David, that kind of thing happened a lot. Mermaids were equal parts human and fish, he pointed out, so the relationship between his grandma and grandad wasn’t any stranger than the one between his parents. 

“You could’ve warned me about the shock,” I told him, once he was done explaining.

“Sorry,” he said, “It’s never happened like that before. Usually it’s only when I’m really nervous, or excited, or…”

He clammed up. I smirked.

“But never with a girl?” I asked.

David shrugged helplessly., “Not until you.”

I whistled., “Very romantic.”

*****

Excerpt from ‘land and sea’, by Jess Wallace

[...] you kiss me like no-one
has kissed me before.
you kiss me like waves
crashing on the beach,
like ocean currents
strong and fast and deep.
you kiss me and lightning
stretches from your sky
to my ground,
and my lips are marked
like gateways
between our worlds

*****

I fell in love with David after that. How could I not? There was electricity between us, literally. And I was an English major. I couldn’t overlook a metaphor that on the nose. 

Our second kiss went a lot smoother. David managed not to zap me, which meant I could focus on what a great kisser he actually was. His hands around my waist were cold and clammy in a way that should’ve been disgusting, but instead sent tingles down my spine. I felt a bulge against my thigh, and after a moment I realised it was the lime in his pocket. I laughed against his lips, and he joined in, then he tossed the lime aside and we sank down into the couch together. It was lovely.

Later that night we had sex, and his electric orgasm almost blasted my tits off. 

That was the way David was. On the surface, he was the sweetest guy, but he had this wild power inside him that I took immense pleasure trying to let out. I collected shocks like badges of honour. I started to treasure the taste of ash, and the tiny, jagged burns that gathered around the corners of my mouth. 

After a few months, David asked me to move in with him. It made sense. I slept over almost every night, and we both needed to save money. I was an English major, and David’s grandad was a fish. He had inherited many things from his mother’s side (like the small, subtle gills below his ears) but money wasn’t one of them. 

When the local council held a poetry competition, it just made sense to submit something. And it just made sense to make it something about David. He was the most exciting thing in my life, and, more cynically, a mermaid-human relationship was just the right kind of diverse-yet-non-threatening subject to appeal to the judges. 

Everything I wrote came from my heart, but I knew which parts of my heart people would pay to see.

*****

*****

David wasn’t happy when he found out about my poem, and even less happy when the video of me reading it went viral. He hadn’t told anyone at work about his mermish heritage, and now he was getting harassed. Worse, his family were getting death threats -- and not just from humans, either. From other mermaids.

“Unnatural,” he muttered as he flipped through a photo album, “Who are they to decide what’s natural?”

I squeezed his shoulder. My arm hair stood on end. 

“It is, well, different,” I said, “I can understand--”

“Don’t,” David snapped, “Whatever you’re about to say, don’t. I get that humans can’t talk to fish. But we can, alright? And, yeah, my grandad wasn’t the smartest. But he was a good grandad. And he loved my grandma.”

He turned a final page and stopped. A tiny baby David was beaming up from a big plastic tub full of water, and a long, brown eel was swimming around him. 

“He never zapped me,” he said quietly, “Not once.”

*****

Excerpts from ‘The Wife Aquatic with Jess Linden-Wallace,' New York Times profile

Jess Linden-Wallace’s SoHo home is airy, light, and bohemian -- a far cry from the half-submerged dungeon you might expect from someone who married a merman. There are no buckets of half-eaten fish or stagnant pools of water to lounge in. There’s even a landline phone instead of a mystical conch shell [...]

[...] Linden-Wallace’s poems found viral success at a time when society was still grappling with the issue of integrating our subaquatic neighbours. Her work addresses themes that had been on all of our minds: the intriguing alienness of mermaids, their exotic (and erotic) appeal, and the risk involved in getting too close. It’s no wonder that her career rode this wave [...]

[...] Fans of her work have pointed out a central mystery in her husband’s ancestry. Scientists have never figured out how eels reproduce. So how exactly was David’s mother conceived?

Linden-Wallace laughs, “I’ve asked, but those are David’s grandparents. He doesn’t want to think about them making babies!”

And does the youngest ever poet laureate have plans for a family of her own?

“There’s no rush,” says Linden-Wallace, “I’ve never addressed it in my poems, but I’m not able to conceive children. But adoption is always an option, somewhere down the line.”

And whether that child is human or fish -- or, like their father, something in between -- remains to be seen.

*****

Our marriage didn’t last long. When he pulled away I wrote him poems, because sometimes it felt like that was all I knew how to do. I tried to capture him in words -- his place in the world, his place in my life. After a while, he stopped reading them. 

When he kissed me goodbye, I didn’t feel a spark. I was the youngest ever poet laureate. I couldn’t overlook a metaphor that on the nose.

*****

Excerpt from 'love without pain’ by Jess Linden-Wallace

when
you kiss
me, my heart
stops. my muscles 
seize. and for a moment, 
the world goes away.
you are the nerves under
my skin. my heart
stops, but i 
am alive. my muscles
seize, but i
am free. for a moment, i 
am on fire with the
lightning
strike of ‘you

but it is only for a moment
and then you pull away
the lightning passes through me
but the world does not come back
and all that is left
are scars on my lips
and the taste of ash