The redfish is remarkable because despite the fact it’s dead, it is still moving. Opal, straw flip-flops in hand, watches it arrive. The dimmed, bloated body (once golden, once maroon) pushes itself onto the beach. With one tail sweep after another, it lurches past mangrove roots and driftwood. It stops once it’s struggled above the tideline.
Opal approaches once it flops over. The redfish’s milky eyes bulge at her. Seaweed snarls its fins. Its missing scales resemble gray, naked nail beds. Opal clutches her sunhat and covers her nose when the wind casts salt into her face.
She is about to ask the redfish what it wants, since nothing dead needs anything, when it clenches its distended stomach. The redfish’s powerful, hook-punched lips give way to dark matter. It retches silt onto the white sand. Sediment from the bottom of the bay fans from its mouth. It’s a horrible mixture, rich with distilled death, softer than slime. Opal screams when she spots the wedding ring half-buried in it.
She bolts to the fish and kneels in its putrid wake. Opal snatches the wedding ring from the slime. Sundress forgotten, she smashes the ring against her chest to clean it. Umber rot stains the linen. Opal turns the ring in her hands until she almost drops it, then slides it onto a shaking finger. The silver band fits as it always has.
Opal, on her hands and knees, looms over the fish. Her hair dangles around her face like an unraveling net. Above, egrets soar.
“Where is he?” she says.
The redfish doesn’t respond. Opal seizes its fin, her fingers sinking into the soft bloat, and rolls it onto its side. She leans in until its soon-to-stink body tangles in her curtain of hair and her lips almost snag on its spiny teeth. Garbled, unfinished noises burst from Opal. The redfish’s gills threaten to slice her cheek.
“Where is he?” she says. “Tell me. Tell me.”
No answer comes. The messenger, having delivered its message, disintegrates into rotten chunks. Opal shakes the fish carcass several more times before apologizing. Then she sits in her pooled sundress, the lacy froth of incoming tide eating at her legs, fingers clenched in a white-hot grip around her ring, and stares at Bon Secour Bay.
The sunset she came to see washes over the water in smears of dreamsicle and blood. The sun, a blinding dot, lowers itself into the gulf. Wind tassels the cypresses. Crabs emerge to clean the dead. Pelican-shapes slash the fading sky. Opal, rocking, hands juddering, mouth spitting fragmented words, doesn’t care about any of it. What she longs to see are the depths.
She stays on the beach even as mosquitos puncture her skin and darkness swallows the shore.
It’s difficult for Opal to explain anything to anyone. She is too forward. Too clear. It’s impossible for her to explain that her husband who walked into the sea a decade ago, who she loves (and loathed) more than anyone in the world, has reached out to her.
She still tries. Despite what others think of Opal, she isn’t immune to elation, or the urge to share good news.
“My estranged husband spoke to me,” she says, while fishing for cash in her wallet. “We’re trying to reconcile. It’s all I can think about.”
The bait shop clerk, a grizzled butch, stares. She frowns when Opal flashes her wedding ring. They’re surrounded by a claustrophobic labyrinth of tubes, tanks, and marine creatures, but the butch looks at Opal as if she’s the most offensive entity present. Opal (forced to wear earplugs so the crosstalk of tank filters and people doesn’t render her rabid) still takes offense to that.
“Opal, honey, ain’t he dead?”
The butch makes ‘honey’ into a seawall. A pseudo-friendly way of keeping Opal at a distance. It took Opal years to clock this. She no longer cares. At least the butch is honest. Opal shakes her head. For the hundredth time, she rotates the ring to bloodlet her jitters.
“No,” she says. “Itai isn’t dead.”
Drowning isn’t consensual. Opal knows that her husband let the seawater into his lungs in an entirely different way. Technicalities are important. She isn’t sure what’s become of him, but she’s never doubted that he’s alive.
The butch makes an unconvinced noise. She takes the ten from Opal’s fingers to make change. The bag of shrimp Opal bought slumps on the counter. The shrimp glide around their prison, legs curling, their blue cores pulsing in their own translucent cages.
“Even if he wasn’t dead,” the butch says, “I’d be afraid to ask why you’re excited to see a man who ain’t done shit for you in a decade.”
“He’s a good partner,” Opal says. “He supports me.”
“How?”
Despite the openness of ‘how?’ it isn’t an open question. People never want an exhaustive explanation. At worst, when given one, they assume aggression. At best, they feign interest while projecting martyrization to everyone else. Opal never sensed that. Someone told her that while attacking her. It was a valuable lesson.
She’s never forgotten the humiliation.
Opal says, “Itai always pays his part of utilities.”
“Ain’t you been paying that with his life insurance payout?” the butch says.
“As I said, he pays his part of the utilities.” Opal thrusts the bait bag into her tote.
The butch retreats behind the counter. The tourists in the bait shop, clustered around the tanks and the corkboard full of ‘missing’ posters, murmur to each other. Maybe some are local. Opal cares so little that she recognizes none of them. They are beneath shrimp. She at least understands shrimp.
“Enjoy your day, Miss Opal,” the butch says.
“It’s Mrs.”
The butch retreats further at her loud, flat correction. Someone clears their throat. Everyone makes way for Opal as she exits, though they aren’t near her.
She’s seen schools of fish do the same for sharks.
“I hope shrimp is still your favorite,” Opal tells the black waves. “I hope they get to you. I hope you weren’t sending the ring to divorce. I still want you. I’ve never hated you. There’s a difference between your presence and you. I can explain that now.”
The boat ramp concrete gnaws at her soles. Algae slicks her skin; fish hook and fish bones prick her toes. A shroud of Spanish moss whispers behind her. All the picnic tables in the park are empty. Opal only came here after the new summer renters called the police on her (she’s always groundskeeping or trespassing on her own property) but she’s grateful for the privacy.
“It’s hard to exist.” She fiddles with the shrimp bag. “You understand that, don’t you, Itai? Sometimes I’d feel you in bed next to me, not even touching me, and it was like hearing the electric in the walls or feeling grocery store lights. It was unbearable. I hated it so much I couldn’t sleep. You were like some boiling black hole put next to me to torture me.”
“But I couldn’t ask for space. I didn’t know how to. We didn’t have it, not in our house. We still don’t. And I was terrified that if I left, or asked you to leave, you’d think I didn’t love you. So I laid there wishing you’d just fucking die.”
Far out in the bay, beneath the singular moonbeam spotlighting the water, something razor-shaped breaks the surface. Maybe it’s a wave. Maybe. Opal restrains herself from crying out. From trying to swim to it.
“I never wanted that. I never meant anything I said while being alive made me insane. It still does that, but I deal with it now. Mostly.” She speaks faster when she senses her voice failing. “You’re the only person I’ve ever missed. Everyone was right about me being a monster. But I do love you.”
The razor crest in the waves is gone. Opal’s voice vanishes. Her sob thrashes inside her body. She releases the shrimp.
They vanish into the gloom.
It’s unfair, Opal knows, that she’s counting the seconds since she released the shrimp. That she’s counting the minutes. The days. It’s unfair that her words are bad. It’s unfair that for years, she blamed Itai for their separation, then blamed herself. It was both of them. It’s always been the both of them. Neither of them have ever stepped foot in a store, a school, or a doctor’s office (or a family gathering, before their families finished dying) without being unwelcome. They’re together in everything, even separate.
Did you hear? Another boat sank.
“You weren’t easy to live with,” she tells her reflection. “I want to try again anyway.” She repeats it into Itai’s wool sweater she sleeps with, then his sparsely decorated corner of the room. There’s nothing else to repeat it to. Her husband didn’t leave much behind. He possessed little besides himself.
The one constant besides that was Itai’s unease with his own body. Even after the injections, after the filet scars that reshaped his pectorals and pelvis, he remained lost. Opal had resented the way he’d floated in their lives, as if he was a jellyfish overflowing from a tiny tide pool while the water ebbed away.
Nah. No one died. A shrimp boat picked them up. But they said . . .
Every few months, Itai would shrink. He’d beg Opal for her clothes, then clung to them, to her, before ranting about how hideous he was. He never recognized their shared bay of a body. The concept that his words poisoned them both was unfathomable. Then when he was done gutting himself, when he was done injuring Opal, he’d swell.
Opal misses her husband now, not just the concept of him. She doesn’t miss the pounds of seafood that cycled through their refrigerator. The parade of baggy clothes that washed through the house before Itai starved himself down, trashed them, then started anew.
I dunno. There’s something strange.
Perhaps he’s found peace in the gulf. He must have. When their marriage became a slipped disc, when agony displaced something soft, they had agreed to separate until they both changed. Opal, afraid of her edges, chose land. Itai walked himself and their rings into the oncoming surf.
Hopefully, his metamorphosis has been good. Hopefully, they’ll speak soon. Hopefully, their changes haven’t made them hostile to each other. With the renters gone, Opal walks circles around their house’s stilts to avoid considering the worst. Her gray streak doesn’t need to widen. She needs no more personal or historical loss.
Something’s in the water.
She spends every night dreaming of bioluminescent stars in a bleak, wet sky.
Six days, eight hours, and thirty minutes after Opal sends her gift, a surprise arrives alongside the news of two sunken sailboats and one missing person: a crevalle jack.
Opal almost trips on it when she steps out to water her banana tree. It’s massive. Four feet of silver, emerald, and ochre. Seventy pounds of forked-fin generosity. It has rolled itself up to her stairs. Flies clump around the bite taken from its stomach. The hook that dragged it to an exhausted death shines in its nostril. Its shredded intestines haven’t yet lost their color.
When Opal gasps, its eye rolls to look at her.
Opal keeps her ring on while she butchers the jack. She periodically stops to link her fingers and clap in excitement, even when she’s slick with gore. The sticky knell of her palms is a chime of gratitude. It floats over the hissing waves.
She buries the bones at the foot of her banana tree. After dinner, she releases a tiny paper plate of fish onto the water.
It floats out of sight.
For every torn trawling net, capsized boat, and uneasy story from an oilman, there is a gift from Itai: an endangered slaughtered sawfish, an eviscerated ochre-and-silver pompano, a fistful of ballyhoo dropped into the wrong waters, a young bull shark heavy with lead, a delicate, deepsea stranger destroyed by a change in pressure. All the refugees killed for a heavenly yacht fleet’s feast crawl, slither, and flop their way to Opal’s feet.
A hand washed up on the beach.
Time means nothing outside of deadlines or paychecks. After a stillborn dolphin gets caught on a crab trap line for days, unable to reach Opal until it’s eaten to the bone (something she broods about even now) she ceases waiting on the beach. She waits in the shallows.
An abandoned trawler drifted ashore.
As a guilty pleasure, as a precaution, she begins going to the park. For a week, she sits breast-deep in boat ramp water every night, salt licking her chin, stingrays gliding around her, undead vow renewals swimming into her lap. (So does litter. She pushes that away).
The crew left it in lifeboats.
“Do you finally feel comfortable?” Opal strokes the underbelly of the flounder blanketing her lap. Gigging punctures speckle its gut. “Can I trust you not to hurt me? Be honest.”
Bon Secour Bay is shallow. She could walk for miles without swimming. Opal fears how she’d look by the time she reached Itai. Her brilliant, ripping terror is gone, but trepidation remains.
We can’t divulge the details . . .
The flounder gently mouths her fingers. Its serrated teeth don’t scratch her. Opal’s reverie shatters when some drunk teenagers, fearing for her safety and sanity, begin yelling at her. Then, when they recognize her, the bottle hurling starts.
She walks home full of glass and apprehension.
Opal isn’t sure who’s giving in return to what.
Her banana tree’s leaves swell into veiny, carnivorous hearts larger than her head. Hope tears at Opal as much as fear. It’s rawer than honeymoon love; it’s more ragged than gull-torn entrails. In her extended isolation, she forgot the feeling of company. To be tempted with it awakens her from hibernation. It sets her insides churning.
Opal starves. She can’t go out without loathing the faceless shunners around her or grasping for them. An atrophied need for community clashes with her exile. How did she last so long without Itai? How can she ensure this hunger doesn’t rush her decision? All of her attempts at conversation get regarded as rude; her ‘hello’s receive discomfort. Her scabbing wounds provoke unease.
Something’s living under the rigs.
The safest landlocked entity in her life is the bait shop butch. Another outcast. Opal claws her way into check-out conversations whenever possible. She can tell the butch is uncomfortable. She’s too desperate to care. One Saturday, she laughs at the news that a trophy fisherman fell onto his own propeller and died. The butch drops Opal’s uncounted cash.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she says. “Someone got hurt! Someone died! How is that funny?”
Opal thinks: ‘why isn’t it funny that the tourists are scared? Their grandparents hunted mine. They’re trying to price me out of my inherited home. They’re trying to hurt my husband. They scream into the sea. They slice manatees. They drag fish to death for sport. They spread disease. Isn’t this funny because it’s deserved? Isn’t it nice to see someone else be the raw nerve?’
Opal says: “It just is.”
I reckon it’s a monster.
The butch asks her to leave.
“Do you still think I’m tender? Do you think I’d stay that way if I joined you?”
Opal speaks to her reflection in the glassy water. Miles away, on the bay’s otherworldly rim, oil rigs smoke. Dawn hasn’t broken. The oncoming storm hasn’t arrived. Copper stings Opal’s gums.
She would rake her palm across sharpened barnacles for someone in need. She shoos cottonmouths across the road. She is capable of joy; of pleasure. Does it matter that she (apparently) has the eyes of a shark? Why is she inhuman for hating people that harassed her and her husband? Why must she smile for outsiders destroying a bay they don’t think she deserves?
Must she bleed and cry in public to show she feels?
That wouldn’t move the shambling shoals that live here. They would see it as an illusion. While apart from Itai, Opal has learned there is no proving herself. This world is simple: if enough people deem something true, it is. Belief trumps reality. Her peacefulness means nothing. Itai’s softness meant nothing. The idea of their violent potential equals action.
The majority has spoken: her husband was wrong about her humanity.
So Opal is a predator. She is a cold, clockwork beast made for evil. Her bones are cartilage, her skin sandpaper, her teeth ever-replenishing. If regret or guilt ever dragged her backwards, they’d flood her gills and kill her. She is thus incapable of these emotions. Might also be incapable of pain.
What do sharks feel when sliced open? Probably little.
Probably nothing.
Only one person believes in Opal’s vulnerability (has laughed with her, consoled her, and pleased her, when she could stand touch) and he’s been underwater for a decade. Who knows what discoveries Itai’s made in the murk. In the labyrinth of oil rig legs or sunless open sea.
It’s hard to tell exactly what he wants when he isn’t here. He may not believe in her anymore. He may not even be a person anymore. Opal only claps in anxiety when she considers the former. The latter might bring them closer.
“Itai,” she says, before her voice flees, “I need a sign you trust me.”
She spits into the shallows.
Minnows eat her saliva away.
An evening later, the next gift comes from deep water wrecks.
The snapper is nothing but scaly muscle rolled in a red-to-coral flush. Its eyes are scarlet. It’s small, this gift slain out of season, but it crawls its way up the shore on tattered fins and tenacity before Opal can see it. When she takes it into her hands, it opens.
In the prickly keepsake vault of its mouth sits an isopod.
It stares at Opal. She stares at it. The isopod, as if to greet her, begins waving its legs. It’s a terrible, flesh-fed gem. It glitters. So does the object in its grip. Opal’s heart overflows in its presence. She reaches for it. With legs crafted for killing tongue, the isopod offers her a rusty heart-shaped locket.
Inside is a molar and a patch of shining, slimy skin.
Opal drives twenty minutes to Gulf Shores, a paradise of palms and bulldozed dunes, to test her taste for humanity. She enters a tourist trap across from gated beachfront property: a cornucopia of towels, neon inflatables, and bottled fetal sharks. Earplug-less, she faces the vacationing crowd. A century ago, Opal’s people tended to this shore. That knowledge sits in her stomach with the swallowed locket.
With every wave of noise the throngs blend into doughy, gaping tides: storm surges carrying pounds of plastic, wealth, and desecrated dead. This is no graveyard of gifts. It’s an abattoir of cleaned, price-tagged victims. Is this worth staying landlocked for? A woman side-eyes her.
They remove Opal when she starts screaming.
The storm is meant for them.
Not intentionally. Opal and Itai have always accommodated forces meant to destroy them. While everyone else ties down their catamarans then flees for condos on calmer shores, Opal sits in front of her rotting bulkhead. She stays put as rain stings her face. It soaks Itai’s sweater, then her otherwise naked body. Seabirds flee the yellow sky. Opal, eyes closed, lets saltwater lick its way up her calves.
The gifts arrive with the darkening sky: anglerfish with lovers fused to their sides, decapitated sailcats heavy with roe, pebbles from ruined fish nests. A celebration of change. Carnal grotesqueness. Opal’s fingers dip inside her. Her moans lodge in every coil of shell and empty segment of crab claw, ready to empty themselves into the depths when they wash out.
Opal keeps fucking herself even as pieces of ruined homes wash ashore. Even as driftwood hurls against her shins, bruising her. Milky froth washes in on the waves. It spikes in and out with the tide. It sprays between her curled fingers, eager to enter her. She feels the gifts, soft and skin-like, crowd her thighs. They hickey her hips. A roaring wave builds in Opal’s ears as the tide recedes. She digs her teeth into her lip and arcs her body towards the oncoming storm. Her nerves scream, begging for destruction.
The wave makes land.
Seawater shoots into her nose, into her eyes, into her; a stray paddle turned javelin collides with her jaw. Her teeth slam shut on her lip then through it. Opal’s nerves explode. When the wave withdraws, Opal, all of her ringing, elbows on the sand, holds blood and creamy milt in her mouth. Her neighbor’s skiff, tether broken, floats nearby. Her lungs burn: not for the lack of air, but the excess of it.
The gift begins dripping out of the hole below her lip. It burns. Did Itai’s first gulp of bay feel like this? Opal swallows. Her old fears vanish. Sandy hair and palm fronds catch in her wounds. Itai’s sweater squeezes her. She is ice water, hot current, and agony. She is alive.
She understands what her husband saw in the bay.
“Alright, Itai,” she rasps into the surf. “I’m ready to try again.”
Opal sets out for the oil rigs. The skiff bounces across waves so steep she fears they’ll break her in half. Her bones throb. The bay fumes. By the time she reaches the first oil rig, stormdark engulfs her. Only flare stacks and the scarlet pulse of rig lights pierce it. Curtains of lost bobbers and fishing line debris drape from their pilings. A hanged tern rots in one. She cannot see past the wind or pelting rain.
All quiets.
The engine dies.
Opal, nerves still aflame, hears herself panting. The water is dead. Black. There is no difference between the sky and the depths. The storm circles her, raging, pacing. Opal glides between oil-sucking monoliths on the last of her momentum.
“Itai?”
It’s been so long. Staring into the unknown is worse when she used to know it. Opal isn’t here to wound; she’s too old to survive wounding. She aches. She waits, turning her ring.
A constellation lights beneath the boat.
Itai rises from the deep at a glacial pace. Even then, his ascent rocks the boat. He’s longer than it by several feet. Sparkling lateral lines trace his sides. A long, maroon fin trims his serpentine form. He is quicksilver married to molten glass. A man blown into an oarfish. As his plumed head breaks the surface, Opal recognizes the remains of a human skull under his skin. When his vestigial limbs grip the edge of the boat, metacarpals glitter inside them, outshone only by a band of silver.
Extra bones streak Itai’s body alongside bioluminescence. A wavy rib there. A thread of radius here. The debris of humanity. He’s been smeared into a deepsea comet.
The boat groans. Opal rushes to the other side so Itai can heave himself in without tipping it. His coils land in the bottom with a crash. The boat sinks, its rim almost even with the surface, as all of Itai piles in. His eyes are quicksilver discs the size of her fists. Nothing reflects in them but iridescence.
Opal unfreezes when she realizes Itai is uncertain if she can bear being touched.
She opens her arms. A whole sea’s worth of coils piles into them. The boat overflows. Sinks. That doesn’t matter: her teeth are against teeth, her hopes against hopes, her sticky flesh against sticky flesh. Opal’s desire for sand and sunlight extinguishes when her husband’s depth-distorted voice speaks her name.
She imagines quiet twilight waters. She imagines a place meant for monsters, and gliding alongside company forever.
She imagines being able to bite.
i’ve missed you, Itai says, the taste of the drowned on his breath. every day.
Opal opens her mouth for him and the gulf.
Originally published in The Off Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird,, edited by Marissa Van Uden.
