LUSCA

SOLEIL KNOWLES

You wring your hands, cold and clammy and rough. Skin of teeth, salty with sea brine cuts into the humanlike fat of your palms, and you stare down the edge of oblivion. The wind whips you, sings to you. A full, fat, yellow moon casts a sultry pall over the water, the light disappearing into its mirror image on the sea. You take one step, then another. The blue hole sings its deep, droning song, and what can you do? Resist?

You are five on an island of scrubs and long roads. Of feuds between north and south, screeches disguised as “good morning” and “good afternoon” and “good evening.” You live as inland as possible in a place where the distance between two coasts is the jump from thumb to forefinger.

You cannot go to the ocean. Never the ocean.

Mother grabs you and shakes your shoulders and preaches harder than the priest in Sunday Mass: The water is dangerous. The water will kill you. Stay away. She bathes you with quick scrubs of a rough cloth, in a metal tub barely covered on the bottom with the freshest water straight off the boat. You’ve never seen a boat, save for the broken ones abandoned in the scrubs. The ones that serve no further purpose than to shelter old dogs from thunder. Boats mean ocean. Ocean means death. You let her scrub you raw and put you to bed. You never tell her you hear the waves in your dreams or see a circle of void stretching wide below your feet.

You are thirteen and gangly. You are thirteen and violent. Eighth grade is not for gangly, violent girls, you think as you chew on a piece of salami between hard bread. It doesn’t fill you, nothing ever does. You scratch at your head, your dark, thick, nappy head, and stare at all the pretty, popular bright girls.

They titter and eat rice, crabs, pork chops, and everything else mother says will make you sick. They stare at you and whisper from behind perfectly manicured hands. You are rough. You are gangly. They are soft and they think you don’t belong. You spit out your salami and walk up to them, fists clenched and skin prickling. They sneer at your clothes, at your hair, and ask what you want. You grab one—the brightest, blondest one—and swing her around by her ponytail. Around and around until she’s a screaming top, a flurry of white socks and plaid skirt. She hits a tree when you’ve finished, and before those stunned, stupid girls can call someone, you’ve spat at their feet and stomped off. The blonde is crying, her face red and splotchy. She is not beautiful. Not anymore.

Mother makes you break a switch when you get home. The principal called her, and she stands there waiting for you with arms crossed and a thousand admonitions on her lips. She spews those admonitions in stops and bursts as she leaves red welts across your arms, your thighs and back. Never do that again, she screams. Never use your strength. You will kill someone. She sends you to bed with no food, but it’s okay. You are no more hungry than you always are. You are ravenous, starving, and deep in your soul, you know it is a hunger that will never be satiated.

You don’t mean to do it. You are so hungry.

The ram comes snuffling into your yard at half past midnight. You hear it clopping around, hear it tearing at your grass and your bushes and your corn. You need to run it, so you tiptoe out of the house. It stares at you, blank and foolish in the moonlight. You open your mouth to shout, to tell it to go away. Instead, your tongue lolls. Your mouth waters and your stomach opens because there’s a bur in the fur on the edge of its tail and the bur has made a nick, and blood—a tiny pinprick of blood—spills from that nick. You are hungry. You are so hungry. You can never be filled, but this ram will help.

When you charge, it stands no chance. You grab it. Your very skin is rough enough to tear away clumps of fur. The ram bays into the night, and then stops. Silences. Hot blood soaks the dirt in a strange sort of sacrifice. You are not filled, but for once, you come close.

One ram. Then two. Then a flock.

People blame the dogs. People start poisoning the dogs, and you watch their bodies burn in piles and droves and explosions of kerosene. The fire offends you, offends your very being, and mother cannot pry you out of your room for days on end.

When she finally sends you to school again, with dark red caked and flaking beneath your nails, you meet no one’s eyes.

The girls bemoan their poor pets, their poor sheep, their fathers who lived off of those sheep. Their faces grow red, and you can smell it. The life flowing just below their skin.

They are better than rams. They scream like rams.

You sit through lessons, writing down numbers and letters and answers to questions until your slate is full and your chalk is nubby, and all you can hear in your ears is the rush of blood in the water. You close your eyes and see that big blue void. Thunder rumbles in the distance. You taste salt and iron and decide you’ve had enough for one day. Your bike is parked outside, and it takes only a second to grab your bag and slip from the classroom. The teacher only knows you’ve gone when you’re already down the road and the rain is starting to pour in sheets, creeping closer.

Your legs work, you pedal harder. You race the rain until you’re standing on your bike, until your skirt is flying behind you and the downpour grows ever closer. Rogue droplets fly out of their ordered lines and catch the back of your neck, of your legs. Your skin itches. The rain reaches out, grabs the back of your skirt and makes sure that even once you’ve reached home, it has won the race. You toss your bike and limp inside, wet skirt obnoxious against your legs. You peel it away. Your legs itch, and when you scratch, your skin feels like it’s made up of a million tiny teeth. Mother watches you with desolation, with sadness and failure and anger. She throws away the skirt. You cannot stay here. You are being sent to the capital; where the buildings are bigger and the people, more strange. Nobody cares in a city like that, and you will disappear like a drop in the ocean. There is less room for mistakes there. There are no rams in the capital.

Mother sends you off with one carry-on and a kiss to the forehead.

She sends you off with the promise that your new school is nice, that you’ll live in a dormitory and make new friends.

She sends you off with the promise that you are safe.

You see the blue hole from the plane window. It looks so small. So plain. You laugh. What a magnificent lie.

You pull at your collar. The uniforms here are no different from home. The school is different, though. Bigger, with a concrete courtyard instead of dust and grass. The classrooms and office are arranged in a perfect square. You stand in perfect lines at a perfect assembly.

You sing the national anthem, and the administrator stands under the sole tree while you bake in the morning sun. They give false life lessons. They quote the Bible and pray and announce things and tell students who must report to the office. You look around at faces you’ve been forced to learn. At faces from Andros with long noses and downy feathers disguised as hair ornaments. At faces from kingston filled with mischief, with too big mouths and hands that go translucent when the sun hits them just right. They do not see you swaying in the unforgiving sunlight. They do not hear the way your veins narrow and cry out. The perfect lines and bored faces sway, and your head cracks against the concrete. The administrator keeps talking. Someone screams.

They pray over your body long before they call for help.

* * *

They don’t talk about it. They don’t talk about the way you sweat and shiver and bay for blood as your skin dries. They don’t talk about your gasp, your cry, the gnash of your teeth as they pour water down your throat.

They look at you the way mother did, with derision and scorn and this child needs one good cutass baked into their stares. They can’t hide you, and so they lie it away.

There is nothing to see.

Heatstroke.

Move along.

The cafeteria serves fish on Thursdays and you race to be the first in line. You order three big plates and snarl at anyone who comes too close. It’s saturated in oil and bread but still it claws at your stomach, at your tongue and your soul in ways the salami never did, in ways the ram just couldn’t. You want more. You need more. The line is too long. The bell rings and like iron to magnets, everyone finds their way back into the square. You go back to class, gnawing on a fork and thinking of bulging eyes, of scales and gills and the deep blue sea.

You are dreaming of a beach, of the water. It licks at your heels, sings to you and pulls you in. Far away and distant, in the memory of a tin tub and flying plaid, your Mother tells you the water is dangerous. She is not here, the deep sings in her tidal voice. I failed with her. She hates me. But I am here for you. I love you. Let me embrace you.

You walk into the waves and split open.

You wake with a headache, soaked to the bone. Iron sits at the back of your mouth, and you know only that it tastes better than oily fried fish. You drag yourself onto the jitney, where the usual morning chatter is replaced with staunch whispers. You drag yourself off of the jitney and into the schoolyard, and everyone is talking. A girl from Andros shakes and ruffles. Her words sound like parrot chatter as she tries to whisper, but you hear it.

Lusca. They whisper. Monster.

“Ain’t nobody see them in years,” one says.

“I thought they gone extinct,” hisses another.

“My daddy gone fishin’ last night and say he saw it,” one pipes above the rest. The students crowd around that one to hear a secondhand tale and you slip away into the girls room.

In the last stall on the right, you stare at your hands. At the webbing flaking away from between your fingers. At the sheen on your skin anyone with lesser sight would mistake for sweat. You leave the bathroom, nudge past the students. They speak of the Thing, of its gnashing teeth and dark eyes. They say it stole a fisherman’s catch, ate it right by the boat. Someone brought their phone. Someone shares the hazy picture.

You go to class and try to ignore the whispers like roiling waves in your ears.

It’s a Tuesday morning when they call you into the office, the air so thick with rain that it sinks down into your lungs. The old lady behind the desk emphasizes “good morning” when you don’t say it first, mutters about rude children after she sends you off to the headmaster.

He’s waiting for you with one leg crossed over the other. In his hand is the phone, confiscated. On the phone, the picture.

“Sit,” he says. Die, he means.

You fold your hands, cross your legs at the ankle.

He puts the phone on his desk, slides it over

“Do you know what this is?”

“A picture, sir.”

“Of?”

“I ain’t know.”

His nostrils flare. A vein sticks out on his wide forehead.

“You don’t know. Are you sure?”

“Yes, sir.” You never wanted to cuss an adult so bad in life. The rain beats down hard on his one little window, and you count patterns in the droplets instead of focusing on his face.

He lets you go with a wave of the hand and a stiff admonition on manners. The rain is still pouring, and it itches your skin as you run off to class.

* * *

On the weekend, you call Mother. She lies and lies and cries and asks why you are asking questions. She screams about the water. The water is evil. The water will kill you, gut you, turn you inside out until you are no longer human. You dash the phone against the wall. Everything is a lie and you are a shred of truth wrapped up in layers of misdirection.

They know now, after that picture. You see it in the way they look at you. The way they watch you dodge the rain and inhale bottles of water when the sun is high in the sky. Mother said you would be safe. Another of her thousand lies. Here, there is no room for magic. Here, they kill monsters.

You close your eyes and see it again.

The blue hole. The dark mystery. The void that sings and cries and pulls you in like it is the only true mother you will ever have.

You need to go back.

The men on the boat look at you and look away just as fast. They do not want to see your eyes, your skin, your teeth. They do not want to see the blood under your nails or the webbing between your fingers. They mercifully leave you alone and shove off.

You left that school and those people with not so much as a look back. You have no mind for them, their ordered world and dull lives. You hold on to the boat rails, watch the sea roil and smile in bursts of foam and schools of fish. You are going home, to scrubs and rams and the void from which all answers flow.

The cliff is rough, the sea is dark. The moon is yellow, and below you, the ocean reaches out her hands to catch you as you jump. You hit the water, and sink. You sink, and sink, until you see the fish. Until you warp, and scream, and finally, finally embrace the ocean. Mother lied, you think as a fin tears out of your back, as your legs stretch and split, split, and split again into eight. As rows of suckers line your new limbs and rows of teeth fill your mouth.

Oh, how she lied.

You catch fish after fish. You catch them and tear at them until blood soaks the water and turns the moonlight scarlet. You tear, gorge, and eat until, finally, the hunger is sated.

The water will not kill me, you think as a group of night swimmers run, splashing, into the waves. As they laugh and swim, paying no mind to the shadows lurking just beneath the surface.

It has brought me, finally, to life.