A barnacle-scaled boardwalk has seen the last of an orange sunset as starlit Mother Mayoude rises from the depths and releases us into Frolic Night.
If the land-folk were to see, most wouldn't believe, but she makes sure they won't see. Her whale-wide mouth opens in a dark corner of the bay, beside filth-ridden sand and filthier piping, and out we spill from the fleshy pockets in her gums and cheeks and between her me-sized teeth. On most nights, we grab at sea life, caught in her mouth instead of sinking down her throat. Bits of shark, of bitty fish, of crab and seal and squid. Bits of everything.
But tonight we kick across the waves and crawl up the beach, first gasping and then rising on webbed feet. We stretch scaly limbs and flare the great spiny fins along our scalps and backs in displays of crimson and opaque and colors with names I've forgotten.
Shore leave, one sailor called it when Nizi tried to tell him what we are, how our lives work between sea and land. But when he explained his meaning, before Nizi took him into her and then stole his clothes to wear another Frolic Night, his shore leave seemed a fish of another breed. Sailors work at sea upon their ships, never in the pocketed embrace of a mother's mouth, and then play and rest on the land.
Our Frolic Night isn't the same. Yes, we play—Mother Mayoude wants us to have fun—but our joy is not the night's purpose.
It is a tithing.
When we Children of Mayoude have finished adjusting to the lightness of moist wind and the heaviness of dry land, we climb the sands toward the boardwalk and scatter into scant shadows. These coastal edges used to be dim places but for a tavern here, a lighthouse there. Dark and quiet corners remain across the oceans, but Mother Mayoude can't bring us to them often. The numbers of land-folk in such places shrink between visits, and they often have little joy and fewer treasures worth taking.
If we're going to frolic, we have to brave these bright places of neon swirling circles and flashing bulbs above carnival-like games, where land-folk decorate their necks and limbs in glowing tubes as if luring some smaller prey.
I watch Nizi crouch behind a shed of warped wood, open a plastic bag she found between giant teeth one day, and don her sailor's suit. She's a funny creature in this tattered white-and-blue outfit, but she says that's the point. She'll frolic, and the land-folk will be drawn to her visual strangeness.
Why would a tiny land-folk woman wear a big sailor suit if not for attention? Nizi said to me once. They'll give it, and I'll take more.
I wear loose pants and a hoodie. I don't want attention.
“Cute outfit,” a land-folk woman says, baubles shining from her ears, as she passes Nizi. The brick-like land-folk man beside her is watching, they're both watching, and maybe Nizi can take from each of them in her frolicking tonight. I've seen it before.
We Children of Mayoude never frolic together. We'll eye each other from across shadows and lights, but to group together on land is dangerous. Some of us our stolen clothes have tattered and torn apart in Mother Mayoude's jaws to the point it can't hide our scales and fins. Some of us can't pass for land-folk as easily as others, even when clothed. Poor Pomo must stick to dark places, where she nabs balloons and candies, never anything plucked from land-folk bodies. Sometimes she lies in the surf pretending she's a dead animal until unsuspecting land-folk wander close.
In the quiet corners of the world, the land-folk tell stories of us thanks to Children of Mayoude like Pomo. Their elders whisper myths and keep harpoons and firearms ready in case they ever see creatures like her again.
It isn't right. She's no different than the rest of us, but the land-folk treat her so. She can't help her tremendous gills, or that her scales have crossed her facial features. Even if she borrowed my stolen hoodie, the land-folk would never see her as one of them.
The transformation takes each of us in different ways.
I used to wander this boardwalk more often when I had hair instead of scales. The hoodie I wore then was mine and kept me warm against the brisk sea breeze. Nowadays, I keep someone else's hoodie, stolen another Frolic Night, to hide my scalp fin and limb scales.
By then, I had already learned Frolic Night was not a gift but a tithing. We learn this early. There's no confusion when Mother Mayoude demands we go forth and steal.
Music booms from speakers atop narrow wooden poles, these new songs a mystery to me. Land-folk children run by, laughing, their mother chasing them, and I wish to tell her how much easier it might be if she could grow large and carry children in her mouth. When she isn't looking, I pluck the wallet from her open purse, swipe the cash, and drop the leather. Distraught land-folk tend to be distracted, and she doesn't need money like I do. She'll have every night to frolic, but I only have now.
I spot Nizi again outside a trinket shop, wearing mean-looking sunglasses that feel wrong against her pleasant sailor suit. Likely she's stuffed other pairs of them inside her clothes the way she's stuffed herself between the couple who passed her earlier. They each have a hand to the small of her back, and I wonder what she'll take from them.
Our relationship with the land-folk wasn't always resentful and thieving. Mother Mayoude was never young, but when she was another kind of old and the land-folk were fresh creatures on this Earth, they would bring offerings to beaches and coastal crags and clifftops overlooking the sea. The great wet pit of Mayoude would open beneath them, and they would give all she demanded and more. In return, she would let them sail and fish, and she wouldn't harm them.
This was before the land-folk's angry machines and poison. The offerings vanished as they betrayed Mother Mayoude and turned instead to a great taking with no concern for repaying the last of the sea's deep souls.
But Mother Mayoude found a way to make them pay, in bits and pieces.
I tear my eyes from Nizi and her couple before she notices I'm staring. We're not supposed to cluster. When I spot Pomo behind a food truck, I hurry the opposite way down the boardwalk, my loose pants swishing, my webbed feet hidden beneath their wide bottoms. Down the lit walkways, past the screams and rides, I search for another open purse, another treasure.
A wooden outcropping juts balcony-like from the boardwalk toward the sea, where two women snap at each other along its thin railing. One is stocky and wears silver in her ears, nose, and lips. The other is taller than me, and her hair juts from her head like my scalp fin when flared.
Words cut through the air and heels grind into wood. The silver-faced woman reels back one arm, chucks a glass bottle toward the sea, and then storms away. The one with fin-like hair doesn't watch the other go, only glares at the sky as if expectant, chest heaving, teeth bared at the stars.
I wander her way. Distraught land-folk tend to be distracted.
But as I'm about to curl around her side and pick her pocket, she turns to me. A pain writhes in her red-rimmed eyes, but also some species of relief, like she's been waiting for right now to happen for minutes, months, years.
“You lonely?” she asks.
Does she mean I have no one at all, or that I'm alone now? I nod as if answering anything.
“Me too,” the land-folk woman says. “I'm Rachel.”
My throat muscles battle until they remember her speech. “Quay,” I say.
Rachel chins down the boardwalk. “Want to play some games?”
We stroll the boardwalk back the way I came, toward the game stalls that echo seaside carnivals of yesteryear. I've played these before—tossing horseshoes, slamming hammers onto weighing scales, firing squirt guns into clown mouths that could only dream to become the damp dark pit of Mother Mayoude when she surfaces to collect us. If Nizi, Pomo, or any of the others wander near, I don't see them. My attention's caught elsewhere.
Rachel stops us at a stall where a teenager in oversized jacket and undersized tank top explains the rules of chucking darts at balloons. Different balloons give different points, and higher scores mean bigger prizes. Rachel pays for each of us to play, but my hands are clammy and clumsy. I hit one low-value balloon, nothing else, and then watch Rachel lean a dart past her face, back toward her ear, forward again, echoing the harpoon-wielding men upon whaling vessels of yesteryear when they would mistake Mother Mayoude for their prey. Those boats vanished into land-folk legend, their remains never found.
“I wonder about porpoises,” Rachel says, never blinking from the balloon-coated wall.
Porpoises. Like dolphins but different. I try to remember if Mother Mayoude has eaten of them; she swallows so much of the sea that she must have. If I'd seen a porpoise, it would only be shrapnel found between motherly teeth.
Rachel chucks her dart. It strikes between two orange mid-value balloons. “I need to ask, Quay—what's your porpoise in life?”
The Children of Mayoude own nothing but ourselves and what we steal from land-folk. I can't own a piece of the sea. That belongs to Mother Mayoude.
“Don't have a porpoise?” Rachel asks, drawing up another dart. “No raisin for your existence? No fate to your bean?”
She giggles so hard, she drops the dart onto the boardwalk. Its needle pierces wood, and the gentle land-folk teenager who hands out darts says that should count as a throw, but Rachel's welcome to try again anyway. They're trying to catch her attention, oblivious to her distraction. She doesn't notice them, doesn't even notice me, really. This is mimicry of joy while she glances over her shoulder again and again, as if expecting someone like the silver-faced woman to watch us and react.
I bend to fetch the dart—our frolicking is far from done—but Rachel bends for it too. Our faces hover close in the shadow of the game stall counter. My eyes must be black pits here; I see her perfectly, the hazy uncertainty in her eyes, drunk not with alcohol but with pain. Someone's hurt her worse than she knows how to say.
“Have you ever felt like you're the only real person in the world?” she asks.
Only land-folk could ever see life that way. If a feeling like Rachel's once came to me in the past, I've forgotten it in the mouth of Mother Mayoude.
Rachel's hand cups my jaw, where I hide tiny sharp teeth behind full lips. “No, you wouldn't. You're too full of realness yourself. Only fake people project their bullshit onto everyone else.” She plucks the dart from the warped wood beneath us, clambers up the game counter, and throws wild.
The needle pops a high-value balloon. She misses with her final dart, but there's a fire in her now, burning for prizes, for frolic and tithing from the innocent land-folk teen who tends this game stall. Her hands rummage at her jeans, hook fingers into pockets, but nothing pops out except a plastic card emblazoned with her face. She tucks it away and sets fuming hands onto the counter.
I dig into my hoodie's pocket and hand over the money I swiped from the distracted mother before I met Rachel. She stares into me so intensely, for a moment I think she sees the scalp fin tucked beneath my hood.
But then she slides the dollars across the counter and gathers another trio of darts. A low-value balloon bursts beneath the first needle. A high-value one pops beneath the second. The third dart slashes into the wall, but Rachel's already gathering another trio for another try. She doesn't want consolation prizes; she wants something big. Her stare burns the balloons' souls near to bursting before her darts cut past the game counter and into the far wall.
Fury turns to joy when she bursts three big-prize balloons. She hugs an arm around my waist and draws her face close to mine as if we're under the counter again.
As if she wants our faces to touch.
I've seen Nizi with land-folk partners aplenty. Della, Nile, others, even Pomo once, though I doubt that man understood what he was looking at.
Never me. The sailors have been easiest for Children of Mayoude to meet in the past, fueled with drink and frustration, but none ever held my interest, either at sea or during their shore leave. I tried to care, but they were only walking opportunities to steal medallions, keepsakes, precious papers. No intimacy there.
Rachel glows against boardwalk neon, a rhythm to her movements capturing some magic in the alien songs blasting through the air. Her grasp is firm, and I let her bounce us up and down in victory while the young land-folk behind the counter fetches her chosen prize.
We drag away a stuffed white tiger shaped like a teddy bear, its torso larger than my head. It's a treasure I might steal away to Mother Mayoude, but I'm not thinking too hard about tithing right now. I'm thinking about frolicking.
I'm thinking how Rachel's fingers keep worming between mine. A blood-deep pain lurks beneath her skin, and she wants more than anything for someone to root it out. Her eyes seem lost in the night. She doesn't live in purposeful cycles, but a chaotic miasma of existence, always waiting for meaning to drop into her life. I don't know what that silver-faced land-folk woman means to her, but she brought as much confusion and suffering into Rachel's life as she brought joy. Maybe more.
We're another half-dozen game stalls from the darts and balloons, poor in money but rich in stuffed tiger, when a song I recognize finally bursts from the high speakers. The singer has slipped my mind, but I remember the electronic noises and keyboard strokes.
Rachel seems to know this song, too—she tucks our stuffed tiger under one armpit, holds my hands in hers, and pretends to sing. More she mumbles parts of the song and then belts out the chorus in loud, broken squawking. Her noises set a confused tremble in my bones. I shouldn't enjoy this; her singing mimics an unfortunate wading seagull before it drowns in Mother Mayoude's gulping maw.
But I do like Rachel's horrible song. Maybe because I like her and the way she clutches my hands without noticing the faint blue scales along the knuckles. Or she notices and doesn't care, and in that case, I like her even more.
She leads me stumbling between untended game stalls, past boardwalk wood and onto behind-building sand. The shadows hide us from neon, while the air's full of strange new songs, land-folk commotion, and the hush and gasp of the ocean against the nearby shore. There's something perfect about it—if I've ever known the words, I've forgotten them now.
The stuffed tiger drops to Rachel's feet, and my back sinks into the wooden wall behind the derelict game stall as she presses full-bodied into me.
Her kiss is warm and full. I let her take over, the touching old to her but new to me. Does she notice my shrunken ears, or the dark breadth of my eyes on this gloomy side of the boardwalk, or my pointed teeth as her tongue scrapes in and out? I don't think so, at least until her blood-deep pain brings her head creeping up my hoodie's underside, bulging beneath cloth, where she kisses my soft belly and scales.
I could stop her.
Or I could let her discover I'm not like her.
She pauses partway up my chest and then draws her head down and out. Her hands keep my hoodie rolled almost to my neck as she studies my chest, where scales brace nipples and gut, their stripes something like our stuffed tiger, only bluer and greener.
One hand reaches past my face and shoves my hood down. The sensation sends my scalp fin cresting like her hair. One fingertip traces its spines, and a pleasant heat crackles through my bones.
Nizi never mentions how land-folk react when they discover what she is. From how she tells her stories, in whispers across the inner mouth of Mother Mayoude, the sailors never notice. They feel the same as they would with any land-folk woman, perhaps better, and she plunders their belongings while they sleep afterward.
Rachel notices me. She should be scared, what with the myths land-folk tell of us, but her face is fearless. The pain in her eyes ebbs on a drifting tide into something grander—first realization, and then maybe awe.
And then we're kissing again.
I've never frolicked like this before, even when I walked the land freely like Rachel, with land-folk parents who gave me a land-folk name. I was a lonely cold creature who wandered the boardwalk and sang along to its boardwalk songs, even at four in the morning after the towering speakers went silent and everyone had gone home except the drunks and junkies and me.
That's when I first found Pomo in the sands below, crying tearlessly at empty hands. She had no treasures to bring Mother Mayoude, I later learned.
No more loneliness for me then, and no more loneliness now. No more cold. Rachel is a furnace on two legs, from the molten core at her chest to the fiery crackle of two fingers as they slide between scaly legs and slip inside me. We go on kissing, too, and rubbing, and the fire spreads up my center until I scream inside her mouth. When she slides out of me, I draw down her front, open her jeans, and bury my face into her in the same place her fingers touched me. She sounds pleased, so I stay buried. My gills suck greedily at the air, unsuited for it but trying their best, confused at why there's no water, or why I don't free my lungs to do their work.
I can't explain to parts of my body that this is where I belong, frolicking as I please.
When I finally draw back, Rachel crumples onto me, and we curl against the carnival shed, panting into each other and coiling. She never asks a question about what I am, so I never have to give an answer. We're past any talk of a porpoise in life.
The night slinks by as we doze and wake. I search her fingers for that blood-deep pain and crackling fire, but she's cooler now. Land-folk aren't grown to stay out all night, even on Frolic Night. I cup my hands around her fingers to warm them, and then we rise together and stroll from the boardwalk to the beach, hand clasping hand. Sand crunches underfoot, dry and then damp where lingering waves beat at the shore. Rachel looks to the starry sky like before, but not in the same way. A crucial organ has turned inside her, once twisted upside-down, now set right.
I hope I did that.
As the surf abandons the sand in crescents of white foam, a black swell bulges beneath the waves like a head beneath a hoodie, and the water tears open around a great dark maw.
Rachel glances at pounding footsteps around us as the other Children of Mayoude come rushing from boardwalk to shore. Nizi carries sparkling necklaces and a pair of gold-plated watches, and she stuffs them into her bag with her sailor suit. Pomo carries an armload of pilfered fried meats, some yet steaming in the red dawn. The rest of our kind throw off stolen garments, gather treasures, and carry them into the surf to head home. We like our land treasures, and it is enough for Mother Mayoude we've taken from the land-folk, even if she can't use what we've stolen.
“Is that where you come from?” Rachel asks, chinning toward the sea. “Is that where you're going?”
I nod, and I nod again. These are neither truths nor lies, only incomplete sides. My hand squeezes Rachel's finger.
She stares into my eyes, still awed, but the pain is back, too. “Guess this is goodbye.”
She slides her hand from mine, cups my face between her palms, and kisses me again, deep and wet as the sea. Her tongue flicks over mine and rubs purposefully against the sharp points of my teeth, as if she wants them to nick her flesh and fill our mouths with her blood and its pain. I latch my arms around her back, pushing into the kiss.
And then I pull at her body, deciding this is not goodbye.
Rachel fights her mouth from mine and kicks at the sand. “Quay!” she cries.
But my legs are used to kicking, the muscles stronger than hers. I launch us backward from the shore, headed for the horizon where dark waves meet the red-tinted sky. The lowering tide helps me carry Rachel toward the gaping maw at sea, same as it helped Pomo drag me toward Mother Mayoude years and years ago. I jerked and slapped and scratched land-folk fingernails at sea-weathered scales the whole journey, the same as Rachel. My fighting didn't matter then, and Rachel's fighting doesn't matter now. We're already too far from shore for her to swim and escape the coastal shelf's riptide. Even if she slithered out of my grasp, Mother Mayoude's submergence would suck at the ocean surface and drag Rachel drowning into the deep. No one would hear her last scream.
Better she follow me into the motherly abyss, where she'll grow scales and fins and become one of us Children of Mayoude.
I look to her through the watery swirl and rush. Her hands have quit beating, her legs quit kicking. Now she stares inches from my face, lips pursed tight against saltwater spray, her tired eyes asking me through lurching waves: Why?
Her question will be answered as soon as we flow over the gargantuan oceanic lip and into Mother Mayoude's waiting jaws. Fleshy pockets will embrace us, and while the others count their treasures, I'll know mine is one, greater than a stuffed tiger. A land-folk woman, a Rachel, a one-of-us-to-be as Mother Mayoude's saliva begins its work.
Why? The answer lies upon this tongue, between these teeth, within these gums. Despite what she's given me, and I've given her, Rachel will learn the same as the rest of us that Frolic Night is not a gift. Though we have fun and joy, that is not the night's purpose.
It is a tithing.