Aimee Parkison
Shivering at Kingbirds singing, Gina stared at the pool's vest of rotting leaves. Elms, red maples, sweetgums, sycamores, and weeping willows flanked the expansive yard. A Wood Stork sang, then the Limpkin and the Scrub Jay. Birdsong reminded Gina that her brother could no longer hear. Thinking of Hap made her feel guilty for listening. He had lost his hearing in both ears due to an infection contracted while swimming with her. Before it happened, they had both been avid swimmers, diving most evenings into her heated Olympic-sized pool, purchased with her husband's bonus the year she finished her degree in marine biology.
After Hap's misfortune, Gina neglected the property, which her husband Drew had built just for her, designed to her exact specifications, once legendary among friends and neighbors. Covered by industrial-grade fabric for nearly a year, the derelict pool was visible in floor-to-ceiling windows of the master bedroom, kitchen, living room, guest rooms, and dining room, as well as from the French doors of the library, which overlooked the backyard. Sagging and bulging, the mesh was damaged as if clawed by animals.
Envisioning frogs whirling near drowned rats, Gina cringed at floating roaches, all sorts of dead and dying insects trapped with reptiles breeding under the strained cover. Rain weighed it down. Straps and ties, fraying, curved to its middle, filth puddling the texture of pea soup. The house started to fill with scurrying, and she wondered if Drew noticed.
Slowly, shaking from exertion, Gina began to lift the corner of the industrial-grade fabric. Displaced rainwater spilled onto the concrete. Reaching into brown scrim, she tugged a slimy strap.
Dead roaches floated like leaves, collecting a rancid soup of insects, fungus, fur, flesh, and bones, mice and other small rodents floating. Water rippled beneath her feet. She realized it might be a huge snake. But what kind?
Something much bigger than a snake rippled the cover, now circling. She stood back to watch, turning on her phone. Her phone pinged for missed calls, missed texts, all from her brother Hap, messages she couldn't bear to hear. Her phone rang. She answered. It was her mother.
Gina glimpsed another movement beneath the pool cover, rippling like big fish reeling. But what could it be? Was something trapped? Or did something slither to hide in stagnant water? Had her neglect created an ideal habitat for an underwater creature to thrive? She held her breath. The pool cover undulated.
"Hap's gone," her mother said.
"What?" Gina asked, staring at the pool cover heaving and swelling.
"Your brother hung himself and left a note that said to ask you why."
"What? Mom? When?"
"They don't know, probably last night."
Listening to the tropical birds' velvet trilling as wind tickled the palm trees, Gina recalled Hap's laughter, the long summer evenings spent with Drew grilling chicken near the pool while she and Hap swam.
Only three years older than Gina and fifteen years younger than Drew, Hap had a swimmer's body. Several months ago, he had lost his appetite and claimed the taste of food changed with the loss of sound. Once clean shaven, he allowed his beard and hair to grow tangled, scraggly, unwashed. It broke her heart that the tragedy was partly her fault, since it happened in her pool.
Barefoot, she paced near the pool's concrete edge. Cutting her left foot on a rock, she stumbled inside the house. Blotting her bloody foot with a kitchen towel, she recalled Drew's promise that Hap would have the best medical care and that Hap's condition would improve. It didn't. When Hap rejected the state-of-the art cochlear implant, Gina fell into depression, avoiding Hap and Drew, like she avoided the pool.
In high school and in college, Hap had been the captain of the swim team. He went on to compete in the Olympics. Swimming was everything to him, his entire life, and he was everything to Gina. After Hap quit swimming with her, she no longer wanted to sleep in the same room with Drew. She couldn't bear the closeness of his body. Though he never spoke of divorce, his business travels grew more frequent and extended for weeks. Now, she wondered if marrying Drew was just a means to an end—just a way to surprise Hap with the pool of his dreams. It kept Hap in her life, swimming with her.
The pool and the house were still relatively new. After two years of marriage, Drew had hired an architect to design the house for Gina. The architect called the plan "The Pool House." The architect said her neglect of the pool was a crime of moral turpitude, since hers was the grandest house in the neighborhood and a symbol of her husband's love. Gina was still a young wife, twenty-five years old to Drew's forty-two. Though she was Drew's third wife, he claimed she was his first love, his only. It didn't matter anymore because she blamed Drew for what had happened to Hap.
Drew had paid for everything beyond what Hap's insurance would cover. Hap claimed the cochlear implant was worse than silence, since the implant altered sounds. The sounds weren't just disconcerting, but frightening to him. "When people talk to me, it sounds like robots talking," he had said.
Gina walked out, again, through the French doors to stand before the covered pool while remembering Hap swimming at the Olympics. Birds trilled, again. As she poked the hook beneath the pool cover, the Short-Tailed Hawk cries increased in volume, and she felt for Hap, who would never again hear birds or the sound of her voice. Are you still my brother? She wondered.
Now more than ever, she was afraid to play Hap's messages or read his texts. She did something she would regret for the rest of her life: she deleted them.
Watching what moved beneath the pool cover, Gina recalled Hap swimming at the Olympics, in high school, in college, and with her at the new house. Gina constantly stood before the windows, staring at the disturbance beneath the mesh and wondering why Drew seemed not to notice. Drew held her hand softly as she wept, discretely caressing her fingers with his fingers.
That night, she opened the Christmas gift she had bought for Hap—his favorite sea-aged whiskey, bottles sparkling amber. The more she drank, the darker it got, as she obsessed on the pool.
Drew strolled into the kitchen. Gina was surprised to see him, but didn't want him to know. She sipped the whiskey, never taking her gaze off the windows and the pool. Standing behind her, Drew rested his stubbly chin on her shoulder. His hair smelled of evergreen aftershave and citrus perfume. Gina knew Drew was trying to tell her something. She didn't care. She had driven him to cheat. Only a week ago, he had left out his phone so she could see a woman's photographs with explicit texts. The women on Drew's phone were younger versions of Gina. Not the sort of man to be entertained by desperate women, though desperate women were often entertained by him, he left. Gina listened for the squeak of his Italian leather shoes on the tiles as he walked to the garage. She heard the whine of the garage doors opening, Drew's Mercedes rev, driving away, the garage doors lowering.
Opening the French doors, stepping out into crickets singing, she approached what slithered beneath the pool cover. Concealed, it seemed stimulated by her. The longer she stared, the more it stirred.
Undulating and circling, it found her while rippling wildly as water splashed her bare legs. Gently, she crouched to her knees near the edge of the mesh and dipped her left hand under the fabric.
Reaching out to what she could not see, she felt the sensation she had as a little girl devouring horror films. She stroked the cool, filthy water, her left hand gingerly exploring, attempting to touch what moved beneath, slithering sleek and large. Her fingertips only grazed it, and it felt smooth, cool, and muscular. It darted to the other side of the pool. Her hand opened beneath the water, inviting the creature to return the way she would invite a dog to sniff her fingers. The creature swam toward her, slowly.
Something warm and slimy tugged her hand, grabbing her fingers in the water. The sensation was like a large mouth sucking her fingers before a larger, warmer mouth swallowed her entire hand. Now, it seemed her hand had been engulfed inside a toothless hot vacuum. Its sucking brought soothing numbness that left her arm paralyzed.
Though she couldn't feel her left arm anymore, something was pulling her, dragging her into the pool. She felt oddly calm, as if someone had slipped her a Quaalude. Vaguely enjoying the numbing, she sensed danger because something was still holding her hand beneath the mesh as if attempting to pull her into the water. Using all of her weight, she freed her left arm, hanging limp at her side. She couldn't move her fingers. This scared her, but also filled her with an indescribable curiosity.
Later that night, her left arm tingled until she was able to slowly move it again. Red blotches on her left hand and wrist glowed like kisses from a passionate lover. Blotches blistered, burning softly before bursting. Her skin peeled as if sunburned.
Falling into bed, cradling her throbbing arm, in her dreams, she swam with Hap, who told her he was still alive. She woke suddenly, sweating in the dark, convinced his suicide was her fault.
Staring at the falling rain out the windows, she wondered what was wrong with her left hand and wrist. Was she okay? Her arm throbbed harder, grew even warmer before she started shivering, shaking, the feeling of warmth rising and crashing at its peak. A spontaneous orgasm emanated from her left arm.
You've just had a seizure, she thought as she walked out into the soft rain of the dark morning. At the pool's edge, she crouched, slapping her left hand on the pool cover, giving it a good smack, as if it were flesh.
In the chill of the water, she dipped her hand, and a pleasing sensation washed over her. She shuddered. Much to her surprise, she responded with more intensity than she ever had with Drew.
What was happening? She felt as if she were about to fall into the pool, where something was pulling her. Once again, a sensation of a warm mouth wrapped around her fingers, her hand, up to the wrist, now up to the elbow, sucking her beneath the pool cover. To stop from falling forward, she leaned back on her haunches, using her right hand to grasp the concrete.
She recalled a documentary she had seen on the sport of noodling, a sort of fishing where men and women and even children caught giant catfish by allowing the fish to swallow their hands as bait. Noodlers pulled giant catfish, with a hand inside the fish's mouth, onto shore. Could the thing in her pool be a giant catfish? Could she noodle it out of the water? Possibly, she thought, except that it seemed bigger than any catfish she could imagine. She decided to noodle the creature to get a glimpse of what held her submerged hand.
A bulky bulge surfaced beneath the pool cover. She lured it, using her hand, pulling, revealing a hefty inky muscular nose-less, hairless masculine face appearing part human, part octopus. Reaching out to her, its flexible finger webs glistened darkly. Atop its bald head, a sack-like mantle cycled water as if for respiration and removal of waste. Gina jumped back. Lateral fins undulating in wake propulsion, the creature darted backwards, away from her. Like an octopus, camouflaging itself, it seemed to disappear through the tiniest openings in the pool cover and in a cloud of ink. Surfacing, it held a dead rat in its jaws, sucking away the flesh from the bones, leaving only semi-digested lumps of tissue and rodent skeleton. Darting back toward her with jet propulsion, contracting its chest while shooting water through a flexible funnel on its back, it turned the pool into a fountain. Gingerly, Gina stepped toward the creature, leaning down to stroke its head. Its skin changed color and texture to match her skin. Softly, she ran her hands over its muscular shoulders and chest, like a man's shoulders and chest, but with three hearts beating, pumping bluish blood coursing beneath its ever-changing translucent skin. The underside of its hands and arms were dotted with suckers. Its enormous elastic jaws unhinged to swallow her arm to the elbow. Sucking on her, it gazed at her lovingly. Its bright, intelligent, grateful eyes seemed familiar. Thanking her with a look of longing, it resembled Hap! With its mouth sliding up and down her arm, the creature held her entire hand past the wrist in its flexible, elastic mouth, sucking. She heard her wrist cracking and popping, but felt no pain. Her arm and hand were numb, and she felt calmly drugged, experiencing a powerful, pleasing sedation.
Noodling the creature, she used her body weight to pull it up and toward her.
She fell back. It splashed up naked, hairless and inky cerulean, long and muscular. A swimmer covered in iridescent indigo scales, it smiled sweetly with blood on its mouth. She was about to scream when it gazed sadly at her with her brother's eyes. Diving back, it disappeared beneath the pool cover.
The next night, Drew still away, Gina fantasized about the creature's tender gaze, knowing it hungered for her. She recalled the sweetness of that gaze radiating gratitude.
Like a parasite, did it know how to feed off her while making her body need it? Their symbiotic relationship offered a release to her pain—a sexual release more powerful than any orgasm a human partner could ever give. Was the creature a predator that fed on lonely women? Were its eyes a weapon?
She knew it wanted something from her. She fantasized about feeding the creature a single finger on her left hand and decided to try, just to see what it would be like. She could live without a finger, if it helped her find release and allowed her to stare into her brother's eyes.
She gazed down at her left hand, wondering which finger to choose. The pinky or the pointer? The thumb or ring finger? Walking out into the mist, she decided to let the creature decide.
At the edge of the pool, she removed her silk robe and crouched naked on her knees. She slapped the pool cover before sliding her left thumb beneath it. The creature's approach ruffled the cover. Water rippled, and the creature glided toward her. Hooded under the mesh, it peeked out at her, water splashing behind it. She displayed her left pinky. The creature drifted up, closer, staring into her eyes. She stroked its smooth head and face with her right hand as it suckled the fingers of her left. One by one, she moved her fingers in and out of its mouth, feeling the softness of its tongue. Jaws unhinging, its mouth opened, gaping in a way no human could. Placing her left hand inside the creature's mouth, holding its tongue in a clenched fist the way she would hold a cock, she enjoyed feeding herself to the creature, but feared she might lose control. She couldn't feel her ring finger anymore. Blood dripped down the creature's chin. She heard it swallowing, drinking, and crunching. It was devouring her flesh, chomping her bones, and drinking her blood and marrow, but there was no pain, only multiple orgasms that peaked, one after the other, leaving her shattered near the water.
As the creature released her, her left arm appeared unfamiliar. It shocked her. Her left hand was gone—just gone, the blackened wound sealed as if cauterized, the stump of her wrist now inky blue, the color of the creature's skin.
Inside the house, boiling water for tea, she realized she would have to adjust to living without her left hand. She would have to hide that she was missing it, as she wasn't a gifted enough liar to come up with a reason if confronted by her husband, parents, friends, or acquaintances.
Over the next week, she became increasingly secretive, never leaving the house, having food delivered, hiding, so that her friends and family assumed she was sick from mourning.
Whenever she opened the French doors overlooking the pool, the sounds of Vireos and bullfrogs greeted her. She heard dogs howling and owls calling all night. Drew stayed away, going on one business trip after another. The more she heard the night sounds, the more she felt they were somehow connected to the creature trying to communicate with her by mimicking sounds in the yard. The more she listened, the more she worried she might be in love.
Grateful for Drew's distance, she went back and forth between longing for the creature and missing Hap. Until it rose from the murk, she'd worried the only real love in her life had been her brother and her only real joy swimming with him. Building the house had been an excuse to build a pool to keep her brother close. Since the creature's eyes resembled Hap's eyes, it made her recall Hap swimming in the pool. Whenever she saw more movement under the pool cover and knew the creature needed to feed, again, she realized it needed her and was hungry for her.
Gingerly, she approached the covered pool as the sky darkened. Soon, it would be night, the creature's feeding time. She drew back the pool cover so that its face peaked out at her. It wanted to eat her, to partake of her, again. She gazed into her brother's eyes when she began to fear giving away another part of herself. She tried to feed the creature food from her kitchen—raw steaks, fried chicken, bananas, bread, potatoes. It refused all human food. She tried to feed it grass and insects and leaves. It refused to eat them. It made clicking sounds like the owls as its eyes danced over her body, flirting, seducing her with sounds of the night. She removed her gown and allowed the creature to lick her toes, legs, knees, arms, belly, and neck. It suckled her breasts. Politely, its tongue circled all over her body as it gazed up at her questioningly, so that she realized it would not consume the rest of her without her consent.
It eased back.
Without opening its mouth, it began to speak in her brother's voice, saying it needed her.
She fed it her left arm up to the shoulder. As it ate of her flesh and bones, she was consumed by a warming, pleasurable release, another cataclysmic orgasm, bringing her into a new realm of exquisite liberation. Afterwards, shaking inside her house, she ransacked her closet for shawls to hide her disfigurement.
Over the next several days, she discovered how empowering it was to keep a secret from others, especially her husband. Her life had never been so entirely her own, though her body was missing a limb. The secrecy about her body was a challenge. It exhilarated her. Her husband never guessed. This emboldened her over the next several nights, when she began to feed the creature her toes, one at a time, by slipping her feet beneath the pool cover.
She offered her right foot, then her entire right leg. Soon, her limbs were gone. The French doors propped open with chairs, she rode a skateboard to propel herself by flicking her head and neck. She kept her condition concealed, never leaving the house, hiding what was left of her body under quilts and shawls as she lay on the sofa, which she pulled herself onto by biting the cushions and yanking with her teeth.
She began texting with her nose and asking people not to visit her. When Drew returned home, she claimed she was unwell. She requested he carry the grocery deliveries from the front door to the kitchen floor, but not to come close to where she rested, since she said she didn't want him to catch her sickness.
When Drew was away during the day, she crawled along the rugs and carpet and tiles by using the thrust of her chin and her teeth, biting at soft furnishings and curtains to pull her body on the skateboard from the kitchen for food and into the bathroom to take care of necessities in the shower and in the trashcan. However, as the days passed by, Drew was growing suspicious and concerned.
"You're unwell?" he asked.
She whispered, "Don't come any closer, please."
"Should I call the doctor?"
"That won't be necessary."
All along, she felt the creature calling her. She knew it was hungry, and she wanted to go to it, to feed it, but she thought she had nothing left to feed it, until she realized she still had her breasts. When Drew left the house that evening, she allowed the creature to consume her breasts, slowly, after it suckled her for nearly fifteen minutes.
Exhausted, she pulled herself into the living room, covering her nakedness in blankets and rapidly falling asleep. Waking, she felt a presence standing over her. Drew, leaning over, stared at her with apprehension. Getting closer, he was reaching for the blankets. She yelled at him to stop. He said he knew something was wrong, that she was hiding something from him.
He accused her of keeping secrets, and she accused him of having affairs. He begged forgiveness before ripping the blankets off, exposing her devoured body. Shrieking, he stumbled backward, hitting his head on the corner of the marble coffee table. His eyes rolled back as blood spurted on the beige carpet, a red halo.
Before Drew regained consciousness, Gina dialed 911 to call an ambulance for him, and then squirmed hastily to the pool on her skateboard. Shivering with lust, she neared the pool cover. The creature surfaced swiftly, its mantled head tearing the overlay like a gown as she gave it permission to devour her.
With a single kiss, lips pressing together, woman to creature, tongues tangling, its mouth opened over hers, its jaws unhinging and expanding so that her chin, nose, eyes, forehead, and then her entire head was engulfed by the creature's mouth. She was being swallowed in warm briny liquid. Immersed, she was inside the creature, as she had only ever allowed her lovers to go inside of her, merging emerged.