It was my fourth date with Imelda. She was a year older than me. She didn’t dye her hair and was a retired librarian and said if I ever caught her playing Bingo I had her permission to kill her on the spot.
We had met through Back from Heaven, the nonprofit I founded to recover the bodies of those who died on Everest. She had joined me on our latest mission, our most successful to date: three deceased climbers retrieved, identified, and returned to their loved ones. One ascent and she was hooked; she joined the team as a full-time volunteer researcher.
And now we were seeing each other. And things were moving fast. Just four dates in and we were going back to my place.
I unlocked the door, reached around to flip the lights, then gestured gallantly for her to enter. She curtsied and strolled in.
And saw the tanks. I still had the smaller Kreisel with my original smack of jellyfish eternally smacking into each other, but what stopped her midstep was the new tank. It took up the wall, a tremendous bubbling cauldron of cornerless glass. In it, the two most enormous jellyfish she’d ever seen pulsed with slow dignity through the water, their blue-while auras commingling. A third one, still just a polyp, trailed behind them.
“Jesus!” she said. “Wow. Just wow.”
“Do you like it?” I asked, moving behind her, wrapping my arms around her waist.
She leaned against me. “They’re so beautiful.” And then, searching for a more precise description, “So unearthly.”
“My son’s an underwater filmmaker. He discovered this species of jellyfish.”
She turned to face me, rested her hands on my shoulders. “No!”
“Really. You’ll meet him someday. And I’ll have to show you his masterwork: The Aphotic Ghost. He won an Oscar for it.” I directed her attention to the mantle.
She looked, then turned back to me and smiled. “You are just endlessly surprising, Enrique.” Then, turning herself back to the tank, but belting my arms to her body, she said, “So when do I get to meet the Academy-Award-winning filmmaker?”
“It’s going to be awhile, I’m afraid. He’s spending time with his mother right now.”
“Ah. I see. Let me guess. You and she can’t be in the same room together?”
“Not at all. We’re in the same room all the time. And she’ll always have a special place in my heart. It’s just that … well, let’s just say we come from two different worlds.”
“Say no more,” she said, squeezing my arm. She turned back to the larger tank and, after a moment’s contemplation, she pointed at the polyp and said, “The tiny one’s cute. Does it have a name?”
“She does,” I said, pulling Imelda a little closer. “Brumhilda.”
THE FOWLER’S DAUGHTER
by Michelle Muenzler
It was one of those autumn days, late in the season, where the scent of wood-smoke clung to the air like a drowning man. The dry meadow grasses crackled beneath the long stride of my boots, and the cold iron of my dad’s shotgun bit through the layered flannels that had also once been his. I’d flushed two pheasants in the far meadow, and now the strung-together pair swished against my back in a halting rhythm.
At the fence, I slipped through an old break. Its wood had been strong once. When I was a little girl, I had clambered along its length and pretended to fly. But that was a different me, a different fence. Given enough time, everything falls apart.
Like my dad, for instance.
I cleared the last hillock, bringing our shack and the pond into view.
“Dammit.” My curse startled some quail into flight.
In the brown waters of the pond, my dad was sunk to his waist, floundering after the geese. They cackled and hissed and led him deeper. I slid the gun from my shoulder and set it in the grass along with the pheasants.
“Out of the water, Dad!” I called, hastening toward him.
His slow spiral inward continued. I grit my teeth, splashed into the icy water, and dragged him ashore; all the while, a furious itching staccatoed my calves.
“Where is she?” he asked, his voice the high-pitched whisper of a child. He shivered in my hands.
“Not here.” Never here. At least not when we wanted her.
I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket, wiped the blood spittle from the corner of his blue-gray lips, and carried him home. A change of clothes and a triple layer of quilts soon quieted his shakes.
“I’ll be back,” I said.
His eyes were already gone, lost in old memories. Did he ever dream of me, or had the geese taken even that? I trudged to my fallen catch in the meadow, a light wind pricking my cheeks and warning of colder days to come. As I bent to retrieve the pheasants, a sudden itch crinkled deep in my spine. I turned to the northern horizon. There, a dark wedge of geese pierced the blue glass of the sky like a bullet.
Mother was coming home.
I cleaned the pheasants and dropped them into a pot of yesterday’s broth. Over the long afternoon, they disintegrated, flesh splitting from bone, and filled the shack with their fatty aroma. When only a sliver of the sun remained on the horizon, I left my dad wrapped in quilts and marched to the pond’s edge, an old dress clenched between my fingers. Mother was waiting, swimming in quiet circles.
She changed as the last rays of red slipped away, her feathers falling into gold-flecked dust, her skin stretching toward the sky. Human again, if you could call her that.
She struggled to her feet, unsteady, and wiped the mud from her knees. “I am home.”
Her voice always startled me at first, too quiet for my memory of it and too soft for the hard angles of her face. I squeezed the dress until my fingers burned.
“Where’s your father?” she asked.
“Sick.” He was more than just sick this time, though.
“Then I must see him.”
I pulled the dress against my stomach. “It’d be better if you didn’t.”
She touched my cheek, and a deep itch fluttered in my shoulder blades. I jerked away and shoved the dress into her hands.
“Don’t touch me.”
“I am your mother.” A shadow flitted across her brow.
“In blood alone.”
She stared, her goose-dark eyes unreadable, then pulled the dress over her head and disappeared into the shack. I collected an old quilt from the porch and huddled near the pond to wait for dawn. Whenever the wind bit too hard, I tossed stones at the dozing geese. If I could have no rest, neither could they.
In the gray hour before dawn, Mother emerged, her face tight and pale. I rose from the grass, quilt still drawn tight around my shoulders. A wet hollow marked where I’d sat the night through.
“Satisfied now?” I refused to soften the bitterness in my voice. She’d kill him with her leaving.
“I will come for you in the spring.”
After my dad was dead, she didn’t say.
“I won’t be here. I’m selling the land and moving to the city. There’s already a developer lined up.”
Her eyes were quiet, but the trembling of her chin told me my barb had struck. She pulled the dress overhead, folded it carefully, and handed it to me. With her eyes on the eastern horizon, she stepped into the pond. I hated her stillness on the edge of change, her calm acceptance. I hated how easily she could let her humanity slide away, like the sloughing of dead skin.
I hated how easily she could leave us, every time.
“Wait,” I said, almost biting my tongue. Why should I have to speak if she would not? “You could stay. Until the end at least. Maybe I would feel differently then.” Or maybe she would remember what it was to love her family more than a flock of birds.