She’s looking forward to growing her vagina back.
She hopes he’ll be ready for sex.
Drowning all those lumpy miscarriages of Andrew Blankenship really turned her on.
So much, in fact, she decides not to wait.
Swims down to the Niagara Mohawk nuclear plant, turns girl, and floats in the warm discharge current.
Pleasures herself.
Cries so loudly a custodian at the plant scans the water.
Sees only driftwood.
When she gets near her wreck, the sun is going down, throwing lavender and pink all over the sky, the water reflecting it on its gently rippling skin.
A silhouette in black stands out.
A boat.
Very small this time.
A rowboat, the kind you can rent at Fair Haven Beach State Park.
Whoever brought it here must have rowed for hours.
She makes out one shape.
A man.
She dives and swims under the water, comes up near.
He’s playing the guitar now, playing well.
He sings a song in Russian.
Improvised, perhaps, no rhymes, but sung in a gravelly voice full of pain and sweetness.
The man in the boat is young.
Not much light left in the sky, but her eyes are quite good in the dark. She sees he’s bearded, like boys back home were bearded. What is that accent? Someplace rural. Is it a boy? White hairs mix with black on his head, but, yes, a boy. Twenty or so.
He sees her.
“What are you doing so far away?” he asks.
“From shore? I might ask the same of you.”
She doesn’t mean to sound flirtatious but knows she does.
“Not from shore.”
A pelican glides to a landing nearby, nothing but a black shape, as much heard as seen. It positions a fish in the pouch below its beak, setting it up to be swallowed.
“From home,” he says.
“Home.”
He smiles at her.
It is a good smile.
“Are you Russian?” she says.
“So Russian I’m practically made of snow.”
“From what village?”
He raises an eyebrow.
“Why do you say village? Do you think I am a farmer?”
A planet, she’s not sure which one, shines dimly in the freshly minted night.
“City, then. What city?”
“Your city.”
“You are not from St. Petersburg.”
“But I am!” he declares in his rural accent. “And not a farmer.”
“What then? Besides a liar?”
She is smiling when she says this.
“A soldier.”
It is easy to picture him on a horse with a wool coat and a saber, fine boots showing off his fine ankles. It is easy to picture him kissing her, coming underwater with her, down to the ship. She knows just where she will put him.
“I like soldiers,” she says.
“Then come closer!”
She does.
“I want to kiss you!” he says suddenly, like a boy saying it for the first time.
She flicks her tail, moves closer.
No.
Not yet.
They should enjoy this part… the other is so brief!
She stays just out of arm’s reach, smiling, her dreadlocks trailing in the water.
“Will you tease me now? Is that your game?”
“You can’t begin to guess my game, boy-who’s-not-from-St.- Petersburg.”
So dark.
Can he even see me?
“You have a beautiful smile.”
She laughs.
“You are from a village of blind men! My smile is the worst part of me.”
“And you smell like Samarkand.”
“If Samarkand had a fish market perhaps. Are you being cruel? Is that your game?”
He just smiles at her.
You can’t begin to guess my game.
She thinks it is time.
She moves to the side of the boat, wiggles come hither with her finger.
He leans down.
Tickles her nose with his beard.
She giggles.
Stars behind him now.
The planet faintly red, must be Mars.
The moon past half full.
He puts his lips to hers.
Cold.
Colder than hers.
She withdraws, looking at him.
“Who are you?” she says. “You do seem familiar.”
“I am your lover,” he says.
“You’re not Nikolai. You’re not the boy I jumped for.”
“No. I am your new lover.”
“Are you dead?” she says.
“Very much alive.”
“Your name?”
“Moroz.”
Frost?
He shows her his index finger.
Looks at her with great significance and solemnity as he slips his finger into the water.
As if consummating their marriage.
Taking her hymen.
It stings, but not down there.
Her skin stings with cold where the water has frozen in a block around her.
She is the core of a small iceberg.
She cannot move.
She begins to speak, but he puts his finger to his lips.
“Shhhhhh,” he says, and a gentle snow falls, as fine as ice shavings, only over them, coming from no cloud.
Mars still glinting above him.
The pelican takes flight nearby; she hears it but cannot turn her head.
It lands on the boat with the man, its feet squeaking on the wet wood.
Still has the fish in its mouth, now spits it out.
Not a fish.
It lands with a metallic clunk.
A knife.
The stars all seem to blur at once, and then, when they become sharp again, the pelican is a woman.
Naked.
Holding the knife.
Pretty, with a mole.
Like old nobility.
She levels the knife at the rusalka’s eyes so the point seems to disappear. Nadia senses this is not a normal knife.
“No, it is not a normal knife,” the woman says.
She knew my thoughts!
“And such simple thoughts. What a shame that such a crude thing as yourself could kill my Misha. Do you remember doing that? The man in the cabin?”
Nodding is difficult, but the rusalka nods.
“Good,” she says. “Tonight will pay for half.”
She draws the edge of the knife across Nadia’s cheeks and nose, cutting her. Her blood is thick, barely runs, as if it can’t remember how to.
It hurts.
When did I last feel pain?
She gasps.
How did she cut me?
“I told you, rusalka. This is no ordinary knife. It is the Knife of St. Olga of Kiev. It drinks magic. It turns fantastical creatures ordinary. It has turned a basilisk into a snake, a cockatrice into a chicken, and a vampire into an effeminate man who did not enjoy the sun. You,” she says, licking the knife, “are already becoming a young girl again. So you may have the pleasure of dying a second death.”
Nadia remembers her first death. The rocks looming up at her, the breeze on her tear-wet cheeks, pressure and a smell like pumpernickel when she hit. The sensation of everything emptying and wrecking like a basket of spilled eggs. It seems closer than it did, more vivid.
“No, you will not be so lucky as to break your neck. And you will not freeze. Freezing is easy. You will die exactly like my Misha died. Drowning. There are far worse things than drowning, but this seems just. You will go to hell more wet than cold.”