When the Tides Held the Moon

by Venessa Vida Kelley

I’d be damned before I saw a month of late nights and missed lunches crumble in the Brooklyn winter because this fuzzy aguacate couldn’t wait for tar to set.

This guy’s Brooklyn accent was thick enough to insulate a house. I couldn’t wait to try it out later.

Pain looks the same in merpeople as it does in humans.

“Emmett, do the damn world a favor and shut the hell up,” Matthias whisper-shouted. “You act like you and Eli got the monopoly on running away. Like nobody else done had it rough as you. Of course I believe him, ’cause I know a survivor when I see one. And if I was you, I’d take a long look at my pale-ass face in the mirror and think about how that Caribbean kid crossed an ocean for a slice of freedom America ain’t never gonna give him.”

“They have souls,” you had told me once the smoke had cleared from the estuary. “You saw how they grieve.” The other man, vested like an eel with eyes like a trench-dweller—whose thunderous blast took you away; I am loath to believe he has ever grieved. But the one I harmed today does not have such eyes. When you died, he looked at me, and in his gaze was my own horror reflected. Perhaps that is why I leapt for his throat.

“I do not understand humans, but I think I am beginning to understand you.” “You are?” “You heard the whistle, and so you came to soothe my ears with music.” I cleared my throat and pulled my cap lower over my eyes. “So?” He tilted his head thoughtfully and, in English, said, “So, your name suits you too, Boy Named Kind.”

learned all I needed to know about what the world thinks of ‘someone like me,’ by which I mean . . . Manos a Dios, I don’t know how to say this . . .” I drew a deep breath. “A Puerto Rican boy who falls in love with other boys.” If I hadn’t had it already, I had Río’s complete attention now. I thought my whole body might dissolve through the grill from shame. “What ridiculous savagery,” he breathed in English, “would make humans spurn a person for something so . . . so . . . ordinary?”

“I am grateful you told me your story, though,” he said, “and sad indeed to learn you are not free to love who you wish. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps the Currents brought us here because they knew we would meet.” My face flushed. “Why do you say that?” He looked pityingly up at me through the iron bars. “Because we are both caged.”

What would he do if he knew that, when he is near me, I hunger for more than my freedom?

Río went quiet again and let his eyes rest on my face, the way he often did when the night deepened, and sleepiness thinned out our banter. Except now, his gaze held something more, a curious intensity I’d been noticing more often as spring grew warmer. “Why’re you lookin’ at me like that?” I ventured through half a smile. “What? I got something stuck to my face?” “It brings me pleasure to look at you.” My hands tightened around my cuatro. “Though,” he added, surveying my surprise, “you seem strangely unaware of your beauty.” “Beauty?” His voice lacked the sarcastic punch I’d grown accustomed to whenever he was kidding around. But he was still wrong. People didn’t cross the street to get away from beautiful people. Beautiful people didn’t invite ridicule or hate just for breathing the same air, for taking up space— “Merfolk do not lie,” he declared, as if he could hear the mean thoughts stomping around in my head. “But as it seems you do not believe me, let us make an agreement.” No. No agreements. “Río—” “One day, I shall tell you how beautiful you are and why it is so. And on that day, you must believe it.”

How could I explain it to him? How cruel his kindness felt sometimes? Brown, Puerto Rican, and inverted, I was a walking composite of undesirable traits, and every time he said I was something more, I wanted to shake him, make him understand that I couldn’t survive in this stupid town if I believed I was better than the petty allowance of scraps I lived on. More treacherous than hoping for a seat in Ornamental was believing in a world where Río wanted me.

“You could not influence the Shark’s actions any more than I could,” he argued, his voice finally rising. “Merciful Neptune, have you no compassion for yourself?” The answer, we both knew, was no, though the word never found its way past my clenched teeth. I wanted to run without stopping, bury myself in the ground. Anything to stop feeling like a wounded animal being hunted by a ruthless god. “Si te digo la verdad . . .” My eyes squeezed shut as the darkest secret I carried rose up my throat like an oil slick in water. “Sometimes I think the hurricane hadn’t meant to leave me behind. That everything I am is an accident because I should’ve been swept out to sea.” “Enough!” I looked down. Río looked stricken. “Enough of this,” he said again. “Come into the water.” “¿Qué dijiste?” “I wish to comfort you. I cannot do it with bars between us.” My stomach dove into my heels at the suggestion. “Comfort me? But—” “Do humans not console each other when they are in pain?” “They do—we do, but . . .” “But what?” Staring unblinkingly at him—at the scar Morgan had carved into his skin—I said the words in Spanish so I didn’t have to bear the sting of them in English. “No lo merezco.” His blue eyes flashed stubbornly. “You do not know what you deserve. You think yourself unworthy for your hand in my captivity when I have already forgiven you! Why do you refuse to forgive yourself?” “After everything I let happen—” “Of everyone who dragged me from the water that night, you are the only on...

“Boy Named Kind,” he said softly, “when was the last time someone showed you kindness?” My agitated brain stuttered in search of an answer. Kindness was Tití Luz. The steward on the USS Carolina who didn’t toss me overboard and gave me a job. Even the Menagerie, despite everything, had offered me a life away from fire and smoke. “I wouldn’t be alive without it,” I said. “¿Y ternura?” A hand left my waist to move a curl out of my eyes. “What of tenderness?” I swallowed. “Sonia kissed me.” “That was not tenderness.”

“Eres inocente, Benigno.” His voice carried only as far as my ears—so I’d be forced to listen. “Don’t—” “Escúchame bien. You are innocent.”

“I dream of you.” I waited for him to drop me. He didn’t. “What do you dream, Benigno?” My arms tightened around him to curb the shaking in my limbs. “That I’m with you. Under the water. Holding you just like this,” I whispered into his shoulder. “They’re the happiest dreams I’ve ever had.” His breath disturbed the last strands of dry hair on my neck as he spoke. “Then why do you sound so sad?” I was wrong. The real leap off the tenement roof was about to come out of my mouth. “’Cause the prettiest girl in Brooklyn wants me, but my heart wants someone else. Someone who knows me better than any human alive—including me. And I don’t even know his name.” Tears were forcing their way into my eyes again. “All I know is that he misses the moon. If I could, I’d ride a roller coaster to the sky just to steal it for him.”

“What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe”—my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—“from you?” “Your heart in my keeping,” he whispered, “would always be safe.” No one leaned in first. Our lips met and in one bright, moonlit moment, the whole cruel, confusing world dissolved in brine. There was only Río—fin and flesh, salt water and sugarcane—and I gave in to his touch like flotsam washing ashore after an age adrift. It was nothing at all like Sonia’s eager, bruising kiss. Río’s mouth was careful, unhurried, and glided over mine with a gentleness I wasn’t sure I deserved. I’d gotten so used to being treated like I couldn’t feel pain; I was a machine meant to labor until the gears failed and I became just another punchline to a white man’s joke. But I was one of Río’s seashells in his hands—treasured, precious, apt to shatter if pressed too hard.

“I did not know my heart could bend toward a human’s touch,” he said quietly. “Until you.” Still clinging to his shoulder, I ventured to lay my free palm upon his cheek. “Does that scare you?” “Less than perhaps it should,” he said soberly. “Are you frightened?” I was terrified. But it was the exhilarating kind. Dreamland’s thrills couldn’t rival the thrill I felt kissing Río. “Only ’cause I’ll be begging you to teach me to swim after this.” He touched his nose to mine and tightened the circle of his arms. “Then kiss me again, and it will make us brave.”

“Río,” I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. “You make me feel like I’m kissing the tides.” “Benigno,” he whispered back. “You make me feel like I am holding the moon.”

He tastes of sky, this tender man who sings of the sea and named me river before he had ever heard of the Currents.

“I don’t believe it,” he murmured. “This whole time, I been thinking you was Mr. Shy Guy when really, you’re just like Humpty and Dumpty!” “Who?” “Eli and Emmett. You don’t want Sonia ’cause you don’t want ladies, full stop. I get that right?” I stared down at the ground. “You gonna put that in your memoir?” He teetered away from me, his hand over his mouth, then spun back. “Brother, I am far more concerned about what Sam’ll say when he finds out the merman who’s been giving him the cold shoulder since day one is playing Romeo and Julio with the hired hand.”

Are you my captor or my savior? I ask.

Son of Neptune, I answer. I am your harmony.