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Don’t waste your damn life trying to smother a spark what wants to be a blaze.”
How would it feel to wake up to the ocean of his eyes? To measure his perfect dimensions against my imperfect ones, breathe in the turquoise sea off his skin, and feel like home had come to find me instead of the other way around?
Despite the engine’s relentless noise, I feel it—the quiver of his pulse through the water, swift as a sailfish—and dare to wonder if his heart beats this way for me.
“Just because she looks at you does not mean she sees you,” Río said with all the steadiness I couldn’t muster myself. “Otherwise, she would not have taken what you did not offer.”
What was the point of crossing the ocean just to find a different hell everywhere I go?” “Do not say that,” he said gently. “What would become of me without you? Where would I be without my Barnacle?”
“I can’t swim,” I whispered. “I can carry you.”
“Boy Named Kind,” he said softly, “when was the last time someone showed you kindness?”
When my sniffles turned to strangled gasps, he whispered, “Release it.” As if his voice had cut the tie, it all came out—years of painful isolation in an audible gush from the shunned recesses of my heart. I could hardly stand the sound it made, broken and desperate and raw as iron-scalded flesh. I sobbed.
“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.”
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.”
“Your emotions are not madness. Nor are you broken. Everyone else—the cowards who taught you that keeping your heart safe meant caging it—they are broken.”
“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.”
“I did not know my heart could bend toward a human’s touch,” he said quietly. “Until you.”
“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.”
A guy can hardly focus on stripping varnish once they’ve seen salt water roll off the curve of Río’s bottom lip; I was out there sanding benches with the energy of a dozen men just to cope.
Any healing this water may bestow has run out, and without Benigno here, I can find no distraction sufficient to quell the burning in my fins.
I been in the sideshow business for ten years, six of them with the twins. Men sweet on other men, ladies sweet on ladies, folks sweet on nobody at all—who cares so long as everyone’s living happy and hurtin’ no one?”
Holy shit, Benny, what does this merman even see in you?” In spite of myself, I cracked a smile. “Who knows. Something. It don’t matter to him that I’m colored and speak Spanish, or that my whole family’s gone, or that he’ll outlive me by like a thousand years or something. It’s like what Igor said about his wife,” I murmured. “He just sees me, Matthias.”
“Yeah, well, Río makes me feel free,” I said. “Like I don’t gotta prove anything—because he thinks I’m enough as I am. When I’m with Río, I feel like maybe all my dumb decisions weren’t so dumb if they brought me to him.”
“I see someone brave and beautiful and too noble for a world as unjust as mine,” I said in Spanish. “With a heart as wide as the ocean if it was willing to bring a lonely, broken thing like me into it. You saw a man starved for air and tenderness and gave him both. You are so much more than a fool like Morgan could ever comprehend.” I covered his hand with mine and traced my thumb over his knuckles. “From the moment I first saw you, I knew you were a miracle.”
“Te quiero, Río.” I reached into the water, found his hand, and lifted it to my chest. “You call me the moon, but it’s you. You’re the beacon. Dios mío, I’ve loved you since the moment you touched my hand through the glass.” When Río’s eyes went suddenly wide and unreadable, I hastily added, “You don’t have to say you feel the same if you don’t. Doesn’t change anything. I just wanted you to—” Río stopped my mouth with his fingertip. “Benigno, surely you know,” he breathed. “You are my heartsong.”
What if passion—the sort that melts down all your raw, untempered pieces in another’s heart—needed something more? A different ingredient. A higher temperature. What if intimacy had always been out of reach because I’d never loved anyone like I loved Río?
Making love, for merfolk, is a consummation of a different sort.” “What sort?” He brushed my hair from my eyes and let his fingertips trail the curve of my face. “Two rivers converged,” he whispered. “Two breaths made one.” His caresses traveled farther down. “A union most sacred.”
“Then your soul would bind to mine. And mine”—he firmed his iron grip around my waist—“to yours.”
That’s when, like a blow to the chest, I remembered. I’d seen a face like hers before. In the rapids. In the hurricane. That face had been mer.
The elders of our harmony could not fault me my transgression, for I felt the whole of the Atlantic sing in his heart for me. His love is so sublime I thought it might turn me to foam.
Merciful Neptune, without the Currents’ call, I pray for guidance some other way. For if Benigno cannot free me from this cage with haste, I will be foam in earnest soon enough.
“In Russia, merman is ‘vodyanoy.’” His chuckle made the bowls rattle. “Is much more older and more ugly creature than merman we capture, but anyway—vodyanoy is master of water, eh?” He gestured at me.
“Mr. Benny is master of fire. Is make sense for blacksmith and merman to be paired.
“Your love has been a shield and sustenance to me. You revived me.”
“My whole life, I’ve never loved anyone like I love you,” I whispered. “How can you expect me to cast you back to the water when I’ve only just found you?”
Jesucristo, nothing makes a lowlife feel high like stomping on folks more spurned by society than they are.
“Which god do I gotta pray to?” I gasped through tears. “No me importa. I don’t care who’s out there, just don’t let him die. Please, I’ll do anything. Anything. Just tell me what to do
“But what I do remember,” he continued quietly, “was thinking I was gonna die getting Eli out, or I was gonna die without him, you get what I’m saying?”
When our folks saw we was a couple of inverts, they did what hate makes people do. But me . . .” Emmett’s rugged features melted into an almost unrecognizable softness. He spoke just above a whisper. “All I could see was the boy I loved.”
“How much do you love him?” he asked. My voice still sounded like steel wool. “I can’t breathe without him.”
“My aunt used to say, ‘Hay una infección sobre la humanidad.’ That humanity had a disease. It took meeting Río to figure out what it was. It tricks folks into thinking the only way to survive a lifetime getting pissed on, is to piss on somebody else. It locks a person in jail or some other institution for being different unless they’re willing to get on a stage and let folks pay three jitneys to call ’em ‘freak’ to their face.”
“I love him,” I repeated. “And he loves me. And I don’t care if that makes me the wrong kind of freak. I can live with losing the job and the warm bed and the only family I’ve ever had in America. But I can’t live with myself if he dies, and neither should you. ’Cause this world ain’t worth a damn if he’s not in it.”
“Well, I for one support Mr. Benny’s wish,” said Madam Navya soberly, “though as I recall, I had said from the very beginning that we should make amends to the—” “Yeah, yeah, your sainthood’s secure,” interrupted Vera.
Humans. Complicated creatures of earth and light and shadow, just as merfolk are as varied as the waves. I am humbled to learn how mistaken about them I have been.
“Sonia”—I squeezed her arm—“you deserve a better man than me.” “Aw, Benny.” She gave a watery chuckle and wiped her nose on her handkerchief. “Different man, yes, but not better. Ain’t no better man than you.”
I’d let you steal me away like the merfolk in the legends.” I leaned my forehead against the glass. “You’ve ruined me for life on land anyway. It’s your fault the world feels like boots that don’t fit. I’d go with you, and it would be the beginning of my life.”
“I’d learn how to speak your native song. I’d call you by your true name, and you’d call me by whatever the word in your language for ‘barnacle’ is.”
Ever been near Vieques? They say the tides there are magic because they light up blue at night, and no one knows why. In the shallows, where the water glows . . .” I skated my fingertips over the glass and imagined his hair threading between them. “That’s where I’d make love to you.”
“You would be well again,” I whispered. “You would sleep in my arms, and I would kiss you without ever having to come up for air. I would make a hymn of both our names. It would make the most beautiful sound . . .” I’d dropped my English because Spanish has so many words for declaring love, and I needed to use them all before it was too late. And though his tears were invisible in water, we both wept to the sound of promises whispered like prayers through the glass about a future where time couldn’t chase us, where my heart would beat for him for as long as he wanted it—until the oceans boiled
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Because as the company cheered and Río smiled at them from the floor of the tank, I realized that, just when I thought I’d lost my faith in everything, I believed in my family.
Like every foreigner, Río seemed to become more imaginary in person.
Slowly and with great effort, he shifted himself toward me until he reached the wall where I pressed my hand against the tank, then my lips. He kissed me through the glass. And though my heart lay dying with him, I whispered, “Time to go home.”
Vera was staring at me like I’d just earned my human oddity title. “He just held his breath for ten minutes! Did no one else notice that Benny just held his breath for ten bleedin’ minutes?” “I take back everything I ever said about you bein’ weak,” Matthias said, slapping chunks of pebbled glass off my union suit. “You got dumbbells for balls, brother.” Grinning weakly, I croaked, “Put that on my next poster.”
“Benigno.” As if they instinctively understood the rare gift of hearing a merman speak, everyone fell silent. Tears instantly clouded my vision, and as his body quaked, he smiled and spoke in a voice softer than the beat of wings. “You have b-become an e-excellent s-swimmer.”
