The Last Dry Moment
Here’s his story: He hadn’t always been a flying fish. He’d been a human once. He’d had acne and a magnificent large schnoz, and his hands had been dry and peeling. He had a girlfriend that he felt so-so about, and he didn’t think anything of it. It had all been boring, he’d always thought, every bit of his life. He drove a car that rattled a bit, and his mother called him once a week to tell him the town gossip: “the family next door is having marital issues,” or “the guy you went to high school with got that silly girl pregnant” or “that cat is lost, the one from the bookstore. One guy said he saw it at the library — that cat must love books!”
This was what his self-proclaimed boring life consisted of: companionship, movement, gossip, dry hands.
How is it that life shifts from the ordinary to the unimaginable? For some, it is the act of falling in love with your friend’s mother, or tasting garlic for the first time, or finding that you have been doing it just so wrong this whole life. But for our man-turned-fish, it was not any of these things, but an accident that occurred on an old peeling bridge. I’ll bring you there now.
It’s a gray morning in August, and off he drives to work. It’s not worth sharing what job it is that he works -- it is just work and that in itself is rather boring.
His little car mutters and hums as it rolls its way towards the bridge. He’s in the middle of thinking about whether he should be insecure about the length of his eyelashes — perhaps he should be. Perhaps they are so short that they can barely bat, can only scratch at the gooey whites of his eyes. He is so preoccupied with this anxiety that he doesn’t notice the red light entering the turn to the bridge, doesn’t notice the tiny car exiting. All at once, there is a crash and the splitting sound of THIS IS THE LAST SOUND YOU’LL HEAR AS A HUMAN! THIS IS THE LAST MOMENT YOU’LL BE SO DRY!!
One can’t explain the sense of drowning without the taste. It’s blood, metal, nothing, salt, salt, fish; that sweet bit, too.
He feels so heavy. He isn’t coming back up — unless . . . unless that sweet bit of him grows so wide and feeling — grows globular and salted, grows an eye that blinks slow — fins that could weave through air and water alike — a new heart that slips around in the puppet of him. He won’t ever flake or dry again — his new body is consistent in its drenching, in its knowing.
*****
Here’s her story: She’s sitting here, wearing those glasses that aren’t even real — just the kind that you wear to “protect yourself” from a superstrong screen device that you watch videos on titled “why I quit that quiz website” or “boyfriend trims my nose hairs and finds something else, finds a little bug or a mini mini squid, that yells LOOK AT ME to a booger, not realizing a booger does not have personhood.”
She’s wearing them also to look cute, because looking cute is the name of the game recently, even though her boyfriend’s been pissed about the glasses. He’s got terrible vision (which works in his favor sometimes when he wants to forget how terribly uncute his girlfriend is, and he takes off his glasses to tell her she’s perfect, which he told her once) but has generally felt quite upset about it, and about how little his girlfriend understands what it is to be a glasses wearer — don’t get him started on the pandemic. She once asked him why he didn’t just wear contacts with a mask — he told her the horror story of a time he accidentally dropped his disposable contacts into his nightstand glass of water, drank them up in the middle of the night. They suctioned to the back of his throat like parasites, stuck and loving that soft wetness of his uvula. He hacked and hacked until they let go of their new home, came back to his tongue with no taste, let themselves be plucked out and thrown away, listened to that voice say NEVER WILL I EVER WEAR CONTACTS AGAIN.
She’s really in love with her boyfriend — she thinks he’s pretty cute. He’s got that lanky glasses thing going, smells just fine. He’s got images of ladies on his wall, one of them has a single tit out. Sometimes when she fucks him in his bedroom she thinks: at least I’ve got two tits out. She knows he doesn’t really think about that — he can’t see how many there are with his glasses off — maybe hers are just one wide tit to him. He doesn’t bother reaching for it/them, sex to him just consists of the feeling that he’s finally satisfied for a moment, he told her that once, too. They are at that age past high school where there’s a lot of time ahead of you but you’re also wasting time. Wasting time by fucking a cute guy in his tit-out bedroom, wasting time by wearing glasses you don’t even need. She’d wanted to be a doctor. But things don’t just happen, do they? And so sometimes you’re just living and pretending there was never a plan.
As she sits in her room, scrolling on her phone and picking flakes of her boyfriend off of her sweater (god these flakes are everywhere — he’s such a crusted, dried out man!), she gets a call. Her phone hums and buzzes in the palm of her hand, and she jumps a little. Unexpected vibrations freak her out a bit — the boyfriend tried to gift her a vibrator last year and the sound itself was too much for her (he said: won’t this make things more exciting? she said: there’s nothing more exciting than the tit on your wall. he said: I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. she said: I like the way things are).
The screen lights up to read the name of her boyfriend’s mother, and she picks up to a moan so deep it is a vibration itself. The moan says: we lost him. The moan says: what is a reason to live now? The moan says: I filled him with all the gossip and stories I could, and milked myself for him, and bought him pair after pair of glasses, and it was all for this? This pain I created, and now you have to feel a part of that pain, too. The girlfriend feels it.
She shows up to the bridge, glasses still on. They are pulling his body out of the river, and she sees the fullness of his chest, arms, legs, face — face: smiling. The expression makes her shiver and sob, and the boyfriend’s mother sits on the river bank, reaching and reaching out to him. But something about this — something about this isn’t so sad.
She hasn’t believed in heaven before, and still doesn’t, but she believes in something else for him-- she can’t quite decide what yet. She’s still picking flecks of his skin off her sweater, his back-then, once-alive dander. She looks up to the sky and sees a flash of something, a wriggling between clouds, and down on her face splashes a bit of something odd and salty, it isn’t water but something else (it’s fish piss, I’m telling you).
There’s a song in her head, almost like she’s known it before, and it’s blared on the radio or at the mall, maybe it has, or maybe it’s new and fresh and knows her so deeply and so well it’s made its way to her: THIS IS THE LAST SOUND HE’LL HEAR AS A HUMAN! THIS IS THE LAST MOMENT HE’LL BE SO DRY!!
*****
From this moment on, he’ll begin to dip and weave through those waters, and fly and fly. He’ll fly until he isn’t sure exactly where he could be, and he’ll see things that he wouldn’t have seen in his dry body. He’ll gulp and gulp it all until he finds something new.
Beeper Peddle is a writer and healer living on the East Coast. She lives with her partner and their beloved soul puppy. Beeper writes about sorrows, lies, and deep loves. When you read her work, you will dip down into her heart and end up in all manner of body parts. Should you find yourself reflected in these words, it is merely coincidence; however, it does not surprise her you share the same heart. Find her at bethpeddle.com and @beeperpeddle on Twitter and Instagram
Sadie Chernila (she/they) is a lover of all things gross, imagined, and emotional. They are currently a junior at Bryn Mawr College majoring in creative writing. She was the recipient of the 2023 Katherine Fullerton Gerould Award for her writing. This is their first online publication.
Note: this story was originally published in Nimbus, the undergraduate literary journal of Bryn Mawr College
miniskirt magazine 