Breakable Things, page 15
But this is not the only reason I am here.
I shade my eyes against the noon sky, its cerulean without dimension or depth, no gradient of quality; the color is absolute as a rich man’s confidence. Malmo tastes like a memory, like a word misplaced. I can smell the ocean, an afterthought in the air. It is cold and clean and old, so very old. Older even than the myth of marriage, than selkie stories, than Adam, than the Eve-that-never-was and the Eve-who-lives.
I follow the crowd onto the platform and then into the station, pouring through their pale bodies. Everyone looks but no one is gauche enough to comment on the tail that droops from the hem of my black woolen coat, the fur a little ragged. Months ago, I’d have been better groomed, more together, more cognizant of propriety, the profound obscenity of wearing my skin like a point of pride.
Then again, months ago, there would have been nothing to see, nothing but dark hair worn in a long, sleek braid. A smile. Skirt, knee-length. Pastel blouses. Nothing of me. Nothing at all.
“I have a room,” I tell the front desk when I find my way to the hotel at last. I smile at them with sharp little teeth and they smile back, empty.
“Welcome,” they say, not meaning any of it.
I leave pawprints on the stairs, even though I am wearing shoes. It amuses me to do so. The front desk says nothing. Someone in the lounge, a woman with a voice like a broken heart, begins to sing, and it sounds like a story of you and I.
An animal wife is an accessory.
She must be.
A spouse is permitted liberties, the libations of agency. Small things like the right to choose the hue of her hair, to drink the stories decocted by strangers, to sleep on a roof under a damask of stars. A spouse, according to fiction, is equal. They are a partner.
An animal wife is not. She is instead ornamental, constrained by coercion, not choice. She is leashed to a length of flayed skin, tidily folded into a cedar chest. She is pliable, pure, convincingly demure.
And most of all, she is angry.
An animal wife always is.
“You’re too kind.” I accent the smile with a stooping of the head, a crooking of the upper lip. The expression must communicate two things: humility and a sweet bewilderment, as though I couldn’t possibly believe what I’d authored but delight in it all the same. It must look like I’d meant it only for him.
He takes the bait. He flushes prettily and we talk, his eyes unfocused the entire while, reverent. I somnambulate through the motions, the minuet familiar. I’ve rehearsed its choreography so many times before. When we reach the finale, I disengage gracefully and he reluctantly, pressing a card into my grip. “Call me.”
My skin sits unevenly on my shoulders. It pulls. It is heavier than it should be, burdened with the years too. I smile at him.
“I will.” We both know I don’t mean any of it.
Obligations discharged, I escape the throng, cross the bridge, the sun warm on the back of my neck. I want to run. The compulsion scratches beneath my skin, push-pulling at my bones until I am halved by conflicting desires. It’d be so easy. To shuck this body, its responsibilities. To feel the cobblestones beneath paws, not feet. Scale the barbicans of the shops, their eaves and trellises. The plunge of the world from the roofs of their gods now domesticated by academics.
But not yet, not yet.
The road takes me to a square. Restaurants swathe its borders, every one of them pleasingly austere. Sweden disdains excess even in their tourist traps. Everywhere, there are tables, colonized by drunks, by devotees of the rare Nordic sun. Men and women conversing softly, bodies pressed together like hands in prayer.
I push past them to a small cafe, its exterior crowded with giggling couples and families, the children mesmerized by plates of cream, shaved white chocolate piled atop syrup-drenched cakes. The woman inside is fleecy-haired, exhausted. She scowls a warning. Be quick, her expression says.
I take my time, nonetheless, poring over their cheesecakes and in the end, commit to a slice of their bestseller and a mug of coffee, black as grief.
“Upstairs,” the waitress barks at me and I bob an acknowledgment, darting up a spiralling staircase. The second storey is lonely of people, low-roofed and too hot. I take a seat beside the window and stare, silent. The sun makes everyone beautiful.
We came here once, you and I. I’d clung to your shadow as you steered us to a table, my voice in a box in the basement of your apartment. You ordered—what was it? I don’t remember any specifics anymore, only sweetness and curls of chocolate, too much for either of us. You smiled at me and it was good, and I wish it wasn’t the few moments I loved about us.
I miss that version of us.
But I don’t miss it enough to not rewrite this memory, replace that evening with this one. The light beading on the rim of my mug, on my blue jeans. The quiet like a homecoming. Animal wives are performative, performances, a menagerie of curated expression and long-lashed silences. We exist to accent and accentuate that which makes our husbands impressive.
If you read this one day, darling, go fuck yourself.
I choke down every mouthful, chase every clump of sugar down with another gasp of coffee. I eat until I’m sick. It will not be the best memory, but it will be mine and there will be nothing of you layered in its nuances, no trace of your expressions, no ghost of your voice. When I talk about this memory one day, it’ll be without you in the conversation.
You kept me silent for so long.
It only seems fair.
I remember when I first saw you.
It was on the stoop of an old temple. You’d been crying for hours. Salt seeped between your fingers in glistening rills, like someone’d licked rivers across the back of your palms. You looked like you were praying, had been begging the stars to spill out the love they’d eaten. While the moon glared, you slit your palm—the tiniest notch, like a small red seed—and squeezed until you’d anointed the steps with your blood. Please, you said. Like the word would be enough.
In a way, I suppose, it was.
I came out of the jungle wearing silks the color of muscle, a saucer of bone in my small hands. You laughed when you saw me. I hadn’t expected that. I see, you said before you came to me on your knees, humble as a penitent, and bled your tithe into my bowl. My eyes held no color and yours held no fear, and you watched without flinching as I lapped up your gift.
When I was done, you asked if I was a rib taken from the roof of god’s breast.
No, I said drowsily. But here, darling, here. I’ll grant you a wish, anyway.
You did not hesitate. You asked me to marry you right there and then, my fingers ringed with red, a drop of your blood in the hollow of my throat. I’d kissed you. Do you remember that? You told me I’d tasted like blackberry wine, like honey and aloe, like summer, like the last fine thing to see in this life. I told you not yet, all dowries must be paid in threes, but the truth is this: I loved you from the first heartbeat, was yours before my body could rehearse the next.
I do not restrict myself to the places we’ve seen, the places you’ve stained with your breath and your words, your insouciant description. The day before I leave, I stalk a winding canal along its cobbled path, follow the blue-green water to where it yawns into the ocean. It is a tedious walk. You’d have despised it. No shops, no landmarks to entice the eye, only an endlessness of manicured grass, and long tanned bodies plated on checkered blankets. Unbidden, your voice uncurls like a drag of smoke, resentful: I used to look like that not too long ago.
I take my time. I do not run. I memorize the topography of my silhouette, its unhurried lines, and the sweep of my hair along the meridian of my spine, the sheer audacity of it all. You loved me best when I was exceptional.
But today, I am merely free.
At a bridge, I pause, inhale the air, and Malmo smells like the first day I realized every cloak of feathers and bearskin coat is invaluable, not irreplaceable. A scent of thyme and brisket being smoked, fresh-cut grass, the rain cooling on fresh asphalt. Pre-processed potential, like only spring can articulate it. I lean over the rails until gravity beckons, hungry as a husband: come to me, trust me, fall into me, I’ll catch you, I love you, I love you, I’ll love you forever.
I laugh into a breeze, who carries my merriment like a boon to a couple lying tangle-limbed on the opposite bank. Step by step, I am erasing you, packing every instance of you into a cardboard box in the attic of my thoughts. Soon, it’d be all gone.
“I can’t wait,” I tell the water and the ghost of you, your eyes old as a wedding vow. My grin is the moon cut in two, incandescent, victorious. Though your memory connives to deter my decision, I shed this poor human facade. It ribbons from my bones, sheets of tissue and hair dip-dyed in emerald, leather and blue jeans. Underneath, I am joy flensed of your petty conditions: basal, bone-deep, breathless.
Three times you came to the temple.
Three times you paid what you owed.
The rest?
It doesn’t matter except for this:
You lied to me.
You rolled up my skin and locked it into a chest. For safekeeping, you told me, your mouth in my hair. When I stopped looking, you set it all on fire, mixed the ashes with a sip of sweet mead. And I’d cried at its taste and you said I was crazy. There was no salt, no lies, nothing but honey, heady as expensive wine, no life outside of you and I.
I have a cloak again, better than the one you burned.
A stitch of grey mouse fur wreaths my right shoulder; he is too little to give me more. But soon, he’d promised, and I believed him. The trimming is all badger, its span woven from elk. Feathers from a stormcrow, like knife-cuts above my heart. A hellhound’s mane. My mother’s fur, blanched by the years. Souvenirs from a thousand small loves.
The hotel says nothing about my damp attire, the way my hair sticks to my face. Tonight, I will make a bonfire of your gifts. I will drink gin and make haikus of our last conversation. I will wear red. I will climb to the roof and I will rename every star, while Malmo dreams of when its tides seethed with ships.
I will be me again, darling, and you will be nothing.
and in our daughters, we find a voice
My prince kills my sisters before they can come to me, their deaths my bride price, the payment for an unwanted humanity. His fishing ships and his harpooners drive them into the rocks and the salt-whetted cliffs, into the maw of the coral. They chase them with nets and explosives purchased at great expense from China, until there is nowhere for my siblings to go but up, up into the searing blue air.
My sisters die voiceless in a froth of red foam, gasping mouths and gaping eyes, no different from common fish.
Then, when all the life has been bled away, when all is still and silent, and there are only coils of drifting entrails, the ships lower men into the water to retrieve the bodies. The youngest are processed quickly; deveined, deboned, skins removed and crusted with salt and spice before they’re left to dry under the sun; the meat carefully separated and stored in chests dripping with ice. The oldest they preserve with formaldehyde and meticulous stitching, with pins and steel rods and hooks no wider than a strand of hair, anything that can allow them to pretend that this was a crusade, not a slaughter.
Their trickery succeeds. The kingdom celebrates and my prince, he devours my littlest sister at his soothsayer’s behest, marinating her first in cumin and cilantro. She was barely more than a fry, too young to emulate his idea of human. In a few months, that would have changed. Her skull would have flattened and grown sleek with long, silvery hair. She would have been beautiful, perhaps even beautiful enough to have taken my place.
“I saved you,” my prince says as he picks the soft meat from her spine.
I say nothing, look down, pick through the kelp heaped on my plate, try not to think about the first time I saw my sister, peering from between my father’s teeth, freshly hatched and clumsy, still viscous from the egg.
The ocean is not like the territories of man.
My father sends no armies in retaliation. My mother does not poison the seas with her grief. The fish do not mourn. Even the wind is silent, indifferent. Ten sisters are nothing, less than nothing.
He gives me no salt, only sugar.
Acres of caramel, drizzled on pastries and baked into sinuous eclairs, layered between crumbling shortcake and bittersweet chocolate. Endless cakes, all intricately made, some infused with strange fruit, others with crushed wildflowers and ginger. Scones dripping with cream. Glittering jellies. Macarons and marshmallows and meringues fragile as hummingbird eggs.
Only once did he make the error of feeding me meat, a tender cut from the leg of his latest kill. Seven men died mangled for this mistake, that gift of power, and I almost, almost reached the shore before he snared me in barbed wire and dragged me away.
From then on, he kept me sequestered in a windowless room in the highest tower of the castle, buried in organza and lace, in books devoted to domesticity, in the green smell of the hills, and flowers that drown me in pollen every spring. My prince allowed me nothing sharp, nothing dangerous, nothing that could be used to cut or maim.
Not even my teeth, which he wears on his crown like a warning.
Occasionally, my sisters visit me.
They are not unhappy, for all of their new ephemeralness, their inability to taste or touch. Death has given them color, imbued their deepwater pallor with indigo and orange and filaments of gold.
They flick through my prison in iridescent circles, less tangible than a soap bubble. Though they do not say it, I think they’re grateful they’re not me.
“A queen should know how to write.”
I raise a careful look between my lashes and smile at the doctor who’d spoken. My new teeth are blunt and perfect and white as salt, a strange weight that I cannot cease exploring with my tongue, like an old woman and a spiced knot of boiled sinew. The doctor could be male, female, a combination of both, or perhaps neither, a sexless thing unlike the prince.
“We will deal with that soon. For now, there are other concerns,” my prince replies, sullen. He rubs more olive oil into my skin. Once, his touch would have made me nauseous, but I’ve grown accustomed to his presence, his endless attention. “I won’t tax her. I’m already asking for too much. But soon.”
“So, she is to be illiterate and a captive until you’ve beget her with your spawn?”
He tenses his arm. “I am not a monster. The pregnancy is necessary. It will free her. It will—”
The doctor sighs. The sound whistles peculiarly through its mask, the top half of some dead bird, bruise-blue and sunset-orange. The doctor drums fingernails against the crook of an elbow, head cocked just so. There is no fear in its stance.
“Turn her into a proper wife?”
To my surprise, the prince supplies no admonishment, only a cold stare. I offer him no comfort, of course, a glance and little more. After everything that has happened, not even my father would be able to demand such an obscenity from me. So, instead I slope forward, leaning into my curiosity. Who was this person? And why did they dare to speak so boldly to my prince?
“But since you insist—” The doctor stares straight at me. “—I suppose I should be the first to congratulate you on your fatherhood. The princess is pregnant.”
In his euphoria, my prince takes no notice of my indifference, or the way the doctor tilts its skull one way and then another, as though to say it knows. I touch my belly, press down. Under my fingertips, I can feel the myriad pebbling of a thousand eggs.
In my dreams, I see the Sea Witch, sometimes.
She is not terrible, not magnificent.
Just old.
It takes exactly three months for my condition to become unmistakable. In that time, my prince transformed from captor to curator, perennially hungry to discuss how he met and loved the mute girl he found on the beach, how he saved her from sea, how a new joy—a future, he gushed once—was now gestating in my belly. To display me where and when possible, on the balconies of the palace, in a banquet of dignitaries, anywhere so long that people can look and exult in our matrimonial glory.
“If we have a daughter, I can only pray that she is as beautiful as her mother,” my prince declared to a company of neighbouring kings one night, his hand warm around my wrist.
Daughters, I thought to myself, as he joined our mouths, his lips sticky with mulberry wine. And they wouldn’t just be beautiful, they would be clever too, and quick as a lie, and always so very, very hungry.
The first clutch comes too early.
I hide them in the jewelry boxes of a visiting countess. If the noblewoman notices her windfall, she makes announcement of it. She leaves almost as she came, slightly richer but no less unremarkable.
Months later, they’ll tell me of a haunting in a distant castle, of the salt-smell in its corridors and the figures in the spires, silks trailing from their skin like fins. Of how they sing so desolately, like birds who have never known the sky, or sirens exiled from the sea.
Everyone who is anyone knows the story of the little mermaid.
She falls in love with a drowning prince and surrenders her voice for a man who can’t even remember her name. She walks on knives for him. She aches. In some versions of the tale, her sacrifice cuts her a kind of happiness. They marry. The story ends, and what comes after can only be presumed to be happy.
In others, they do not. Instead, he falls for someone else, a woman with a voice, a woman with property and the accoutrements of a noble title, a woman with value he can measure in parchment and gold ingots. The mermaid’s sisters come for her in these versions. They give her a knife to cut herself free. In some endings, she does. In others, she does not, dissolving into a gasp of sea foam, forgotten except as an example although of what exactly, no one seems to know.
