Aquasphere
by Allegra Gulino
Maxine Kerrigan, soon to revert to her maiden name of Trent, moved to Russellville, Pennsylvania.
Through thrift-store shopping, she had acquired basic implements and furniture for her shabby, “oozing with charm” place. It was satisfying to fill the shelves with unpacked books and arrange her things. She had even felt a little euphoric while her music or TV resounded in the space.
But, in quiet moments, her apartment echoed with her lonely sighs. The potted violets and spider plant suspended in macramé were her only companions.
So, with gung-ho independence, she tightened and oiled the creaking hinges on the kitchen cabinets and covered the Formica counters with phonebooks, a toaster, a teapot and her next project: a betta bowl.
Also known as Siamese fighting fish, bettas don’t need aquarium filters, and their water can be room temperature. The long-finned males resemble silk scarves in royal blues, teals and reds, and they are usually for sale in small jars because they kill other bettas. Though one male can live in a community tank with other gentle fish, an aquarium was beyond Maxine’s financial means. Her alimony was to be small.
In Pittsburgh, she bought the two-gallon fishbowl and gravel as a final act in the city where her marriage had failed. In her new place, the pond plants and grow light acquired from a nursery completed the little eco-system, which had mellowed without an occupant atop her bar counter for a couple of weeks.
She found an aquarium store in the yellow pages, and plied her map for directions. On a Thursday evening in February 1989, Maxine was ready to get her fish.
Anticipation swept her from her Oldsmobile and in through the fogged, double glass doors of Aquasphere. Her arrival was announced by a loud, clanging bell.
I’ll get the most beautiful betta they have. She would name him Quincy after Michael Jackson’s producer, Quincy Jones — calling him Michael would be too obvious — and she would triumphantly bring him home. Then, perched on her bar stool, Maxine would enjoy Quincy’s slow-motion flamenco dance. A new, easy relationship would begin.
Behind the store’s front counter, a balding employee in a blue Aquasphere polo shirt slid two bags of feeder gold fish into a paper bag for a stout, sandy-haired customer.
He probably has Oscars. Maxine had always disliked the rusty-looking freshwater fish with thick bodies and gaping mouths. They ate small fish.
The cash register drawer shut, and the young man paused at a clothes rack to don his winter coat and flip up the fur-edged hood. As the door shut behind him, the affixed bell clanked decisively.
The middle-aged cashier gave Maxine a seedy grin and gestured toward the rack.
It is warm in here. She unzipped her parka and slid out, revealing her orange cable sweater. She hung her black coat next to three others. Settling the strap of her tiny purse across her body and combing fingers through her afro, Maxine strode farther into the store to asses the merchandise before zeroing in on the bettas, whose jars she was sure to locate on an end cap.
Two back walls were lined with three tiers of aquariums. After observing anemones and their busy clown fish stewards, she moved down one tank to yellow sea horses dotted with acid green; usually, only public aquariums had them. Occupying the highest row above those, were purple fringed jelly fish, which were never for sale, as far as she knew.
“Whoa! How’d they get those?”
From behind shelves which held aquarium pumps and filters of many kinds, a freckle-faced, red-headed teen tittered. Another glance confirmed that the girl’s face was thin and pointy, almost deformed.
Maxine turned and slid her sleeve down: her watch said 8:35. When do they close? Nine?
More briskly, she moved along the side wall tanks occupied by marine life, wondering if the back wall had freshwater fish.
What kind of fish are those? Marine fish, judging from the lumps of coral in their fifty-five gallon tank, but their heads and faces looked like the stylized pug dogs rendered on Chinese screens.
And such colors... Am I seeing things? In the spiky manes around their heads, Maxine watched prismatic colors ripple and change hue, like lava lamps. The creatures’ bodies resembled koi, with crenelated, silver scales. Like kites on tight strings, they jounced toward her when she bent over them.
“What are you?” There should be no such things. She straightened and looked for a label naming them.
In the corner of her left eye, she caught a long and slithery something in the next tank over. Grey and eel-like, but with a double row of flippers, the creature lashed and wormed at the front glass of an inadequately sized tank. It looked prehistoric. Next moment, the creature flipped out of its uncovered enclosure and wriggled on the floor: two feet long and hissing.
Maxine gasped, with a hand over her chest, “It’s escaped! Somebody help!”
Oddly, the thing’s dozen or so flippers found purchase on the linoleum tiles. Like an aquatic centipede, it scuttled under the tanks.
“Hey! The eel thing escaped.” She turned and collided against a rotund man with twinkling eyes, who was wearing an employee’s blue shirt. His grin was so broad it obscured his eyes and displayed crooked, yellow teeth.
She started, “That eel—” but was hushed by his shrug and belly laugh.
“What’s funny?” She was annoyed.
As he gibbered, his cheeks bunched into tennis ball-sized spheres. Then, they grew heavy. Losing their fullness, they drooped toward his jaw line, dragging his eyelids down to display the red, inner lids. His mirth gained a bullfrog resonance.
Maxine staggered back.
The under-layers of his eyelids and cheeks burbled halfway down his face like melted wax, and the skin of his sparse brows and forehead expanded upward in two ridges over his widening eyes, while his black hair slid backwards over his head.
“Come,” he boomed at her, extending meaty hands, with membranes stretched between the digits.
“Like hell!” Maxine spun and fled up an aisle, away from the tanks, where a watery commotion indicated more escapes.
Twelve feet up, the freckled girl leered over innocuous aquarium supplies, on legs that were stilt height. “It’s okay,” she trilled from pinched, beakish lips. “Join with us.” Her spidery hands writhed beside her narrowing head. “It’s marvelous!”
But Maxine sped around her toward the door. The distance was farther than she remembered.
The balding man rounded the corner at the end of the aisle ahead. At his feet rolled four huge puffer fish blown up to a yard in circumference. They barreled toward Maxine. Over their whirling spikes, the man had a loathsome smile under a halo of swaying anemone-tentacle hair.
Then she was lifted from the rolling menace by the crane-ish arms of the red-headed girl. “Really, it’s okay. It’s fun,” she chirped musically. Her skinny fingers dug into Maxine’s armpits.
Maxine screamed, kicking the tops off of the aquarium fluorescent lights protruding vertically above the shelves. They shattered everywhere. There was a softening sensation and Maxine’s humerus bones painlessly stretched away from their sockets, and their fleshy connections melted from Stork Girl’s grasp.
Incredibly, Maxine landed on her feet in another aisle. The impact of the ten-foot fall didn’t punch agony through her skeleton. Instead, kinetic energy spread like warm honey and broke her skin’s boundaries. The flesh of her feet merged with the fabric and rubber of her socks and shoes and exuded, blob-like, over the floor, while the rest of the impact glided through her extremities.
Pulsing and stretching, her arms merged with her orange sweater yarn; they and her brown fingers waved in boneless slow motion. It was exquisite.
An inner voice cried, You’re lost!
She giggled. I’m an amoeba. She hadn’t known that she carried tension in her firm body, with its fixed edges and limited shape. That habitual tautness dissipated as her skin formed new shapes. Her breasts roiled and bounced against her arms, and each step was a blend of oozing and rebounding off the floor. It was fun. Except for her inner voice, saying, Get out!
The koi-pugs crawled on the floor at the far end of the aisle. They tumbled into a huddle and began to mate with each other. Maxine guffawed.
Get out now, barked her intuition. Backing away from the amorous creatures, she again encountered the puffer fish rocking to and fro as if in a trance.
No problem! Traversing the narrow aisle, her malleable edges formed thrilling new shapes around their spikes, then peeled away. At the end of the aisle the condensation-covered front door was twenty feet away. If she could stay focused and keep her momentum, she might escape.
Escape to what? Will I stay this way?
Get out! shouted her inner voice.
“Okay,” Maxine slurred. “I’ll go.”
“Wait,” came a baritone behind her.
While gushing forward, she bent her head around to see the speaker.
He was morphing into a starfish. Peach-hued tube feet zippered up and down his body. He must have worn a red leather jacket before; crimson, warty skin expanded over the curling backs of his hands, it crinkled like plastic as he struggled and bristled. Somehow, his dark face retained its perimeters against the fantastical growths: his broad forehead braced soft, poetic eyes.
“Don’t go.” His full lips emphasized the ‘o.’ Instead of bending at the knee, his legs half-snaked, half-staggered him across the floor.
Horrible!
“Please! Help me.” At “me,” his mahogany throat and the grey collar of his sweatshirt reappeared; he was fighting the transformation.
He can fight it? Maxine took his writhing, prickly hand in her undulating one, and his tube feet hooked into her softness. The contact tingled through her. Instead of fleeing, she wanted to envelop him in lustful flesh.
He drew close, his eyes closed in pleasure.
Maxine gooshed her head forward to kiss him.
Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Stork Girl copulating with Anemone Man. They were suspended between the wares and the drop-in ceiling, with her spindly limbs braced on opposite walls fifty feet across.
Get out!
She withdrew from Starfish Man. “Come on.” Her voice slid uncontrollably downward.
A bubble burst from his lips as he answered, “Let’s go.”
Rebounding from him, she propelled toward the exit, while his legs moved along like ill-formed claymation.
With monstrous croaks, Frog Man bounced toward them on long, deeply folded legs.
“Three-legged race,” Starfish Man cried.
Of course!
With his left leg embedded in her right, his arm glommed to her back, and her hand infiltrating his coarse waist; “in,” they called and swept their joined inner ‘leg’ forward. “Out,” they swung their separate outer legs. In that manner, they accelerated toward the moist doors.
“No!” Frog Man boomed.
But they shoved the door open. The bell was jerked free and made a clamorous riot on the floor. “In, out, in, out,” they chanted, continuing their bizarre march through the chill air. They cut left across Aquasphere’s parking lot, which faced an empty Route 34.
From inside the store, Frog Man bellowed outrage.
Plodding through dead winter weeds, they entered the lot of a U-Haul business, closed for the night. They passed two rows of rental trailers. There was no sign of pursuit.
Pain crept up and seared Maxine’s right side. She gasped, “Let’s stop.”
Halting behind a trailer’s big metal box, they listened. Traffic from Route 34’s intersection with Thebes Road droned, then died.
Maxine’s right arm and leg were alive with pins-and-needles, until she peeled away from him.
Groaning, he unwrapped his leg from hers, making a sound like ripping velcro. He peered around the trailer at Aquasphere. “Look.”
Maxine did. Under the parking lot lights, the aquarium store was losing its edges. Its beige grid of bricks wobbled, as if stirred by inner currents, and its glass front rippled. The neon “Open” sign shorted out, followed by the interior lights. Then, the flat roof bubbled and hunkered down, while the walls bowed out.
Singing came from inside, as if the occupants were doing a choral warm-up exercise on several, discordant notes.
“Wow,” was all Maxine could say.
He put a hand on her back. Through her nubby sweater, her senses registered his solid, separate touch.
A rumble thickened the night air. With a hollow boom, Aquasphere popped and gushed into the ground. Liquid snapped toward the center and splashed away in lessening ripples. Reflected lights winked on its surface.
Pulling back from their observation point, they sat heavily on the ground. Maxine’s jeans creased into her groin and behind her knees; her high-tops contained her feet; her bra straps dug into her shoulders.
Next to her, spears of illumination lanced between the trailers revealing her companion’s appealing, dark face with large, expressive eyes, closely shorn hair, full mouth, and tapered chin.
“Calvin?” Oddly, she knew that was his name.
He was deferential in replying, “Maxine?”
“It’s over,” she said, leaning her fluffy-topped, but otherwise solid head against his shoulder.
“Yeah.” He scooted closer, his leather jacket creaked mildly. “I didn’t think we’d make it out.”
Maxine shuddered. “I wasn’t sure I wanted to.”
“Yeah...”
As the glamour was shed from their systems, he slapped his knee, “Oh my God, that place was... off!”
With a creaking laugh, she agreed: “Definitely.”
“Thanks for coming with me.” Looking at her with awe and wryly twisting lips, “After all that, I don’t want more fish.”
Laughing, but also crying a little, she squeezed his cool fingers between hers. “Fish can’t talk. They can’t replace... a person.”
“Let’s blow this joint.” He scrambled to his feet and held a hand out to her.
“Calvin,” she said, hauling herself up with unexpected vigor, “it’s damn good to meet you.”
Copyright © 2024 by Allegra Gulino
