As Beautiful as Fish in a Dream

by Shannon Joyce Prince

Part 3 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Go just outside the village, past the dragon-sized maple tree, turn where the ravens congregate regardless of season or hour, and in front of the lake you will find Fern and Argus’s house. It looks like it was conjured by some exiled sea god who found sanctuary in the forest. Some nubile deity who lay upon the bends of the humongous roots of centuries-old trees and pretended that what folded underneath him was the movement of the waves.

Just because their house is made of oak, that doesn’t stop fish from floating along the brown beams like tropical conquistadors laying claim to the woods. Or maybe this is a chaparral nymph’s water dreaming, because the fish upon the walls are made of tree bark, dyed jungle colors with blossoms filched from their ancient boughs.

Fern keeps at the love-toil of making fish for that phantom child hidden deep in the cosmos who will one day belong to her and Argus. She is dreaming; she stopped bleeding years ago. She is longing and Argus is there with her, hoping though the womb is obsolete there is some other way to get their baby-child.

* * *

The people who live in the lake watch Argus with admiration and bemusement. They are not mermaids exactly, all limbs present, but they are sepia, kelp-colored, malachite. They wondered at the illogical gentleness of this man who is either too kind or too crazy to eat fish, then they loved him when they realized it was both.

They look at Argus dangerously, with the gaze of judging gods, so attracted to his weirdness they know that eventually they will have to intrude upon it, participate in it, for good or for evil. They look up at Argus as fire-edged thunder clouds gaze down at the earth, full of either sustenance or death, ambiguity not making them hesitant to unleash their bounty.

The people in the lake have an orphan among their folk, a baby girl. All the grandmothers in her lineage have already scuttled forth into the afterlife, all the grandfathers who share her blood in their eternal embrace, and the people in the lake know from the fish Argus releases to the water, which know from the way Argus makes his livelihood among the village children, what that man wishes for most.

So the people in the lake come out: a young wise woman draped with necklaces of cowrie from head to foot like the shells that net a Tchokwe drum, a solemn giant patriarch who looks as if he spent the past century just growing his thick, kinky, storm dark hair, an elder council woman dressed in a sweep of blue all stand on the water.

The cool evening air touches them and it’s as alien as the caress of a ghost. From furrowed brows they survey the goldenrod evening sunlight devoid of an aqueous lens and wonder if another world would make any difference. They tell Argus to go get his woman, stir her from her dreaming-work, because they have something to say.

And because Fern and Argus are offered the thing they want most, they make the promise no man or woman can keep, to raise the lake baby until she becomes a woman, and then return her to the water so that her womanhood doesn’t kill her. Fern and Argus come from peoples for whom the wondrous is not foreign, they know the repercussions of striking deals between the worlds, but they are like that refugee sea god dirty with the loam of the forest floor, dreaming of warm womb water blue and green, too full of longing to see the trees that surround him.

* * *

If Fern and Argus had been “raised,” they would not have become as special or as wounded as they are. If Mama had told Fern, “Well why shouldn’t that unicorn have picked you?” if Daddy had said to Argus, “Well it doesn’t matter, son, that you can’t bring yourself to eat the fish, there’s plenty stranger than that in the world,” they’d know how to become a mother and a father. But Argus is a storyteller, so in lieu of remembered love, love will be as Argus articulates it, how he has witnessed it in the world of stories.

And of course this is not the love of hope and fear, they are not welcoming unpredictable mercurial love into their home, they are engaging in love that knows its result. This is love that knows where it’s going but doesn’t know how to get there. But I don’t want you to think this the love of the dying, love that breaks the proscenium of spiritual amelioration and bleeds into the world of shinju and faith-degrading tragedies.

No, it’s not like that. When they took their baby from the arms of the lake lady, it wasn’t in mourning, it was with the breathless delight of Christmas children. Every month for decades the moon had called down an egg from Fern’s uterus and discarded her and Argus’s shared wish to engender their love in a child, to make some little girl the repository for all that was worth anything in them.

They didn’t accept their baby daughter to spend a decade or two in dread. They reach for her in awe of her skin as deep in color as pecan shells and so soft it almost cannot be felt, just like the musical notes that go so high they cannot be heard. And her hair is like some dark metal beginning to be tarnished by water, each lock veiled in faint sea-green.

When their daughter is older, she smiles patiently when they tell her her story, even Argus cannot make her believe it. She cannot conceive of ever having belonged to anyone except them. She loves them with a love that sets them wondering what their lives could have been should they have been privileged with more than the attention of unicorns and fish.

She takes the mystique off those loves, reveals them to her parents. She is a holy child, a solemn secret trickster spirit, leaving her parents love’s pleasures in all the places they would never expect them — she puts the heads of azaleas in Argus’s pockets with lustrous rocks and pungent leaves, she makes paper fish for her mother because she thinks that’s how you go about loving somebody.

Have you ever been on a journey with your beloved to the faraway cordilleras or perhaps the distant sea, and it seems that the heights or depths you want will be forever distant, and you are so full of loving and learning your companion that all of a sudden, one day, the sun is gone and replaced with a jade wall, there is no road and your feet are wet with foam? This was how their daughter’s womanhood came upon Fern and Argus. When did her hair ferment to that green somewhere between emerald and teal? When did the brown of her skin take on the look of orichalcum blighted by sea?

Some merciful spirit allowed her to reach twenty before she got her period. She is not wounded by the pain that folds her each month, but by the age she suddenly sees in Argus and Fern. Where did those years come from? Where was her gaze as they had become older and frailer? And twenty years had also left Fern and Argus half inclined to share in their baby’s disbelief. Perhaps her heritage was only a reverie, a riff on her orphanhood none of them had to accept.

Forever in Argus and Fern’s minds will twenty years seem like the secret number, the magic period that purifies as it unfolds and heals as it passes. Twenty is how many years you need to become as whole as you never were. Twenty years with the person who cups their hands into a dark sphere so that what is not tough in you can be, can shine a thin light into that confined shadow and no one can get at it. But now that twenty years have come and gone, it’s time to turn from joy to longing, because how can they give up that child who has become their whole world?

Help. Their little girl’s blood will not stop issuing forth. Help. She needs the gypsum lake water, she needs the green, she needs what Fern and Argus cannot give. Help. Help Fern and Argus to let her go, because right now her menses is a terrible ochre cloud beneath her that never abates.

The earth ushers forth a giant turtle into the family home, the more it ambles forth slow and gentle the more it abandons other-species sexual ambiguity and reveals itself to be a woman, a grandmother in fact. The beautiful girl curls up on the turtle’s back and is carried to the water’s edge.

The people who live in the lake stand on top of it, black totems in front of the evening sun. Where are Fern and Argus, they wonder? The old ones are coming, arms full of fish a thousand colors. When the grandmother turtle begins to swim out to the people of the lake, Fern and Argus let go of the fish into the water. They become alive without marveling at their genesis and swim after the girl.

The girl looks to the playthings of her childhood, as beautiful as fish in a dream, she looks to her Fern and Argus as they cling to each other, as heartbroken as parents in a story. As the cool water touches her arms, she thinks she would rather be depleted of all the blood in her than see them crucified between the worlds.

The regal people of the lake are descending back home, the turtle is trying to sink, but love will not let the girl succumb to water. It may as well be rock crystal, because she cannot penetrate it. At that moment, whatever made Fern so unique a unicorn pierced her, whatever left Argus so gentle he could not deprive anything of life, gives them the courage to walk across the water to their child.

Learning to walk in your own world takes a child months, learning to walk in a second world is nearly impossible. Fern and Argus come from peoples for whom the wondrous is not foreign; they know how perilous it is to try to survive another realm, but they are in love so they keep their balance over the ripples, they are in love so they ignore the age-pain of their limbs. When they lie down beside their daughter on the turtle’s back, the people who live in the lake fling their heads away, not about to witness the light ignited by that love.

But there is no light, just three souls entangled in their love and grief, three souls united in metamorphosis, three souls silent and expectant because something betwixt them is trying to be.

* * *

In the graveyard, there are headstones with birth and death days four or five hundred years apart from each other. These sit quietly next to the grave markers of people whose lives lasted only seven or eight decades. And among the living, there are those who can trace their ancestry back to tree nymphs or autumn sprites — folk whose hair does not gray, but greens. And people hope for a ligneous babe, a chrysanthemum-smelling child.

But amphibiousness is not always a case of the wondrous joining our world, sometimes it goes the other way. It is easy with these three. Fern and Argus aren’t all that attached to human society. They have suffered enough under its weight, and besides, their best love is with someone non-human. And their baby girl has spent her entire existence in a realm where she doesn’t belong; these three could survive in another world.

Love can coax the spirit of a birch tree out his heartwood into the arms of a woman, love can bring the autumnal fairy down from the harvest breeze into the embrace of a man. A unicorn remembers love when he finds it, in virgins, tightly knotted in their chests into little celadon seeds that will one day erupt into vines that tangle around their beloveds. He remembers, and he is there upon the water.

He kneels next to the grandmother turtle so Fern, Argus, and their daughter can mount, and he takes them to his home, where one gruff-looking male spirit is at the forge turning russet into deer, another wild-looking smith is sculpting trees from ebony and mahogany and then compacting them into seeds which he holds before the lips of a wind woman to blow out into the regions where humans live.

All around are pine and redwood and fir men and women, striding about, intoxicating the morning with their perfumes. Nobody takes much note of the green-haired lake child recuperating under the healing canopy of the nether-forest. They don’t stare at the lightning-streaked woman whose hair is going from gray to finch colored, or the man who is reverberating wildly with the force of his relieved crying.

These are an enchanted people, for whom humans are rare, but not foreign. Wounded refugees coming to heal in their midst do not even merit their gaze.

Proceed to Challenge 275...