Page 138 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

Then, that day, during the aqua fitness class, Cassandra started to sing, her throat

opening wide, flaring beneath her pink lips, tongue twisting upward, engorged with the

luscious purple blood of ancient vibration.

Miranda heard her mother’s singing, heard the eerie sound while fastening her shoes in

the corridor that ran along the back of the pool. She put her feet down hard, and her

teeth clamped shut, too. Then she raced round to the wet passageway that led to the

pool. She screech-turned around a wall of green tile. There was Cassandra, her mum,

surrounded by a gaggle of aqua fitness elders. Her mum’s face was turned up, to more

fully extend a throat like a cormorant’s red sack, billowing like the sail of a sunship that

glides between the stars.

Miranda jumped in the water, paddled to her mother. She knew it was urgent. She

needed to get there. The moment she arrived at her mother’s warbling form, the sound

nearly exploding her ears and chest, Miranda dived under, and made for Cassandra’s

feet. There they were, light green in the cool light of the pool bottom. Miranda could see

the webs beginning to form between the toes. Then Miranda extended her own small

white hand, like a twig in the water, and used her short nails to clip the near invisible

rope that held her mother’s ankles to the pool bottom. The leash parted, translucent

ribbons sinking to the pool floor, the remnants shaping bracelets around Cassandra’s

sturdy ankles. That was all that was needed. Miranda burst up through the blue water,

pushing out a placenta’s worth of water from lungs and trachea. Next to her, her

mother’s singing subsided slightly. The folds of neck gills retracted into yellow skin. And

then she shot up, amid a geyser of pool water, loosened and open, a shrill note in the

air. Cassandra was gone.

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