Glenn Kirker art by Daniel Rosenberg
A Loneliness of Two
Naiads were sneaky and, because of it, Sylvia was ruined.
Casting her eyes to the west, Sylvia could just make out the smudge of reddish-brown on the horizon that was the near shore of Blood Island. In the dramatic wash of colour that was the tropical sunset, the intervening stretch of ocean had turned scarlet as if the current flowing between there and the Women’s Island was tainted with the juices of a thousand butchered leviathans. Until she had turned thirteen, and became a woman in body as well as spirit, her aunts and mother had explained that this nightly phenomenon was the reason for the westerly isle’s name. For a child, it had been a more than adequate explanation - the path of waves that were dyed by the sun’s last sanguineous rays certainly looked more like an artery than a current - but as an adult it had been necessary that she knew the truth of the matter.
Blood Island was so named because it was where the women had to go when they bled.
That unwelcome setting-straight of the record had disillusioned the thirteen year old Sylvia, given her preference for the beauty of the sunset-inspired explanation. Many times since, in the last three years, she had been heard to utter that only children should be poets. Adults just didn’t have it in them to be more than pragmatic.
She remembered getting The Speech from her mother shortly after that thirteenth birthday, remembered the anticipatory dread of once a month, for the rest of her life, having to paddle off alone to Blood Island through the naiad-infested waters to be secluded away from the rest of her family. Her first trip had not been so bad – she was allowed an aunt as a chaperone as all girls were during their first unclean week on the island – but her second… She had been so scared of going there alone that she had pretended that her flow hadn’t come on time, hoping that her mother wouldn’t make her go. Even though she knew that there would be at least five other women already on the isle, able to help her cope. Even though common sense should have told her that the blood came in an undeniable cycle and that, despite her protestations, her mother would know it was there.
Over the years, Sylvia had become inured to the fear, had learnt that there were worse things than being alone. Nevertheless she had yearned, until now, for the day she would be wedded and with child, just for a break from the monotonous drudgery of paddling into loneliness once every month. Now that she was sixteen she should, by rights, be sent to the monthly gatherings when the men came over from Man’s Island in the east, looking for wives.
But now she knew she could never be married, ever, thanks to a stupid moment of inattention, an upturned canoe, and the sneakiness of naiads.
It had been over a month ago, on her last trip to Blood Island, when the dull ache of her shoulders as they pulled her oars against the water, the warmth of the rising sun as it crept down her back and the bored call of a far off gull had suggested to her the lyrics of a song. Sylvia’s mind had wandered just long enough for a vagrant zephyr to raise the swell just high enough for her canoe to tip just far enough…
She had tread water, swearing, while she watched her oars sink out of sight
beneath her circling feet, down and away beyond her reach. Luckily, her canoe had drifted only body-lengths away and in the direction of Blood Island, and so she had regained its safety in moments. Kneeling once more in its prow, she had cast one last disgusted look back in the direction where her oars had escaped her and there she had seen it – a faint, pearlescent sheen to the waves, rimmed by sticky, yellow globs.
Naiad semen.
With a sob catching in her throat she had ripped up her skirt, hoping beyond logic that there would be some outward sign of whether or not she fallen amongst the insidious stuff, knowing that if she had, no amount of ogling or pawing at her vagina could make any difference now. Seconds were all it took and it made no difference what the point in your cycle.
Within minutes an ironically friendly current had carried her within shallower waters and she had been able to swim one handed to Blood Island, towing the canoe behind her with her other arm.
Over a month ago.
Her flow had not come as scheduled. The damn, lecherous naiad had impregnated her after all.
Heedless of whether or not she was being observed, Sylvia ran her hands over the faint tightening that had developed across her belly in the last few days.
Before her a proud line of palm trees stood, gently swaying in the twilight breeze. Their position respectfully back behind the flotsam that delineated the high-tide mark reminded her that all things born of nature were wise to fear the fluid anarchy of the ocean’s waves. Staring out from the ochre beach of Women’s Island and into the spears of scarlet light that fired towards her from the west, Sylvia wondered what the hell was she going to do now.
Hell is an ocean with no islands on which to land, a place where you drown, are reborn, drown again and so on, for all of time. A place where loose women went after death – an aunt.
A human woman has never borne a naiad child and to do so would cause the fish to spurn the Isles until her every family member and friend died a horrible death by starvation – grandmother.
Stupid mistakes shouldn’t be made worse by a failure to accept the consequences – mother.
At least the headwoman was making an attempt to remain rational.
‘Sylvia, you know that eventually the men would hear and the child would be butchered.’
‘But why, Mistress? If it is true that no one has tried to raise a naiad half-breed, who knows what it would be like? Maybe the child would be good. I could raise it to be loyal to us, to humans.’
‘Don’t be naïve, Sylvia,’ the headwoman said, dismissing the suggestion with an irritated shake of her head. ‘Have you not seen the fate of Dania? Of Ophelia? Of Carolita? The naiads are utterly alien. They are creatures of instinct, not learning. Such a beast could not alter its essential nature, regardless of its upbringing.’
Dania had elected to have her naiad child aborted. She had drunk the juice of the sweetspine fruit for two consecutive days, ingesting no other food or drink during that time, until her cramps had come and the bloody, scaly foetus had been ejected from her body. The thing’s spirit still swarmed around her head like a cloud of flies – a constant, storm-grey presence, exactly the colour that Sylvia saw in her peripheral vision whenever her mother clipped her across the ears for inattention. Ophelia and Carolita had followed the headwoman’s advice and had waited for their children to be born before killing them. They had cast the infant bodies into the sea with the rationale that the naiads would take care of them if they truly wished them to live. Both women were haunted as well – testimony, as far as Sylvia was concerned, to the obvious fallacy in the headwoman’s method – constantly mocked by the sound of a mewling baby that emanated from pseudo-visible shadows hovering behind their ears. The shadows were more than superficially similar in hue to the aquamarine florets of coral that the women used for money on the odd occasion that they had cause for trade with the ocean’s myriad, non-human denizens.
The question that Sylvia wanted to ask, but for which she knew she would never muster the courage, was: if the naiads are such beasts, how is it that part of them survives death, when no trace of a human ghost has ever been seen?
‘The men never kill naiads when they encounter them fishing, Mistress, why is it permitted for me to do it now?’
The headwoman sighed. ‘I will not be drawn into a debate with you about this, Sylvia. The men do not kill naiads when fishing because it is bad luck to do so. This is totally different.’
Sylvia couldn’t see how having a grey or blue cloud enshrouding your head for the rest of your unmarried life could be considered anything other than bad luck.
The headwoman seemed to read her rebellion in the set lines of her face. ‘Sylvia,’ she said in a tone steeped in sympathy, ‘you have been violated and it is a sad, sad thing. Such things always make us emotional, just like a Farewelling for a dead friend. At such times, it behooves one as young as yourself to accept the counsel of your elders. You cannot keep this child – it would be wrong, terribly wrong – a perversion of nature and an insult to the men that they would never bear. Your choices are those of Dania or Ophelia. Neither are pleasant but we can’t change what’s past. There’s only a week before the beast is born so choose one and let’s be on with life.’
Sylvia found herself angered by the patronising dismissal in the headwoman’s tone. She wanted to say something shocking, something to prod an honest, unrehearsed response from the woman’s lips. All she could think of was:
‘What would you do in my place, Mistress?’
The headwoman snorted, surprised by Sylvia’s pertness. ‘This never happened to me,’ she said. ‘That is why I am headwoman and you are just a silly, pregnant girl.’
Sylvia dragged her aunt’s canoe down to the beach as silently as she was able given its bulk and the complete lack of masking noise in the solitude of deep night.
Moonless, the night provided her no advice as to the nature of the tide or the depth of the swells off shore. The stars served only to mock her desire for vision, sending inconstant glimmers off the waves, dizzying and teasing splinters of light.
She pushed the vessel into the water, ambivalent to its direction, and hopped with an ease at odds with her new, uncomfortable girth into its harshly carved bosom. The water skins she had filched from beneath her mother’s cot banged painfully into her kidneys before settling again at her sides, hopeful frames to either side of her extended belly.
A few brusque strokes pushed her past the headlands that formed the main bay of Women’s Island and out into the open sea. She ceased her labours, trying to sense through her buttocks the tide and its strength. As straight as a comet, she felt it tugging her out into the ocean. A grimace of satisfaction shaped her mouth but failed to touch her eyes, where tears of uncertainty, as salty as the sea, dripped slowly down to her chin.
A loneliness of two was preferable to being alone amidst strangers.