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“She’s hot but she’s fucking crazy,” one said to the next, a refrain so common he digested it like soup let out too far. He winced down the rest of his beer, tapped the bar with two entry-level, white-collar hands, and left.
Sandbag feet shuffled down the narrow hall to a bathroom where he found her asleep in a cold clawfoot tub, willow limbs draped over the sides, spigot on, water cascading onto tile, frizzles of moss and plant matter coursing lazily near his entry-level, white-collar feet. Daybreak played across her skin, refracting with a ferocity that forbade him from making out the shape of her. His mind chunked to decipher where he was, what she was doing in the tub like that. A thick memory of his sister’s ill-fated, DIY seaweed bath bombs from two Christmases ago — it took the plumber half a day to undo the damage.
Her eyes were ancient texts whispering open. “I wake up so thirsty if I don’t sleep in water.” “Aren’t you afraid you’ll drown?” “No.”
She stole into a loamy robe before he could confirm that his eyes had indeed deceived him, that she hadn’t been breathing from gleaming folds tucked within the foothills of her curves. His eyes would not be absolved until three dates later.
“I’m a hellbender,” she said, as if revealing that she were a tax professional or an avid cyclist or an only child.
He spent the next month in a murk of his own, a circular parsing of attraction and repulsion. How had he not noticed that she was a giant salamander? What did this make of him?
All he knew for certain was that she was grotesque and precious and rare and she did not feign humility for it, which made her fucking crazy to that guy at the bar and legions of others like him. There was a clawing desire to possess her, keep her behind glass, ensure that no one else could know the woman who was a hellbender. No one could appreciate her the way he could, he was sure of it. He opened an incognito window on his phone and typed large freshwater aquarium build into the search bar.
He was six years old and the neighbor kid was showing him how to smear a lightning bug across the driveway with his foot — you gotta do it just as it starts to light up. His dirty Reebok left in its wake a neon comet tail, brilliant against asphalt sky for two blinks, then a dull drag of guts. The miraculous, bioluminescent beacon of this tiny, perfect creature, spent like a cigarette butt.
Lucidity arrived like a dropped kneeler in church. He saw it: the silt in her complexion, the transparent green of her eyes, their plain acceptance of life’s brutality. Her unadorned wildness next to his sheepish domestication. The aquarium plan — it wasn’t right.
Then he was at the altar of her doorstep, cheeks wet, takeaway box of shrimp in entry-level, white-collar hand. He’d gotten it from the fish house at the mouth of the river and, in the process, found out she’d dated the chef there for some time. Fleeced him for shellfish.
A prey animal’s wide panic flooded her eyes. Behind her, water and plants he could now identify as hornwort and watermilfoil evacuated the bathroom in drowsy currents, swirling paisley across her vintage hardwood floors. Whatever he’d planned to say dissolved. “What do you need?” “There was an oil spill in the river. I need a ride.”
Until now, she had taken to soaking in the river that stole through the city’s industrial center, a wry smile framed by the crumbling teeth of forgotten progress. It wasn’t ideal — hellbenders require clean, moving water — but she’d found suitable spots. She got by.
Her movements changed when they made it to the place on the map. Without the city’s ever-present audience her undulating, amphibious flesh performed only for utility.
Her gummy kiss on his apricot cheek, she was a secret slipping into the cold, clear river. He waited to see if she’d look back, if she’d give him anything — just another glance — for doing the right thing. He waited a long time.
