This was clearly the big one. He didn’t want to say. John couldn’t look at me and talk at the same time. He fiddled with some invisible thing in the water. “About . . . about eighty-five?”
He didn’t look a day out of college.
“Let me see your feet,” I sighed. But I already knew. You have got to be kidding me. What are the fucking chances?
I hadn’t noticed before. I know we had sex and everything, but I’m not really into feet that way. I checked under his arms and under his hair. John Heron, alleged human male, had webbed toes, gills, and tiny vestigial skull-fins the color of the jellyfish on the beach.
“Mystery solved,” I purred in his ear. “You’re one of us. Half one of us, anyway. Welcome to Freak City. Watch out—it gets real stupid here.”
• • •
And indeed it did get real stupid, real fast.
I shouldn’t have gotten knocked up. It’s so easy when you’re doing it with other fish! If it’s not mating season, I’m not releasing eggs and it’s all good times and kippers for breakfast after. But John’s got a lot of mammal in him, and I guess the rules are different. Probably what happened to his poor mother, whoever she was. Girl thought she was going topside for a bit of blow and strange and all of a sudden—BAM. Egged up something terrible. Atlantean girls go from zero to mum in about six weeks, so I just . . . stuck around. I couldn’t face my mother or Platypunk or Crowjack. I couldn’t face being on stage screaming out “Atlantean Idiot” with a big ol’ baby belly. It is the opposite of punk rock.
The best part of giving birth was the look on John Heron’s face. I don’t know what he saw in his sex-ed filmstrips, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a green girl squatting in the ocean in broad daylight while she pushes out an aquamarine egg the size of a dinghy and tries to hide what’s happening from the kids in their floaties and swim trunks. He thought the daddy’s job was to smoke a cigar and change a couple of diapers, not to wait until nightfall to drag the egg onto the sand and secrete a nutritive acid from his eyes to dissolve the shell. I don’t think I ever loved him again as much as I did while he wept over our son, fire-colored gunk hissing and popping on the eggshell, laughing at the total bugfuck absurdity of what was happening to him. When the glassy blue egg had half-melted away, I reached my arms down into the last of the glittering yolk. I felt tiny fingers clutch my hand.
Look, I have never been anything but hardcore since I said my first swear, but when my son grabbed onto me for the first time, it was like a harpoon in the heart. Nothing ever hurt so much or felt so good. I lifted him out of the egg and held him in my arms. He didn’t cry. He held on to my hair in his fists.
Of course, he wasn’t him yet. Atlanteans are born hermaphroditic, telepathic, about as far along as a human two-year-old, and completely transparent. We pigment up over childhood. In kindergarten, most of us still have clear patches all over. I counted diamond ribs through crystal skin.
“It’ll be a boy in about a year,” I whispered to John.
We both stared at our child. I was amazed any creature could be so perfect and beautiful. John was amazed that his kid looked like a glass Christmas ornament of the baby Jesus.
We named him Angus. John insisted, after his foster father. I only gave in because everything else about Angus was all me. You’d never know he had any mammal in the mix at all. When he cried, it sounded like whale song. But when we were alone I called him Azure. A proper pedigreed Atlantean name for the secret prince of the sea. Because I still hadn’t told John who I was. Who my mother was. I liked just being Bayou for somebody in the world. Just being loved. But after Angus was born, we had to go home. Hatchlings just can’t live on land. It’d be like filling a baby’s bottle full of rum and cramming it up his nose all day. A growing boy needs salt water.
This is the part you’ve been waiting for. I know what stories fill the seats, and it’s not the one about the punk rock alligator princess getting knocked up. That’s what happens before the real story. Or offstage during an act break. Babies just sort of happen to heroes at random moments, like a new superpower, and then they’re off to the real excitement. But Angus and I happened to each other. Lucky accidents. All the way down, his gentle little voice spoke in my head, and my rough, air-shredded whiskey-whisper murmured in his. I kept looking over at John, swimming so beautifully, like he’d never walked in his life, wondering if he could hear us. But I guess he was too human for that.
Mama, what are those?
Those are orcas, Azure. We?
??ll sneak out while Daddy’s sleeping and play hide-and-seek with them, just you wait.
Mama, why is the ocean blue?
Because blue is the color of love, my darling. Everything good is blue.
We glided up the long road to the palace, and for once, it looked wonderful to me, in all its rusted trash-heap glory. I was going to present my mother with her first grandchild, with the chorus to a song I hadn’t even known I was playing, with the future. I flushed pink with pride. She’ll love you, I told John, though it was even money she’d hate him. Don’t be nervous. You’re coming home. Atlantis never turns away her own. Maybe we’ll even find your parents. One of them, anyway. You look kind of like this girl I know who plays the drums in Zombie Starfish and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
But the doors of the palace were shut. Not just shut, barricaded with the masts of the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste. Not just barricaded but guarded by two burly Atlanteans, a giant squid with anger issues, and a great white shark. Not just shut and barricaded and guarded but sporting a big sign with scrawly, terrible penmanship:
COMMONERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER OF MEGALODON
(AND ALSO BAYOU WHO CAN FUCK RIGHT OFF)
Six weeks is a long time to be gone, I guess. All the clubs had shut down till further notice. Platypunk and his family had gone into hiding. No one had any plankton and no one had any hope and no one had any idea what the hell was going on. Half the royal family was in lockup—Davy Jones’s Memorial Hospital for the Violent and Insane. And some asshole named Megalodon ruled Atlantis with an iron fin. But no one had seen the boss himself, only his muscle. So, what did we do? We did what anyone would do when they’re young and in love and looking after their first baby.
We beat the shit out of a shark.
It felt good to fight side by side. People always forget that we did. Anything he can do, I can do upside down and holding a baby in one arm. He was only ever half-Atlantean. I am a full-size candy bar. I laid out one of the guards with a barroom dirty kick, then tied the ’roided-out squid’s tentacles together in a big party bow. I looked over and John had crushed the other guard’s green skull with his fist and was riding the shark like a mechanical bull, banging the poor fella into Megalodon’s sign. Into the word BAYOU. Over and over until the great white passed out cold and the barricade buckled.
Inside. Down the long hall of the Bismarck’s hull. My home. I was born there. I was made of glass there. And from the Bismarck into the Titanic’s tenth ballroom, to my mother’s silver-teapot throne. On one side of the thing, Platypunk crouched miserably in a cage with a marine research tracking collar around his neck, chained to the floor. On the other, my mother, Delphine Tankerbane the Fourth, lay flat on her face, her beautiful hair trailing up behind her, collared and leashed at the neck, the wrists, the ankles, with her blood floating around her like a black jellyfish. Too much blood. Too much blood for this to be a dream I could wake up from and have my mom call me BeeBee and snuggle me like she did when I was a little glass guppy and we’d never had a single fight and I didn’t even know how to play the conch yet.
On the throne sat Crowjack.
Only he wasn’t Crowjack anymore. Not completely. His legs had fused into a thrashing thick tail. His emerald-plated head was almost fully transformed into the maw and dead eyes of a prehistoric shark. He snapped his massive rows of teeth. When he saw me, his suddenly broad, powerful chest began to glow electric blue. The blue of love. The blue of mating.