“Crowjack! What the fuck? What did you do?”

“I found it, Bayou! I found a way back home. To our own dimension. This is what we’re supposed to look like! This is what we are! The greatest predators in any ocean in the universe! It feels amazing. It feels right. It’s your stupid mother and all the fish-gut aristocrats who keep us trapped in miserable half-primate bodies! I’ll show you. I’ll show you the way. The sea . . . is full of doors, Bayou. And all the doors lead to power. And what the shit is that thing you dragged back?”

“Call me Avast, cruel villain!” John cried. “Wherever injustice rears its hideous head, wherever tyranny casts its baleful gaze, wherever evil sails the sea, there you will find Avast ready and able to strike it down!”

Megalodon blinked. I gawked at my husband. “Is this a joke?” snarled the shark-thing on the throne. “What are you talking about? Sit down, Shakespeare; this is between me and my little princess.”

“The lady is mine,” Avast growled. It was like we’d gotten zapped into one of Crowjack’s shitty performance pieces, throwing around purple prose and noble angst like beach balls.

I didn’t even get a chance to say I wasn’t either of theirs. Crowjack wasn’t stupid. He saw a child in my arm and a stranger at my side and suddenly I didn’t exist anymore. Just his rage. Avast’s righteousness. It wasn’t about me anymore and it never would be again. It was about halibut and fatherhood and the pressures of masculinity. Megalodon lunged at us and we fought him, and I suppose if you could have sat up in a balcony seat, there would have been some elegance to the fight, some beauty. Fighting can be like that, sometimes. Megalodon yelled out lines from his own terrible plays and Avast bellowed about justice and freedom in a way that made me seriously question my romantic choices and I stayed grimly silent, clutching my son to me, swinging wild, aiming for my ex-boyfriend’s eyes.

I should have found a place for Angus to hide. I should have put him down. It all happened so fast. I thought I could protect him. And one moment it all seemed to be going so well, and in another Megalodon shrieked beyond human hearing and turned on me, snatching my glass boy from my arms and swallowing him whole. Angus’s voice went out in my head like a blown pilot light. Mama, mama, it’s so loud—and then nothing. The emerald dinosaur freak sitting in my mother’s chair laughed at me. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, then spun round, bit off Avast’s arm, and swam through the ceiling into the dark water, screaming Avast Avast Avast like a curse, like a need, like a promise, like the reverb fading out at the end of a furious song.

Oh, the arm grew back. We’re like starfish; it’s a thing we can do. And it all went on like you’ve heard, Avast and Megalodon, their endless undersea boxing match. Submarines full of other men, Union men, with masks and costumes and hard-set jaws. Oaths to fight to the death, to never yield, to never surrender, to never stop. But in all those oaths and boasts and proclamations of might and right, Avast never said our son’s name. Oh, yes, he would have vengeance, but for “my son.” As though I didn’t exist. As though Angus, as though Azure was nothing but a stolen painting or a bloody nose. A blow to Avast’s pride.

All I felt was nothing. I could fight as well as any of them. And I did. Up there, he’s a superhero. Down here, I’m Queen of Atlantis. I command the seas. You can call me a sellout if you want. I deserve it. Platypunk did. He tried to get me to run off with him to the Indian Ocean where none of this absurdity could find us, and I said no. What was I supposed to do? My family was dead. Atlantis was well and truly fucked. I told myself it was just another stage. Just another costume. But I knew the truth. Punk dies the day the mortgage comes due. I slipped out of my sturgeon-skin coat and fishhook earrings and into my mother’s pale green glam gown of glitter and responsibility. I let them put the Abalone Crown on my head. But I wouldn’t grow my hair out. Never. They couldn’t make me.

God, I made all the Union boys so uncomfortable. I got in between them and the mirror they liked to preen in, the mirror that showed them all as Kings of the Known Universe. They all felt safe with their girlfriends’ ambitions—artists and actresses and scientists. Girls you could brag to the alumni magazine about, but no one they ever had to compete with. They were the sparkly shiny special ones in their houses. After all, science is great, but who can compete with superpowers?

Well, the Queen of Atlantis can.

To tell you the truth, Avast hated Atlantis. Up there, he was a hero. He was totally unique, from New York to New Delhi. Down here, with me, he was just like everyone else

. He got so angry at me, over nothing, over everything, over having to spend another second in a place where no one cared that he could tell a whale what to do, where no one knew he was a star. He never touched me anymore. If he came home and saw my chest light up with blue at the sight of him, his lip curled up in disgust and he buried himself in his workouts.

They never once asked me to join their little club. Even after Megalodon opened the floodgates and half a dimension’s worth of our redneck cousins poured through. Even after I defeated Whitewater and the Werekraken in the Battle of the Bermuda Triangle. Megalodon only barely escaped that one. He holed up in Guignol City like a trust fund baby for months after, licking his wounds. Even then, my husband and his friends never said, Hey, you’re pretty handy; wanna learn the secret handshake? And fucking hell, they hated my crying at night. I hated my crying at night. But I couldn’t help it, could I? John Heron never heard Angus’s little voice in his head. His father was still puttering around, replacing lightbulbs in his cozy little house. Easy come, easy go. They hated hearing the word baby. Child. It messed up the blocking of their play about themselves. Avast could scream, I shall destroy you for the death of my son! and his boys would all cheer. But if I so much as touched my stomach and whispered that I missed my baby, oh, how they’d sneer!

I did everything I was supposed to do. I ruled a nation and battled the forces of aquatic evil. Wherever injustice reared its hideous head, wherever tyranny cast its baleful gaze, wherever evil sailed the sea, I showed up to work and punched my card. But still they whispered about me. In the grottos, in the shallows where they could all breathe easy after dinner, half off their faces on my mother’s sixty-year squid-ink scotch.

“I think she’s losing it,” Kid Mercury said.

“She’s definitely not normal,” Grimdark piled on. “Honestly, Johnny, the kid was barely a week old. It’s not like she can’t have another one. Maybe you should start trying again.”

Chiaroscuro shook his head. So concerned! “Who knows what could happen if . . . if someone like her really went totally mentally airborne. The veils between the Atlantean dimensions look like someone’s grotty old underwear as it is.”

“I don’t know. Just let her be, man,” sighed the Insomniac, but no one paid any attention to him. Thanks, superheroes! You’ve truly saved the day! What would the world do without you?

John Heron, Avast, my husband, my golden lighthouse in the dark, my fire-weeping darling, slugged back the last of a scotch my mother had been saving for her jubilee and groaned. “I wish I’d never met her. I know that’s a horrible thing to say. I’d never tell her, not in a hundred years. But god, whenever she opens her mouth these days, I wish I’d just let her drown out there, gone back up the lighthouse steps, and had a smoke instead.”

He still thought he’d saved me all those years before. That somehow, the Queen of Atlantis had needed a lifeguard. Those good, kind, clean-cut All-American boys comforted him, hugged him (manfully), said they understood him. Nobody deserved a wife like me.

And so my husband put me away. In the gentler, medical wing of Davy Jones’s Memorial. For my own protection, they said. So I could heal. So Megalodon couldn’t find me. So they’d know I was safe. But really, so they’d feel better. So they could get back to the show already in progress. It was just so messy, the whole wife-and-kid thing. Doesn’t go with the outfit. Leave that shit for a Very Special Episode and get back to prime time! I laughed in his face when he signed me over to the doctors.

“I’m sorry, John. I just didn’t get it.”

“What are you talking about, Bayou?”

“I thought we were a punkrage anthem for the ages. You and me against the world. But all you wanted was a groupie. You could get over Angus dying—Azure dying—you could stomach a psychotic shark out for your blood. But you couldn’t share the fucking mic. So, do what you do best, John. Smash everything around you and let someone else clean it up. Go be special in your shitpile world of nobodies and leave me locked up with the wreckage of us. Maybe someday you can tell a morning talk show about your crazy wife and watch the ratings soar. I’m not crazy; I just hate my life, you fuck.”

• • •

John hasn’t come to visitors’ day in years. My cousin Baleen is running the joint out there. As far as my doctors are concerned, Queen Bayou is a quiet, easy patient. She doesn’t cause any trouble. She floats in her room and doesn’t bother anyone and every once in a while, she sings real soft to the waves: Blue is the color of love, my darling. Everything good is blue. As far as anyone can tell, my husband plans to leave me here forever, a gun on the mantle, a hammer under glass. In Case of Emergency, Break Plot.

But you know what? Megalodon was right. The sea is full of doors. And all the doors lead to power.

One of them leads here.

THE HELL HATH CLUB VS. THE JUNGIAN SUBCONSCIOUS

Tags: Catherynne M. Valente Fantasy
Source: readsnovelonline.net