Water to Water, Sea to Sea

One night the lamprey crawls from the sea and into my bed. Which is strange because it feeds on cold, cold-blooded sea life like itself. Normally. But maybe it senses I’m dying.

This is the reason the bed is so cold, though my body lies there, why the sheets are wetted from salty sweat. In fact, it’s a bit like the sea after all. I’ve been here so long, I might be submerged. My skin sloughs, I sense it peeling in thin layers like paper. I sense the lamprey, its rubbery fishness that slithers against me. My girl body so tender compared to its standard prey that is spiny, scaly. It nuzzles through the outer layers of my flesh, and I close my eyes, trying to calm my breathing that comes in fast gasps.

In my room, it’s dark like the blackest starless sky. Quiet, except the crash of waves against the rocky shore below. A house at the top of a tall craggy cliff with five bedrooms, though it’s just me living here, dying here, since my true love left me tied to the bedposts with black silk ribbons. Couldn’t bear the thought of me with another, she always left me this way when she went out, then one day she didn’t come back. I wondered if she fell, if she found a new house with a better lover and forgot, didn’t forget but no reason to return. I’ll be gone soon enough. Save the cost of a bullet. She’s thrifty like that.

The lamprey is my new bedfellow. He’s a lonesome vampire who wants not just my blood but the fascia, the membranous tissues that wrap each body organ, the vessels and bones. Crushed and suctioned until I turn inside out.

When I’d imagined my own death, I suppose everyone does sometimes, it wasn’t like this. I’d expected to pass my second decade of living. I’d thought I’d have more time to prepare, because my life is filled with sin. I didn’t seek it, but it sought me, and who was I to question the natural order of things? I’d take time to repent, I’d told myself, later. Confess and Hail Mary’s as my ninth decade of living approached. My mother lived to one hundred seven. She accepted Jesus as her Savior at one hundred six. Now she sings with the angels.

Two days shy of my second decade of living, I’m tied to the bedposts of my own bed, no one to find me. I badly misjudged the intentions of that priest. Though he came knocking at my door with passion and the Easy Read King James in black leatherette binding, he claimed (later) it was only in service to the Lord God our Father. After I tried to fuck him, not once but three times.

There’s a reason my true love mistrusts me.

There was the time when, in the ecstasy, I tried stabbing her with the Shun Fuji Chef’s kitchen knife. The scissors, the garden shears. But she loves me, she loves me for it—

Now it’s days gone by, I’m awash in my person sea. The lamprey’s toothed orifice chews gently, eating the soup of my insides. My body feels newly hollow at the extremities, skin folding in onto itself. How much longer until it’s too late, I don’t know. Then my true love if (when) she returns, not having meant to leave me at all but unaccountably delayed, will find nothing but this collapsed body suit. No one inside, but outside what resembled from afar a black silky ribbon like the ones at my wrists. It whips its long slick body in all directions, the tail end trying to free the mouth end. The drain.

That’s what it is, and when the plug yanks free anything left of me worth preserving spills to the floor, a sloppy wet stream of it. Everything else back to the dark salty waters, where the lamprey returns, vanished into the black cold mass of it. It takes part of me with it. Water to water, sea to sea.

*Feature image by Mannaggia (Adobe)