PodCastle 811: Apolépisi: A De-Scaling

* Author : Suzan Palumbo

* Narrator : Shingai Njeri Kagunda

* Host : Matt Dovey

* Audio Producer : Devin Martin

*

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Previously published by Lightspeed Magazine

Content warning for terminal illness

Rated PG-13

Apolépisi: A De-Scaling

By: Suzan Palumbo

I find Aleda’s scale, sticky with ichor, tucked between the tentacles of our pink anemone bed. I tweeze it out from the undulating appendages with my thumb and index finger and flounder against my escalating heart rate.

Aleda’s swishing back and forth, getting ready for work near the mouth of our cave. It’s time for her to catch the current to the school where she teaches merlets the whisper of the sea.

“I love those ‘mussel heads’,” she’ll say when she returns and rests her hands on my shoulder later tonight. I’ll swivel around and squeeze her so close a longing will bloom in my chest. Except this time, the need won’t fade with the dwindling evening. It will deepen like a cavern and devour me.

I should call out; show her the errant piece of her body that signals the end of our days together before she’s off to the currents.

Let’s have this last carefree day.

The thought crests and seals my mouth mollusc tight. When she’s gone, I pretend it’s the cold moment she’s left forever and let desolation creep over me like the shadow of a shark.

“I found this on the bed.” The scale glints like nacre in my fingers.

“Whose is it?” Aleda asks. There’s a hook in her voice. She knows my scales are octagonal, not tear-drop shaped like hers. I want it to be mine. I don’t want to be the one left behind.

She runs her hands over the curves of her chest and across her hips, searching. The remembrance of those intimate arcs under my own palms sends an electric wave through me.

“I can’t find where it’s from, Raya,” she says. Her eyes flood with uncertainty. She gulps a mouth full of water and filters it through her gills. I swim behind her, brush my hands across her knotted shoulder muscles and down the center of her back. How often have I ached to touch her like this, even after a night tangled in each other’s fins? I don’t want to find her bare flesh, acknowledge the change brewing within her and between us.

“It’s here.” I constrain the ripple in my voice and guide her hand above her left hip. She probes the soft outline of the missing scale with her fingertip. She flinches.

“Does it hurt?” I put my arms around her and bury my face in her neck. A scale dislodges from her shoulder and spirals to the sandy floor.

She presses against me. “No.”

Bioluminescent dinoflagellates fill the cavern in Mother Mer’s cave where she and the Council of Aunties examine Aleda. The flagellates’ glow illuminates the places on Aleda’s body where her scales have sloughed off. She’s lost so many since we discovered the first. The Aunties twist and turn Aleda for some time before they send us out of the room so they can confer in private. Aleda floats next to me, hands clasped in front of her as we wait for them to speak to us. A coral-sharp glint has replaced the dismay in her eyes.

Mother Mer comes to us. Miniature sea stars spangle her body in an intricate spiral pattern signifying her leadership of the complex. Her scales between them are lustrous in defiance of her wisdom and age. The expression in her eyes is fractured like a broken shell. She wastes no time.