Short Story (to lighten the mood)

 How Chloe St. Germain Found Peace and Harmony in 2020

“It’s a bathtub, Chloe, that’s all,” Judy shouted through her cotton mask from across the room as she pointed to the hallway that led to the tank rooms.  COVID19 had closed Judy’s Escape Float Spa temporarily due to the shutdowns -  and my knitting shop, Yarn Yoga, for good. I would visit from across the room while Judy furtively shuttled a few long-time clients through the back door to the single tub she kept operational. They were nurses and Judy justified the illegal activity as community service rather than what it was: keeping the lights on. For me, it was the only time I saw another human in real life anymore. 

“There’s a thousand pounds of Epsom salts cycling through that tank. You control the lights, the sound, everything. Choose your own sensory adventure, Chloe, but you can’t stay like this.”  She gestured up and down with her left hand, helpless to describe the state I was in. I self-consciously brought a hand up to my hair, suddenly remembering I hadn't so much as run a brush through it since my visit three days ago. Normally I’d have at least shoved the heap of brown hair under a baseball hat. I wasn’t exactly sure how much brown was up there, I hadn’t exactly kept up with covering the gray roots.

Things weren’t going well. COVID19 had taken my husband, Mark, back in May. In June, my business sent out its last package of handspun yarn. Then, on a brilliant September afternoon, the first foreclosure notice for my house arrived. 

Escape Float Spa opened next door to Yarn Yoga in 2018. Upon meeting, Judy and I had become inseparable as we realized we were selling the same thing: relaxation. Yarn Yoga by way of knitting and Escape Float via Epsom salt and sensory deprivation. 

Judy’s spa housed four separate soaking rooms, each with a giant float tank, silence, darkness, warm water, and a half-ton of salt. Each of the private rooms is designed as a large square split into two rectangular halves. One half for changing, one half for showering, and then soaking.  Each room was appointed with dried lavender and Home Goods clearance prints featuring pastel trees and flitting birds. A simple wooden chair. Round wicker basket to hold gently folded clothing.  An avowed claustrophobic, I had refused to step foot in one of the tanks for the entirety of our friendship. When Mark was in his fourth week in the Intensive Care unit, I couldn’t sleep or eat or think of anything but my husband, alone in that god damned hospital. Judy tried to get me to float, convinced of the healing power of meditation and salt. I wasn’t the one who needed healing, I explained.

Five months into my widowhood and seven in quarantine, and I couldn’t stop shaking. My muscles had tightened into a giant Charlie horse in my back that woke me out of a sound sleep every two hours. Like I said, things weren’t going well. I looked at Judy’s face and saw the deep lines around her mouth. She was livid with me. 

“Chloe, what have you got to lose? If you hate it, just get out.” She had both hands on her hips, and over the mask covering her nose and mouth, I could see her furrowed eyebrows and crinkled forehead lines.

“Yeah, fine. Screw it. I’ll try anything,” I said. I needed a shower anyhow. At the very least, I told myself, the rainfall showerhead she had installed would be nice. I made my way down the hall into the single open soaking room, the smell of epsom salts somehow breaking through seasonal allergies and a whole lot of snot. The changing room was a Goop-inspired Instagram post. Shades of greige, slate blue, and deep ochre. Almost black hardwood on the floor. Probably a laminate, I reflected, easier to clean. On a shelf near the wooden chair was a ceramic bowl painted in the required colors, held earplugs and a petroleum jelly packet to cover any open cuts or skin wounds. The tiniest paper cut became a big deal when a thousand pounds of salt got involved. The Middle Ages poured salt into flesh wounds as torture for a reason, I reminded myself, as I took the jelly into the shower. Where cuticles belonged were deep red welts and tiny white flecks of skin poked out. The shower stall, a very classy travertine and black tile, had a second glass door that opened to a ten-foot by four-foot soaking tub.

I was naked and standing beneath the hot water streaming from a polished sterling silver showerhead, scanning the room for hidden cameras before remembering it was Judy’s spa and she could barely work the ATM, nevermind set up or afford a camera system. After I’d scrubbed all the oils and soaps off myself, I pushed open the heavy glass door to the float tank. The movement of the door triggered the meditation music that began playing through the speakers overhead. Soundscapes played their innocuous blend of nature, birds, and strings. Soft blue and green LEDs circled the oversized bathtub. Perfectly warmed water came to mid-calf. It was all too much. What world allows this to exist at $150 an hour while not three blocks away there was a tent city? I reminded myself that now wasn’t the time for a political debate, that the time for those sorts of debates had ended at least two decades previous. 

I stretched out in the water. The weightlessness took over. The muscles in my shoulders and upper back began to twitch and jump at the sudden lack of gravity and life’s constant demands on them. As my arm muscles tweaked out in this new state of grace, I stretched myself out into the largest X I could muster. I pulled and pointed my toes until my legs shook and I had to let go. The water gently sloshed against the slides. The lights were still glowing a soft blue and I took my first big breath and let it go. I’d done my share of YouTube yoga and tried breathing and counting the way the girl teaching the classes did. I looked around and saw the intent of the tank: it was womb-like. Everything here felt within my touch and control rather than too small of closing in. Manageable. The space was entirely manageable. I closed my eyes and tried the breathing again, slower this time. With each exhale, I further untethered from earth. I let go of the shut-off notices, the disappeared future, nightmares about Mark, and his terrible last days. It all melted. I imagined the salt pulling it all out of me, through my skin and hair, a black spiral of desperation and loneliness. I closed my eyes and felt a slow spinning sensation that reminded me of the first time I drank strawberry schnapps. I reached over my right shoulder and pressed the large simple button embedded into the side of the tub wall. Silence and darkness immediately followed. In my mind’s eye I saw constellations of universes yet discovered appear. Never in my life had I experienced anything like the aptly named Escape Float Spa. For thirty minutes I spun through space and for a brief moment in time, I may have found something like peace. 

             Afterwards I walked back into the empty waiting room. Judy was waiting at the edge of her seat. I offered a wane smile and held up both hands. The shaking had stopped. A tear escaped one eye and I angrily brushed it away. Judy’s forehead wrinkles disappeared and her eyebrows shot up as her smile lit up the world and made me believe in possibilities again.  “There you are,” she said.

I was hooked. I found that disconnected, meditative space inside my mind more easily and quickly each time I went. I began to forget where I was, or even who I was, within the first fifteen minutes of the session.  

If I went too long between floats, my anxiety would show me all the ways I was about to die. To cope, I knitted. Not sit down on the couch and sip a cup of tea sort of knitting. This was a frantic speed knitting without any sort of plan or pattern. It was row after row of sameness and routine. I’d walk the length of my house for hours with a skein of yarn tucked under my left arm and an amorphous blob of wool spilling out of my needles. What began as a lap blanket was now an arrangement of stockinette stitch in colors, yarns, and stitch counts that had no business being in the same project with each other. I barely looked at what was happening in my hands while in this state. I was breathing and counting and walking and sliding the tip of my right hand needle through the loop of my left and yarning over and pulling through and slipping those new, perfect stitches over. It was all I could do right. And I was using all that stash yarn, finally. Mark would have liked that. Economical. 

After a week of this, I would give in and call Judy to schedule a soak. Before long, I needed the float sessions every couple of days. Then every other day. And then, I no longer felt floating was a choice I needed to make. It was morning coffee. It was popcorn at the movies. It was a cold beer on a hot summer day. Soaking was as much a part of my life as Judy was, as Mark was.

It was customary for the tips of my fingers and toes to resemble white cauliflower after soaking for an hour in the heavily salted water.  Looking back at  my journal, it was after visit twenty-four that the toes on both feet had begun to feel unhealthily sponge-like and viscous. 

By the thirty-sixth soak, though, I couldn’t deny what was happening to my feet. After that fateful soak ended and the brightening LEDs broke my meditation, the world felt manageable and possible. Answers to long-held questions seemed within grasp and the idea that I might be okay were sliding through my conscious mind. I sat up and enjoyed a long and lazy stretch. It was only when I stepped onto the floor of the shower stall that I heard it. The sound of my foot hitting the floor was wrong. Flatter. It slapped the floor a little too loudly. I looked down at the toes on my right foot and saw they had become a solid piece of translucent gray flesh.

I stared in horror. All that calming breath I had practiced  left my body in a whoosh. I bent to get a closer look, not believing what I was seeing. I rubbed at my eyes and instantly regretted it. I hadn’t rinsed off, and the salt burned my face and eyes. I stumbled forward, cussing loudly, and turned the water on, rinsing the fire out of my corneas.  I squatted onto the shower floor to get a closer look. 

The skin between my toes had become two sides of Velcro. Upon meeting, it had meshed itself together into something of a flap.  I closed my eyes and let the freshwater run over me. I dried my face and leaned out of the stream of water to get a closer look. 

I had seen correctly. My stomach made a quick trip around my insides, and my knees buckled. I couldn’t let them stay that way. I had no choice but to separate my toes by hand.  

I took hold of a toe with each hand, holding each between my thumb and forefinger. I closed my eyes and pulled. It was the sound of two frozen chicken breasts being torn apart. I remembered once peeling a sunburn too close to the unburnt skin and the quick gasp of fear at it almost hurting, of nearly tearing your skin off.  I watched as sticky yellow pus oozed out from the openings in the ripped skin of my toes. 

I vomited the coffee I’d had for breakfast. I laid my head on the floor and watched the water from the shower swirl together with my pumpkin spice coffee and slide down the drain. When all traces of it were gone, I rinsed off and inspected my feet. I stuck them under the stream of water and washed myself clean. Slowly, the thick cuticle that had covered my feet melted away.

There was no trace of anything different or weird. Nothing was stuck together. Normal. I rubbed at the toes on both feet and wiggled them, and bent each digit to know for sure that everything was back to how it should be. By the time I was dressed, I had half-convinced myself that something must have stuck itself onto my feet in the water. 

I needed to talk to Judy - but I was afraid she would tell me to stay out of the tanks. And I couldn’t accept that what had happened was real. At the same time, I couldn’t admit that it wasn’t real. The sound of pulling my toes apart kept coming back. The tearing of my flesh wouldn’t let me off reality’s hook. I had done that. I picked up my phone and FaceTimed Judy. 

She answered immediately, inexplicably wearing bright red lipstick and Garfield pajamas. I was in my usual red flannel from head to toe. Per quarantine tradition, I packed my bong, and Judy did the same. I propped up the two-dimensional view of my friend. “It used to be puff, puff, pass,” she said.

“Now it’s puff, puff, get the fuck away from me,” I replied, and we laughed because it was true. 

“Jude, I have a weird question.”

“Shoot,” she said as a massive plume of smoke filled the iPhone screen.

“Anyone ever get- anyone’s toes ever get, like, wicked sticky? From floating too much?” I asked.

“Sticky?” Judy laughed, “Chloe, you need to lay off the weed.” 

She told me to show her my toes when I finished my next float. We agreed it must have been something in the water or maybe I was soaking too much. My agreement with this sentiment had more to do with denying my abject terror than it did with logic. 

I had every intention of showing Judy my feet after my next appointment. The problem was, she had inadvertently set me up for ninety minutes instead of the usual sixty. It was too long by far.

From my meditative imagined world of nothing, I came back to earth splashing and gasping for air. I tried to kick my feet, but they wouldn’t let go of each other.  My legs wouldn’t let go. I lurched toward the wall of the float tank on my right. I slapped at the side where the button for the lights was, finally found it, and jammed my thumb onto it. The haze of blue light, meant for peaceful awakenings, cast an otherworldly glow on the odd, new shape of me under the viscous water.  

          Laying on my back, I lifted my feet into the air over my head. I did not have two separate feet. A thick, gray, and white skin covered me from the shins down.  I was slimy and slippery from my thighs to my toes. The new casing around my feet had bonded them together into one solid thing of flesh. It was moving and spreading and hardening onto me as I watched, helplessly slapping at the latex-like skin, sick with desperation to tear it off of me. I wanted to scream. I meant to shout. I willed it to happen, but instead, a silent breath of air wisped out.

In a complete panic, I hauled myself backward, up the step, out of the tank of water, through the glass door, and onto the attached shower stall’s floor. I kept staring down at where two distinct feet belonged, unable to take my eyes off the grotesquery at the end of my legs. I began to rock uncontrollably, back and forth, my arms folded across my belly. A low keening started somewhere deep inside of me, breathing up and out of my lungs and larynx, escaping the perfect O of my lips. 

I stared at the impossibility of the sluglike gray covering my legs, felt my eyes widening evermore. My hands shook, and I was convinced I could see my heart pounding through my chest. I reached up and turned the shower on, and slapped the handle toward hot.

I took a long, shaky breath, leaned forward, and swallowed hard. I needed to calm my body down. I concentrated on getting my heart rate back under two hundred. When my hands were at least controllable if still shaking, I began to work my pinky nail under the edge of the new corium and began to pull it off. Almost immediately, yellow pus leaked out between this new stuff and my skin. I gagged more than once, thankful I’d not had more than a glass of water so far that day. I wiped the pus away with a washcloth. The fluid the cloth missed spread over the top of my foot and dried almost instantly into another hard layer of dermis. The room began to spin, and I braced myself with both hands on the floor.

I picked a chunk of the thick, plasticine skin again and pulled it slowly off; tiny bits of my skin came off with it. The connective tissues holding it onto me stretched and stretched until finally, like waxy honeycombs, it let go. I dropped the thick callus of skin onto the floor.  The water washed all evidence of it down the drain. 

I continued pulling the hard shell off my feet. The skin underneath, bright red and raw, was bleeding at more than just a trickle. Finally, twenty minutes later, I had two legs again. I rinsed the salt out of my still mostly pepper, shoulder-length hair and watched as the open wounds began to close and heal while I watched with a detached awe. The healthy, new skin on my feet spread itself over the open and burning spots. The raw areas cooled, and within seconds, I had no more pain. The injured scarlet skin turned pink, a shiny white, then disappeared entirely. 

On my way out, Judy asked if everything was okay. “Totally fine,” I lied, quickly shouting that I needed to get home to check on a sourdough starter. 

I stayed away from Escape for six days before my anxiety reminded me why I had started going in the first place. I was pacing—a lot. Finally, after three hours of continuous motion on another unending Wednesday, I swallowed fifteen hundred milligrams of trazodone, instead of the usual five hundred I took each night before bed. It would mean going without at some point or asking the doc for more. Which led to questions I didn’t have answers for. I put the thought into an imaginary box and put that box inside another box, labelled it “Ron Popeil: Set it and Forget it,” and then did just that. I slept for nearly two full days.  

There was no way to avoid it. I needed to get back in that tank. I needed to feel the salt soaking into my skin, opening my mind, taking me to the only place I’d ever felt peace. Every day brought more bad news. 

The election was a soul-sucking quest for the absolute bottom of humanity. Thousands of people were dying every day from this damn virus. I knew what every one of those families went through. Each night, I closed my eyes and tried to find a way back to that headspace I had created in the float tank. Each night, I failed. I would tumble into a world of nightmares that were all too much like daytime’s reality set on hyper speed. I couldn’t sleep more than an hour at a clip. Ten minutes, I told myself. I’d just go in for ten minutes. 

I called Judy. I intended to schedule a session. She coughed a couple of times when she answered. It was a down-deep cough. Endless. It was Mark’s cough.

“Judy,” I started to say before she waved me off. 

“Do not start. I’m fine. I’m quarantining. If I get a headache or a fever, I’ll call my doc, I promise!”

“For fuck’s sake, Judy. How? Who did you see?” She just sort of shrugged. Likely one of her community service nurses, but there was no way to know for sure. I never figured out how Mark got it and I didn’t. 

I didn’t say anything as Judy smiled and told me to stay safe and that she would see me “on the other side.” Immediately, I felt my heart pick up a sprint. The sweat pricked at my underarms and my palms were sweaty before I could reply.

“That was ominous,” I told her. “Terrible choice of words, Judy, Jesus Christ.” She heaved out a laugh through phlegm-filled lungs. I told her to rest, but I knew. I grabbed for my knitting as I said goodbye and stabbed at the wool with my needle, wrapped the yarn far too tightly and purposely broke it in two with my fingers. 

Back in February, I had worked for Judy while she was in New Jersey welcoming her third grandchild into the world.  She taught me all about how the tanks worked, and most importantly, where she kept the spare key hidden. I blew a kiss that Judy caught and promptly pretended to shove up her nose and snort it a la Scarface. 

I lasted exactly one day before I sent a text to Judy. I was astonished to find that morning that I had exactly three skeins of garbage acrylic craft yarn remaining. Gross. At that moment, the bare bulb in our unfinished basement went out with a pop and fizzle. I closed my eyes and let my head fall backward in the dark as I pulled my phone out of my back pocket. There in my blackened basement, I never felt as shameful and selfish as I did at that moment. I opened the message app and felt the familiar heat rising in my cheeks, my fingers shook too much to type so I used voice to text. I was beyond frantic at the thought of losing Judy, sure. But under all of that, deep down in the parts we don’t even share with our dying husbands, what I wanted was her key to the spa. I hit the little microphone on the keyboard.

Hey! Feeling pretty anxious, worried about you. How are you feeling?

On my iPhone screen, three dots appeared, indicating a reply. 

IN ER. GETTING TESTED. HIGH FEVER.

             Shit. Shit. Shit. Judy, whose daily step count goal was two-hundred and fifty and relied on an inhaler several times a day was a walking risk factor. Mark was a runner. He was a letter carrier and walked miles every day. Yet once again, there I was shaking and ashamed of the truth. I needed to get into that tank. I needed it as much as I needed my friend to survive. I needed it so I could survive. I yanked off my socks and stepped onto the cool hardwood floor of my bedroom. The panic was rising, and my heart rate sent my smartwatch binging. 

“Red curtains, blue afghan, brown floor,” I listed out loud to nobody. I breathed ujjayi then sent my reply.  

I’m so sorry, Judy. You must be so scared. How can I help?

I was praying to several old and new gods that she needed me to go to the spa. I’d do anything she asked if it meant time in a tank. Just let me have a half hour. Thirty minutes should be safe.  

THANKS CHICA.  KEY IS UNDER THE MAT AS USUAL. WOULD U MIND LETTING STEVE IN FOR A 90 TONIGHT AT 6? 

TAKE A FREE FLOAT WHILE THERE? 

Steve was an elder care social worker. He would only come at night and when there would be nobody coming in after him. He had lost more than half of his patients to Covid. Yes, I could let Steve in. 

The reality of going back into the tank suddenly a reality, a bit of fear found its way around my belly. I knew what I had seen was real, but was it terrible? It didn't hurt and my feet were fine. Judy soaked daily, and so had hundreds of faithful customers. Nobody died. I continued rationalizing this way the entire time I dressed, ate, and drove the empty roads to Northampton. By the time I hit Hadley I’d convinced myself that my feet probably needed it more than my state of mind. My skin on both feet had never been softer to be honest.

Downtown Northampton’s sidewalks were almost entirely empty. The opposite of a typical warm, late October Saturday. The foliage brings people to Western Mass in the droves, but this year, it was for locals only. Signs in restaurant windows advertising take-out menus, curbside pickups, and reduced hours. Call here when you arrive! They excitedly announce in bold red letters to a sad, scared and lonely public.  I wanted to erase the exclamation points, it was like a clown nose on a corpse. 

I pulled into the parking lot of the strip mall at three in the afternoon. I would float for thirty minutes and then clean the place as much as possible to polish away my precious guilt. 

The neighborhood tiger cat walked amiably over for a head scritch as  I crouched over the spa mat scrawled with, “We all FLOAT in here,” and grabbed the hidden key from underneath. I stood and looked over at my closed up shop. Brown craft paper covered the windows from inside. The sign was still up over the door. An old friend I grew up with had painted it by hand for me as a gift. I asked to keep it at the closing when I sold the whole business. The barely legal buyer thought it was “kinda old school, but soooo cuuutteeeee.” I wanted to throat punch her.

Another Smith College graduate with a lot of cash for the big, wide strokes and none of the gumption needed for the detail work. Nothing seems to have happened inside the shop since that day.

 Once inside, I started breathing easier. My chest loosened and expanded. My nostrils opened wider, and the air filled my lungs and belly as though I had a suction device down there.  Oxygen came in, and carbon dioxide went out in a perfect cycle. I began undressing the moment the door closed behind me.

I didn’t bother with the pre-soak rituals, the lights, or the music. I flung open the door to the float room and dropped down into the water, the salt pushing every part of me upward. From my ankles to my little fingers, I was perfectly balanced and held aloft in a black and saline universe. In an instant, the world disappeared, and my body spun through space. 

The galaxy opened herself to me and showed me unknowable colors. She played me music that didn’t exist, and she touched me in places that I had not known were a part of me before. In this space, I was without shape or body. I was gratitude and gentleness. I was all the best parts of myself and none of the sad, angry, or lost. I was safe.

I sought out all the evidence I had that there was kindness in my heart, in my small intestines, down into my mitochondria and cytoplasm. Finding it there in excess, I exhaled and imagined it spreading up and out, through the roof, and into the red and gold of the world outside. 

I came back from wherever my mind had taken me and became aware that I was completely submerged in the water. My mouth was closed, and my chest was perfectly still, not moving with oxygen entering and carbon dioxide leaving. The world was silent, and I was not afraid. The serenity of my water-world came back with me.

I gently swayed my torso back and forth under the water, not wanting to break the spell. I felt the soft water caress my belly. My hair swirled around me, the soft water gently hushing itself against me, stroking me back to my imagined world of color and comfort. 

I knew without checking that whatever happened with my feet had moved up and that my legs were not legs. I knew that I did not have to raise my head above the water to breathe. I decided to feel what was going on with my body this time rather than watch it. I flexed what had been my feet a few times, told them to move, and they did. 

The resulting movement, or catapult if that’s what you want to call it, was way out of proportion. No sooner had I moved my feet downward when I was tossed backward into the glass door that separated the tank and the shower stall. My back smacked against the door before I splashed back down into the Epsom salt water. 

The dreamlike lifted and I began to panic and shake uncontrollably again. I felt a ridge along the back of where my legs would meet if there were still two different legs to do such a thing. It was a distinct line one might describe as a fin.  Whatever my feet had become was now splashing wildly at the other end of the tank. I pushed down, forcing my lower half under the water, and immediately sent me flying upward and crashing into the glass door behind me and then sliding down back into the water once again.  The automated lights and music had kicked on when I crashed into the door. I wiped at my eyes with the washcloth and finally saw what I had become.  

 My first cohesive thought was, “Not human.” What had been feet was a tailfin. It was there, at the end of me. I moved what I thought of as my toes. Instead, the fin at the other end of the tank moved.  My breath left what I hoped were still lungs in a violent panic. I couldn’t get air back inside me. I swayed from side to side, hoping that would push oxygen from the water into me somehow, an entirely insane thought. A high-pitched ringing took over my hearing. I was disconnecting from my body, rising into the air above me. A childhood survival tactic coming back after forty years to save me again. I closed my eyes again, and the screaming continued until finally, I was out of air and energy. 

I heard my own voice in my head only louder and commanding: You have a choice right now, dumbass. You can give in to the panic. You can let it take over the rest of your crumbling mind and stay here screaming for an eternity, or, you can take a breath. Learn what this new skin, this unwanted new body, is all about. 

 I looked again at myself, this time more in control of the rising terror. My body had enlarged and completely lost any semblance to a human form. I was neither fish nor mammal. The skin on my arms and chest was thicker and heavier than my belly and hips. Those areas were more “me” still. My arms were a golden-yellow that I certainly hadn’t seen at the MAC counter in my lifetime. I wondered what shade letter and number I was now and part of my brain cackled a little too crazily for comfort. My freckles were gone, mixed feelings about that. In my middle-age, those suckers took a few years off when you needed them to. My fingernails had thickened into claws. I held my hand up in the air and studied the thick talons. I had to admit, they were awesome.

In college, I took a Greek mythology class. I remembered Perseus slaying the sea monster, Cetus. Inside my textbook was a centerfold drawing of the amphibious creature. It was the size of a whale and had the ferocity of a dragon. I looked at my moving and changing flesh,  felt it expanding and growing. I wondered how large I would get if I stayed where I was. Or, perhaps, if I were in a larger pond.

I grew lightheaded. I wasn’t sure what the time was, but it felt late. I reached back toward the glass door and pushed it open before hauling myself up with both arms onto the step into the shower stall. From there, I flopped back, smacking onto the floor of the shower. I reached up and yanked on the handle to the shower, cranking the hot water as high as I could get it. Under me, the water began to pool, and a soft current began moving between my shoulder blades. Gills were sucking at the shower water collecting on the floor, desperately searching for oxygen. The world dimmed and then went dark.

When I came to, the shower was soaking me in icy water. It felt like late evening. I looked down, terrified. 

I saw feet. Ten toes, pointing up at the ceiling precisely as they should be.  I inspected every square inch of myself in the mirror. I counted my eyelashes and teeth; stuck my tongue out; and looked between my legs. I slapped myself on the back. No gills. I was Chloe St. Germain again. Whatever it was that I had just turned into had been washed away in the shower.  

Later, dressed and sitting inside my car, I turned on the radio and leaned my head back against the seat. I needed to sit and listen to the oxygen rattle around my lungs for a minute. I grabbed the half joint I left behind earlier from the center console and my lighter, slid both into my pocket and got out of the car. 

My key still worked when I turned the lock to Yarn Yoga. Of course it did. Sierra Julianne Whitcop from Newton wasn’t going to be bothered with those sorts of boring details. Inside, everything was exactly as I had left it. The shop was perfectly clean. Not a single item out of place. Every knitting needle hanging exactly in the right place, yarns organized by weight and fiber content. The beautiful check out counter Mark and his dad had built for me still gleamed under the fine layer of oil I had given it. 

In the back corner of the store was an area for knitting circles and classes. I flopped down onto the couch, reached down and slid out my old ashtray. I lit my half joint and inhaled deeply, the ashtray balanced on my chest. The area was just a bunch of old chairs and the couch facing each other, but something about their mismatched shapes and purpose made it feel like fate had somehow brought all these unrelated and incongruous things and people together to create a little bit of warmth for each other. 

I took another deep drag of the joint and checked my phone. It was almost midnight. I had six missed messages, five from a very annoyed Steve, and one from an unknown number.

Hi this is Debbie. Judy’s daughter shes not doing good.

They moved her to ICU. Call when you can?

Arriving home, I flung open my front door and grabbed the box of wine from the counter and the ten pound bag of epsom salt that Amazon had delivered while I was out. The box of wine had four bottles worth of cheap cabernet sauvignon inside and I intended to  drink every one of them. I turned the hot and cold water knobs in the tub on and adjusted as close to body temperature as I could. I poured myself a glass of wine into the only clean cup I had left in the house, slit open the bag of salt with a butcher knife and dumped it into the bath. I sat on the toilet and waited for the water to at least cover the salt. 

The moment the salt was completely submerged, I stood outside the tub and swirled the toes of my right foot in the water, stirring the salt into the water. When I lifted them out, they’d already melded together. I saw my reflection in the mirror and I could have sworn there was a smirk on my lips that I didn’t mean to put there.

I stepped into the tub and sat down while the water got higher and higher on my thighs, then my waist. I laid back and let it happen. I thought back through the months of screaming into the void, of sameness, sadness, boredom and finger tapping. Creative masturbation techniques,  YouTube sailing videos, and podcast after bloody podcast. Days seeped into weeks into months into one another. It could be a Tuesday or a Sunday or a Friday afternoon, it didn’t matter. 

I could die here in this eight-hundred square foot house with only a few houseplants and Ravelry to miss me. There is freedom to be found in this. Not the Friday freedom you got on your way home from work with the sunroof open and Beck blasting about two turntables and a microphone. This was Freedom, was it not?  Peace and harmony are wonderful, but freedom was what I had been hunting down my entire life. Nothing left to lose, right Janice?

I opened my eyes and saw that I barely fit in my own tub. My skin was all the colors of yellow and gold and green and brilliant blues. There was a pearl quality to the skin that wasn’t there before, a maturation of what had come before. I lifted my lower half up and nudged the drain open with my surprisingly dextrous tail fin and flipped the shower on. Salt in any amount would work it seemed. This time, the smile was wide and intentional.

Sometime in the middle of the night I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing. Judy was gone.

~~

Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season was cold, gray, and abandoned.  I turned the car off in the parking lot near the marina right as NPR announced Joe Biden the winner of the Presidential election. That was hopeful, I thought without a whole lot of hope to account for. I wasn’t so concerned with this world any more, but I was happy for those who were. Sometimes, you take what you can get. A lesson this next generation might need some more time with.         

Ocean air gently filled my lungs. My chest opened wide. On the exhale, I sent out as much love as I possibly could to the world. I sent all the kindness I could find within me. With my arms open to my sides, my head thrown back, I kept walking, tears of goodbyes and hellos, of relief and wisdom soaking the sides of my face. I knew where to go to find peace in this world and the idea filled me with something like happiness. 

I took off my shoes and sat down at the end of the pier. The place had cleared out quickly after the ferry unloaded. The wind kicked up and my wool hat went flying away with it. I watched as it flew up into the bare branches of an oak tree. Perhaps it would come down another day and land on the head of someone who needed it. 

I breathed the delicious salt air through my nose and into my lungs a few more times. In through the nose, hold at the top and slowly out through the mouth. I watched a single cloud slide across the sapphire sky and felt the late fall sun warm my face. It wasn’t a prayer so much as a meditation of gratitude. I pushed off and arched into a perfect dive, my fingers breaking the icy surface of the Atlantic. She welcomed me home.