Chapter 6 Healing
Healing
Once again, I find myself not waking up in my cot or bed. I blink calmly at the starry night sky. Was I caught in the storm? Did I collapse out here? Was all of that another strange dream?
Through my gauzy hair, I can see the bulb is still running and I’m glad that the generator hasn’t run out of fuel.
Water splashes gently up against the other side of me, spattering onto my cheek in misty droplets.
I turn my stiff neck and see those bright shining eyes again, their electricity zapping me awake.
“I’m feeling much better now,” he whispers.
I sit up quickly and notice my exposed midriff from my sweater unravelling. I feel some fabric wrapped around my stomach and push my hand against its cold wetness.
“Ouch.”
I wince and dip my legs into the tide pool.
The cold water feels good on my swollen feet.
I’ve done more running in the last twenty-four hours than probably the last ten years.
He drifts over to me and I pull back a bit, to which he pinches his brow concerned.
“Once I woke up, I noticed it wasn’t just my blood that was in that trail and filling this pond.
You had also gotten hurt and hadn’t even noticed. ”
I point rudely at his tail. “Well, I was a little distracted by—” I pull my hand back and swish it around, clearing the air from what I was about to say. “There was a lot going on.”
He puts his head in my lap and looks up at me gently, rubbing my sore legs, seemingly knowing almost exactly what hurts the most. I reach down in my tired trance and pick up a semi dried curling tendril of his hair.
It slips between my fingers like soft silk cascading down his back and into the water.
He rubs his face into my lap like some small purring creature—
Suddenly feeling more aware and even the smallest ounce of shame, I jolt up and he flops backwards into the water. “Ah! Sorry! I’ve got to go…the lighthouse…I need to uh—”
I bumble away all the excuses I can think of, even though…this is my house? My rock! My safe haven and some weird man-thing is practically purring against me like this is any amount of normal!
Tripping backwards towards the door, I fumble for the handle, searching for something solid to hold onto.
He looks at me like a puppy I’m leaving at the pound.
I awkwardly escape back inside. My heart is pounding as reality cascades down upon me with crushing weight.
I saved a man, that man is half fish, and I’m alone on this island with this half-fish-man. I must be losing my mind.
Into my unmade bed, I crumble still soaked. Though caked in salt and with my boots still on, but I’m beyond the threshold for human exhaustion. I am but so many little cells screaming to find rest.
Collapsing into sleep, I drift away to the gentle waves lapping against the rocks, tossing pebbles softly in its cold embrace.
A melodic churning that is changing something within my heart as I dream.
My mind wanders on storms and lightning, of strong hands tearing up my sweater to hold and caress me.
To take gentle care of my flesh, to lick my wounds.
A faceless mouth that lingers, that caresses, and that cares—that cares for me.
I can’t help but feel guilty. In my last dream I felt the safety of Eli’s hands, but now they are not his that hand me off into this strange infirmary I float within.
The wounds of my stomach are knit back into their rightful place, the dropped stitches tenderly resurrected into one complete whole stuffed body.
After being benevolently repaired I am tucked into a soft bed wrapped over and over in a mummification dressing of kelp leaves.
My alarm clock of screeching birds wakes me up once again.
Sitting up, I move my arms and legs out jutting into a starfish frame.
The dream was so real that I’m genuinely surprised I can move freely from that tender swaddle that I imagined.
I quickly pull off the dressing from my torso, only a purple-toned scar remains.
How could I have healed so quickly? He dressed it like it was a mortal wound, but now it looks like I was bleeding out over a rose thorn scratch.
Moving quickly to the window I see the furthest edge of the pond, but no sight of him. Did he leave already? Are his wounds worse and he’s floating upside down in the side of the pool I can’t see from my window?
Rushing down the stairs, I pull off my boots that are only turning into lead weights around my swollen feet. I quickly open the door and—almost smack him in the head!
“Look out! We are not in an emergency anymore!” He braces himself back up against a rock.
“Any morning there’s a fish, a mermaid—merman, on my front stoop, it is an emergency!” I huff.
I see now how he’s sprung this surprise on me, overnight he’s moved rocks, pebbles and practically boulders to turn his little tide pool into a moat that reaches right up to my front door.
“It is not ‘fish’, it’s Lir.” He exclaims with the sort of attitude that I should somehow know that by now.
Pointing my whole body and arms towards the sea, I yell, “Well okay Lir, the ocean is that way? What are you trying to do anyways? You’re supposed to be healing up, do you know how much blood you lost—“
Interrupting me, he pouts while swishing the water with his clawed finger.
“I was worried you’d forget about me down here…
” Gazing up, he looks all over me. He sighs before he admits, “And, I was worried about you.” He had no shame for the first statement, but his eyes lower as he makes his confession.
Defeated, I groan, “You’re not a goldfish, it’d be hard to forget about you…” I trail off, a sudden realization washing over me. “Did you come up the stairs last night?” I scream in a sudden outburst, while pointing back up the long hall.
“No? How could I get up those? I’m injured...” He whimpers as he says the last word looking both pathetic and suspicious.
“But, I was dreaming about—I swear I could feel you—”
That statement makes him perk up, the little gold rings adorning his ears catching the light as he quickly moves closer to me.
“You were dreaming about me?” He grins. A too wide toothy smile, a grin that if I had any better sense I should be terrified of.
Then again, I ran out into that storm, thus I’ve proven myself to be a complete idiot.
Tasting the salt air, I realize my mouth has been hanging open for more than a second. “That’s not the point! You—” I point to my stomach and then his mouth, back and forth, before flailing my hands all about like a fool.
“I did that while you were collapsed on the rocks next to me, I was just trying to stitch you up like you stitched me up.”
“That is not how I stitched you up!” I turn my head away, not wanting him to see my face turning red. “Also, you said you weren’t magic! How is this rope burn already gone?”
“I’m not magic, or at least I don’t think I am. Would you call it magic or cursed if I can’t save myself? I was bleeding out too badly, too deadly of a wound for any of that to help me—but for you, I could at least quell the pain a bit.”
Moving closer, I sit down on the ground and swirl my finger in the water, lost in all of his words. “Most humans can’t do either, save ourselves or others—not even the ones we love.”
We both look sad for a moment, but then I perk up to exclaim, “Don’t do any of that without my permission!” I circle the outline of my mouth with my hands. Though he’s speaking English, I do feel the need to sign out my thoughts with this nonchalant attitude he’s throwing around.
Tilting his head, he pauses before defending himself, “I didn't though.”
We stare silently until he elaborates, “Once I woke up, and you were lying next to me on the rocks. Feverish and shaking, you cried out for me, ‘Somebody. Please save me.’ I only did what I was told.”
I begin to roll my eyes, but he looks down pensive. “It’s strange, I felt like I had heard that cried out before while traveling across the water, that voice drifting along the waves towards me. That is what I followed here after all.”
I remember back to when my husband died, when I came here willingly, but it felt more like a banishment.
I had only been married a little over a year at that point, and it felt like just moments before that I had been a young maiden.
So many hopes, so much innocence towards the world.
I had yet to be tossed around in life’s cruel tide.
I was once shiny and new, but I have been shattered and dulled into a piece of sea glass.
Washed alone on this shore to be rolled and spit out until there is nothing left of me.
That’s what I had resigned myself to at least. I had still felt it quietly in my heart though, those words just a whisper; someone please, save me.
“You probably just heard the gulls, they’re always crying like that...” I turn my head quickly away from him, from his eyes that reflect the light like imperfect bubbled glass, glass not yet dulled by the tide.
With noises closer to creaky haunted house doors than to human joints, I groan bracing my raw knees as I climb up to go back inside. His hand shoots out of the water quickly and I gasp as my brain remembers that this is some sort of sea creature, possibly a monster.
He pulls me close, and it almost feels—for a moment—as if he’s going to put his mouth on mine.
I have never been so close to a man who thought of doing something else with this little of space between us.
Instead, he pulls my hands up towards his mouth.
Is he going to kiss my mangled knuckle as some sort of chivalric gesture?
A seal for an oath between us about the debt he has incurred from my stupidity?
More likely he has finally decided to eat me.