Chapter 32 Cocoon
Cocoon
On the fourth or fifth day (I’ve lost track), the sun still does not shine.
The overcast darkness still blankets every inch of vision, but the sea has finally calmed.
The warm breeze kisses each wave as it softly crests.
The Gods must have forgiven each other in this lover’s quarrel.
Pulling back to brush hands, instead of winding back fists.
As each wave splashes the spring bioluminescence softly flickers along the top of the sluggish water.
The phytoplankton run across the sea like meteorites burning up in the atmosphere, glowing as brightly as they can when churned by Earth’s unrelenting rocking.
I watch these sparklers fizzle along the shore as my eyelids become heavy and weighed by fishing weights.
Their apologetic lullaby entrancing me into slumber.
Attempting to wake, I rock back and forth in my chair, shaking my head while desperately trying to keep my eyes from gluing shut.
My chin eventually falls into my chest, but I am instantly shattered awake—
A screeching noise claws up the stairs, emanating from the radio room.
I tumble down the short flight to investigate.
All of the electronics and radios are alive in a maelstrom of flashing and buzzing.
The radio channels change with such rapidity that their dials are just a flash of movement.
I try to turn off their switches, but they still refuse to quiet, refuse to let their lights die out even without power.
The howling from their overburdened speakers crackles with such fervent and unwavering intensity—even as I hold the plug in my hand.
A banshee must have come directly across the stereo’s frequency to torment me.
I stand there for a moment, a cold sweat covering my forehead and palm, the blinking lights reflecting off of it as I look at the unplugged cord in my hand. I don’t know what else to do. For just a moment I consider chucking it all into the sea, if it would only stop the screaming.
Then the radio frequencies slow enough to hear syllables, portions of words in different voices, different languages. They all come together to form a hauntingly familiar word—
“An—Dree—A”
“A—ne—de-re-ah.”
“Andrea.”
I can’t breathe. I was half asleep the last time I thought I heard my name through these speakers, but now I am sure I am awake.
Even though I can’t trust my ears and eyes, I can still grip the warm power cord, I can smell the salt air and I can taste the battery acid flavored fear seeping into my palate.
Which ghost is it this time? The gears? The orange blinking that’s been tormenting me from the horizon? My mer—before I can even ask myself, my question is answered.
“Andrea!” A scream climbs desperately up the steps.
The front door bangs open, breaking bottles throughout, their scattering glass pinging like wind chimes all about the halls.
A low howl bounces within the inner walls of the stairwell.
My nightmares of failure puppeteer my legs forward down the spiraling stairs.
I hold the wall both too exhausted to stand, but also too scared of what I might find.
Lir thrashes around in the doorway crying out in pain.
Reaching for me desperately, though he cannot come further without breaking down the jamb—I don’t doubt he would have if I was any slower in my decent.
The turquoise glowing water laps up the stairs and walls, splashing up from the moat almost at his command to bring me to him. Was he speared by a northern whaler?
Even when he was broken against the cove before, he grunted and groaned to hold together his dignity. Now, he pants and cries out for only me.
Propped up over the edge of the front step he sweats and his voice—which normally has such a mirthful tone, instead calls with a precise decree:
“Andrea.”
His skin is ashen and bunched up every which way, dripping off of him at his elbows and joints. His scales only seem to be shining half as bright, their luster blocked by a layer of dull overcast webbing all over him. A snake caught in his molting now thrashes every which way to be released.
I reach and begin to quickly pull him from his spidery casing, peeling back the cobwebs which I think are causing him his cries and discomfort.
All at once, I am completely engulfed in his arms. Holding me close with his face pressed into my chest, his voice cracks with every syllable. “Andrea. Something—something is happening to me.”
He says my name over and over in a desperate prayer.
I can feel his skin is burning up, and I flay off more of the slime coating from his back as he clutches me while shaking.
His breathing slows into a shuttering heave, every muscle of his on fire.
It’s like I’m being held by the stove itself, a lobster to be boiled alive.
To see my lover twisting in such pain could be compared to the fiery lakes of hell itself, its gates opening and crackling within my stomach.
His arms are crushing my lungs, pulling me into the water with him which splashes up glowing across our bodies.
With my free hand I debride this shell covering his scaly shimmering tail. The scales look shockingly bright as I strip them from his tortured state. This veil of molt doesn't seem to hurt him as I strip it away, yet he still pants against my ear.
I try to calm him down, poorly hiding the shaking fear in my throat. “Lir—we can fix this, if you wanted sponge baths from me all you had to do was ask, just a little scrubbing will—”
Quickly, he pushes me back. As if my voice is causing his head to rupture.
He climbs backwards onto a rock, leaning away and looking at me in both pain and like he’s desperately deciding which part of me to eat first. Out of the water now, I see all the changes that I hadn’t noticed before hidden by this new skin and strange body.
“What’s happened to me, Andrea?” Every word carrying the ache from his metamorphosis.
Where skin used to smoothly transition to scales on his pelvis a large pulsating appendage now beats full of determination as it is presented to me.
He cries out, his lips moving languidly between his words and biting his lip to hold back, “It’s turning my stomach into knots.
It burns and beats along with my heart.”
His nails grip into his chest, as if he’d pull out his own beating heart rather than feel this torture, but instead under my gaze he just winces through his teeth while I study him.
I watch it twitch with his breathing, growing even larger.
It’s the same as a human man’s if you squinted, if I stepped much further back, if I don’t think about how heavy it would feel in my hands.
“Please help me Andrea, you fixed me before—what can be done—it’s burning me up!”
The illuminated waves quietly lap up all around us as I stand there frozen in shock, in transfixed amazement. His haggard breathing is the loudest thing on this rock, the loudest thing in the known universe as far as I’m concerned. I can hear nothing else.
How is it that Lir could have gone through so much in such a short while—most importantly, how long has he been suffering? Only a few hours—or has he been like this for days, unable to seek my help until the storm subsided?
I crawl up on the rock on top of him, his pupils following my every move looking for guidance.
I try to stay calm and lean over him. Just the two of us in a tent of my hair, a safety net to shroud us from his lustful writhing.
I whisper in his ear. I tell him about all the things I had tried to gently shield him from before, what humans do to quell this burning, what they do to fuck.
Where a man goes to make love to a woman and how I could release him from this suffering.
Grabbing my hips, he frantically nods. His voice is pressurized hot air escaping from cracks in the Earth. “That. Please help me, that is what I need, Andrea.”
I look down between my legs at him as he pulsates.
I gently graze it with my fingertips. He sees the shake in my eager hands, and his voice softens in urgency but not desperation, “I want you, Andrea. In any way you’ll allow me.
” Looking up at me, a moment of perfect clarity where I am completely filling his view, where his eyes are only locked in on me.
For just a small quiet second, we pause all of our pushing and pulling.
Where instead, all we are focusing on is the sound of the purling water.
Synchronizing our two breaths, two hearts into one body that can coexist in the same moment in time.
Clay from the earth and sand from the sea, overlapping in a complete harmonious desperation, to be joined together, to be miscible in uniform pleasure.
All of that is held in this heavy weighted silence between us.
Completely transfixed on me, he follows the concerns hidden between the lines on my face.
He doesn’t know his transformed body is nothing like I’ve seen before, let alone seen in anatomy books.
It cries out for my comfort, and I answer with my body.
Lir’s eyes are full of glowing hot liquid gold that looks like its ready to drip from his mouth and cock—if I made him, if I commanded him.
I don’t allow him suffer any longer. I rock gently atop the tip of him, bracing against his chest for support. Though he is now almost thrice my size I feel like I could control even his heartbeat. I am instead the powerful siren this time, his pleasure and pain in my clutches.
Inching down lower, slowly we align ourselves into one being. We both gasp in amazement as our glowing outlines turn into a combined shadow in the splashing darkness of night. My hips control which way we bend together, my body becoming a vessel to twist and turn and mould to his every shape.
When he kisses me, in the moment when we finally meet at our meridian, he tastes like destiny.
Like things yet to be, but will surely come to pass.
Life will be completely different for both of us from this moment forward, time has stopped and restarted again at a completely different pace, both our hearts now in tune with the same rhythm.
I am not losing any part of myself to him. We are neither of each other’s conquests or conquerors. This moment, where his eyes are filled with glossy tears—where I am filled up by him completely—is simply a consecrated miracle, a perfect gift shared in the overlapping space between us.
Lir grabs my hips as I grind on his stomach, creating a mess all over his perfect sun-drenched skin.
The rich color is returning to his complexion as we break the bonds and chains of the chrysalis that surrounds him.
In turn, with every movement, we soothe the wounds that still linger around my heart.
Just like his song, just like his mouth—his whimpers and moans mend all those punctured fears.
Glowing fluids dripping and ooze into pools around us, to only be washed away by the tide that slowly swishes at my feet. He pushes and pulls my comparatively smaller frame against him, grinding away any angular edge with his craving thrusts.
Our panting echoes across this barren rock with our fertile gasps and lustful grunts.
My flesh stretches and forms to become the perfect shape for him to only barely fit—every thrust a reminder of how easily we could break each other.
I cry out, wrapping my arms around his neck, begging him to keep hitting just that spot, just that motion, just that small part of me exploding and imploding simultaneously.
“How do I feel, Lir?” I ask once I am able to connect my mouth to my brain again.
He looks at me, aghast I could even ask him such a question.
I watch him intently has he twists in his words, as he untangles beneath me.
“Andrea, I could sooner answer how it feels to swim within the craters of the moon.” He pants while palming my face, his eyes bright and hungry for my touch, for every bit of my attention. “Incredible, Andrea. Indescribable—”
I grind on him and then raise my hips up and down in one smooth elliptical orbiting motion and see him lose all of his precious prose. “Fuck! That is so good Andrea,” he whimpers in overwhelming pleasure. Screaming now like a sailor, instead of singing like a merman.
As I cry out, Lir grits his teeth while raising his hips upwards to meet my womb with every ounce of him that he has. It pours out of me glowing a subtle milky blue, which languidly drips down my legs, all over us and the rocks. Being smeared like a beacon of proof of our pleasure.
He gasps, our open mouths perfect reflections of each other.
The air between us the only distance we allow.
He kisses me with such unyielding force I fear he will never let me go.
The pinpricks of his remaining pain hangs on his lips which quiver, sending shivers down my spine.
His hands still grasp my hips. His fingers reaching around to rub soft circles against my tailbone, catching those electrical pulses coming down to recirculate them through my mouth.
“I want to stay like this forever, Lir.”
“You are mine, forever—”
As we lay there wrapped up in each other’s embrace, he stays inside of me a long time, throbbing as he continues to release, not ready yet to break this new sacred bond between us.