Every year the mudflats get bigger. I smell Smith and Tangier Islands in the silt, lands slowly pulled apart to our south like confetti in a palm—the currents blow. The elders like the mudflat. It helps them ease their way out of the water when the sun rises, as the bones in their tails writhe and pop and snap back into the shape of legs. I don’t need a mudflat. I drag myself up into the reeds, hands turned inward like club feet. My bones are young. It doesn’t take long to be human again.
In the double-wide on shore, I kiss King Malcolm on his middle knuckle and my mother tells me, “Have a good day at school.”
I pull on my jeans. They’re hard from days of dried seawater. Laney brings everyone’s clothes to the laundromat on Saturdays, but it’s Friday now. There’s nothing on the table for breakfast. It’s a bad year for crabs, and a bad year for rockfish, and it’s too cold now for algae and jellyfish harvesting. King Malcolm blames the state of Virginia.
At the bus stop, Prince Malcolm and I share a cigarette. He’s eighteen, so he gets them at the Wawa up the road with the money he makes selling shark’s teeth and whelk shells. He’s pale and blond like his father, stands out in the murk of the Bay. Bull sharks never go after Malcolm.
We don’t say anything while we smoke. His jeans look like my jeans, dirty and salty and hard. Malcolm stares up at the sun behind an overcast sky. I look at it, too. Malcolm says, “Looks like the moon, doesn’t it?”
I don’t know what he means by that, but he’s Prince Malcolm, so I say, “Yeah.”
He takes the cigarette and stamps it out on his jeans. “I wanna go to Bloodsworth tonight.”
I squint at him, and then at the sun that looks like the moon. Bloodsworth is off-limits. I would like to say no, that’s a terrible idea, but this is Prince Malcolm. I don’t say anything.
Other kids from other doublewides come out to the bus stop, too. They keep away from us. They’ve seen us step out of the reeds in the early mornings, seen us pick crab shells from our teeth, scratch barnacles off our fingernails. We’re watermen, we tell them when they ask.
Malcolm doesn’t pay them any mind. He looks me up and down in his cool way, above it all, then gives me an easy smile and ruffles my hair. “Don’t worry, Cownose,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not as bad as they say.”
The school bus comes trundling down the path toward the water just as the white clouds start to drop their cold rain. It’s almost snow, I think. This morning, the digital clock behind King Malcolm’s throne blinked 6:56 AM, 29.98 inches Hg, 36 ° F. My mom got King Malcolm that clock years ago, for Christmas, from a yard sale. I’ve got my hoodie pulled on, hood up, but Malcolm is unbothered by the cold in just a black t-shirt, no goosebumps on his skin. We’re benthic, my mother told me once. We’re Bay fish. We tolerate the sting of jellies better, hunker down in the widgeongrass better with our wild curly hair. King Malcolm, she said with reverence, is built for the open seas. He stays here year-round to guide us through his own goodwill.
Prince Malcolm and I sit side-by-side in the back of the bus. There used to be a whole bunch of us who’d ride together, but Laney and Ralph graduated, and Zane dropped out, and Billy got Maura pregnant and had to get a day job to keep the larva in her belly fed since the fishing’s been so bad, so King Malcolm kicked him out. Now it’s just me and the prince. The other kids sit far away from us since we smell sweet, like rotting fish.
The bus picks us up first, then it heads to Todd Lakes, the neighborhood next door to ours where the rich kids live. They get on and sit around us, since by then there’s nowhere else to sit.
In front of us, like always: Drake. Last year, he brought a live lobster on the bus and threw it at me, and said, eat it, freshman! and Prince Malcolm found that funny as hell, and then took the lobster from me and snapped it in half and slurped its muscles out of its shell while its legs still writhed, and now Drake loves him and the two have something of a repertoire, which makes the bus ride hell. “Moooorning, boys,” says Drake, swinging his backpack into the leather seat beside him. He looks at me. “What’s on the agenda, little cuz? What is it you call him, Malcolm? Cownose?”
“’Cause his nose is like a cow,” says Malcolm.
“Yeah, alright,” says Drake. “I’d say it’s more like a pig, the way it’s upturned a bit.”
I roll my eyes.
“What do you sophomores get up to on weekends?” says Drake to me. “You party?”
“We’re going out to Bloodsworth Island,” says Malcolm for me. He’s a senior. Drake’s probably invited him to some drug-and-alcohol fest out in Salisbury but at night he won’t have legs, so he won’t be in attendance. “See if we can find some of those old navy bombs and blast ‘em.”
“Ha!” says Drake. “Jesus. That’s fucking crazy. Can I come?”
Malcolm looks at me. He tilts his head ten or so degrees left, which means, I invite your input on this decision. I look at Malcolm and squint. No. How will we even get him out there? A boat? We won’t be caught dead in a boat. If the other clans see us, you’ll never be king. Rain hits the front of the bus a little harder now and the driver turns on the windshield wipers. Malcolm inspects his fingernails, and scrapes a barnacle off of one. “No,” he says to Drake. “Todd Lakes kids, you’re snitches.”
Drake scoffs, points himself forward, and unzips his backpack. He always carries six or seven books—white boy books, Laney would call them, and he reads them with startling speed: Infinite Jest one day, Catch-22 the next. Crime and Fiction, today. Malcolm peers over the brown leather seat to say, “Is that the one I told you about?” and Drake grins. I put in my headphones.
We get to school and go our separate ways, him and Drake padding off toward the gym to talk about their fuckboy literature while I go by the cafeteria and get my free breakfast, white bread toast and a cup of yogurt. It’ll upset my stomach later, but an empty stomach will hurt just as bad.
All day I sit in the backs of rooms and speak to no one. The teachers know better than to try and wrest answers out of me, because I won’t know them. I’ve been referred to the guidance counselor in the basement twice, and I’m due for another one soon.
My earth sciences teacher, Mrs. Kropkowski, hasn’t given up on me yet. This is my fault. I have her class in the mornings, when the feeling of the cold water on my skin is still fresh, the smell of the islands in the currents. I accidentally revealed that I know a lot about estuarine sediment dynamics early in the semester. I take notes when she talks about sea level rise.
Caden, a Todd Lakes kid who rides the bus with me, raises his hand.
“Yes, Caden,” says Mrs. Kropkowski.
“Hi, yes, Mrs. Kropkowski,” says Caden with an awful grin that reminds me of Drake throwing a lobster at me. “All due respect, but this is bull-crap. My dad says it doesn’t make sense, and he’s right. An ice cube melts in water, the glass doesn’t overflow.”
“The ice cube’s on land,” I mutter before I think better of it.
This delights Mrs. Kropkowski, who knew I had potential. “What was that, Jeremy?” she says.
I don’t say anything.
There’s another rich kid next to me. Not Todd Lakes, a different waterfront subdivision. Her name is Kristen, and she wears a different pair of shoes every single day. She says, “He said the ice cube’s on land,” which proves Malcolm was right, they’re all snitches.
“That’s right,” says Mrs. Kropkowski. “The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are currently on land, which means that—” I stop listening. Caden looks at me like he’s going to rip my spine out of my body. I stare back at him, unimpressed. He’s much less frightening than a bull shark.
At lunch, I eat alone. The menu offers chicken nuggets or pizza, and neither of those appeal to me much. Chicken is at least more closely related to fish than cheese, so I gingerly eat the nuggets and know that tonight I’m going to shit my brains out the second I shift.
Kristen sits suddenly across from me, slamming down her Vera Bradley lunch bag. “Hi,” she says.
I blink up at her. “Hello.”
“Caden wants to beat the shit out of you in free period,” she says.
I peel the breading off another of my nuggets and say, “He’ll have to wait. I have plans.”
“Just wanted to warn you,” says Kristen.
Caden is lithe and wears glasses and I’m certain I could make quick work of him, even out of the water. I ate each of my clutch-siblings by the time I was three, which is a record in our clan. I’m good enough at gym class that the coach asked me to join the lacrosse team, but practice runs into the evenings, when the sun goes down, and I’ll have no legs then. If Caden attacks me, he’s as stupid as he seems.
During free period I go to the library and I read the new State of the Bay report the government put out. Things are improving, they say. Nitrogen inputs are down but it’s been a dry year so I don’t think that means much. The chicken farmers flushing shit in the water have Annapolis wrapped around their fingers, and the fishermen in Virginia sieve the rockfish from the waves before they can make it up the neck of the Bay.
I feel a presence behind me. I turn and there’s Mrs. Kropkowski, smiling. “You could go to college for this, you know,” she says.
“Oh,” I say.
“Are you interested in college?”
“We don’t really do college.”
She frowns. She takes in my tense shoulders and my hand wrapped tight around the mouse, and she nods, replaces her frown with a narrow smile. “Let me know if you change your mind,” she says. Then she leaves me be.
Behind her in the stacks, I see Caden leering. I sigh and turn off the computer and make my way over to him. “Kristen said you want to fight?” I ask him.
He narrows his eyes. He expected to approach me, to sneak up behind me and mock my web browsing habits, and this throws him off. “I—You—Nice reading about the Bay, nerd.”
“Caden,” I say, as even-toned as I can, “why don’t we step outside?”
Caden wanted to be the one to say that. He wrinkles his nose and leads the way.
Inside the tangled patch of forest by the football field, there’s a meadow. It doesn’t show up on any of the school’s closed-circuit cameras. Kids smoke weed there, and fight, and out there on a blanket is where Billy filled Maura’s belly with eggs, which means her young will be weak-willed like tadpoles, too drawn to land. A gaggle of kids stand loitering, waiting for Caden and I. With the misty fog and the way the forest is this time of year, leaves half-shed from the branches, we can see them but they can’t see us. We walk like gladiators to the clearing and I unsheathe my second row of teeth, grab Caden’s arm, bite so hard I leave the imprint of my molars in his ulna. He screams like a heron, and I dissolve into the woods. His blood on my lips tastes gamey. Recently he’s eaten beef, and the beef ate corn, and the corn ate beef poop, and the beef whose poop it was ate corn, and so on. I lick it down anyway and massage my back teeth back in my gums. When the kids in the clearing go to rescue Caden, it’ll look more like he was bit by a wolf or a bear than me. No one will believe him.
I make my way through the tangled, spiky underbrush in search of a place to hunker down until the bus comes to take us home, but the bed of leaves on the ground are cold and wet. I keep walking, eyes down, searching for a patch dry enough to sit.
Ahead of me I see two shapes against an elm, and it takes my eyes a second to recognize them as people I know. Here is Prince Malcolm, shoved against rough bark with his tongue down Drake’s throat, and his zipper undone, and Drake’s hand around the base of his dick.
I can’t help but croak like a toadfish.
Prince Malcolm sees me and shouts and shoves Drake to the ground. Drake falls back onto their blanket and says something like, “God, what is your problem today, you moody—” and then he sees me and he laughs as he zips up his pants. “Oh, gosh,” he says. “Here we go. So, Cownose, when a man loves a man—”
“I don’t love you,” says Malcolm.
“That’s not what you said last—”
“Fuck,” says Malcolm. “Cownose, if you tell anyone—”
“This is unnatural,” I say.
Drake hisses to Malcolm, “I knew you lived in a trailer park but I didn’t think your cousin was a homophobe.”
“He’s a human,” I say.
“It’s not like I’m gonna put eggs in him!” says Malcolm.
Drake blanches. “What the fuck does that mean, Mal?”
“Nothing,” says Malcolm. “It’s an inside joke. A family joke. A little family joke. Cownose, I’m gay. Okay? Surprise!”
“Attracted to humans,” I say, shaking my head.
“Who the fuck isn’t?” says Drake, nose wrinkled.
Malcolm holds his hands in the air. “Jeremy, we are just messing around.”
“That’s not what you said last week,” says Drake.
“The king needs to know.” My hands curdle into fists down at my hips. I don’t mean to issue a challenge, but my heart rate is up from the altercation with Caden, and there’s all sorts of adrenaline coursing around my veins, so my back teeth slide out of my gums little by little.
Malcolm takes the initiative, launching and diving on me from above, teeth out, which is very pelagic of him, high and mighty, and I wish he and his dad would just go back out to sea so we could rule ourselves like we did for centuries. I drive a fist up into his gut. He gets me in the eyebrow. The wet leaves stick to my hair and his shirt as we roll and tussle. I punch him in the mouth. He kicks me in the side. Then Drake pulls us apart.
Malcolm and I let him separate us, and we stand in the clearing panting. The challenge goes unfinished. But I’d been winning. I had him pinned.
His lip drips red. I feel my blood falling from my eyebrow into my eyelashes. Drake looks back and forth from me to Malcolm and back to me.
I wipe my eyebrow and glare at Malcolm.
“Drake, could you please—go somewhere else?” says Malcolm in a voice so unprincely I want to hurl. “I’ve got to talk this out with my cousin.”
Drake hisses something I don’t catch, glares at me, and pads off to the clearing to see what all the commotion is over there. He’ll find his Todd Lakes compatriot bleeding from a mysterious bite wound, I’ll bet, and everybody in uproar wondering whether to tell a teacher or call an ambulance.
“Listen,” says Malcolm, “I won’t tell my dad we fought, if you don’t tell him about—this.”
“Weak,” I snarl.
“So what?” he says. “God, you can’t just—get so stuck in what the elders say. You’ll get it when you’re older. They’re all shitheads. My dad’s the biggest shithead of them all. You know, the other clans have it good. You know that? They work jobs and get money and they buy their fish and at neap tide, they sleep in beds, all in their own rooms. And they elect their leaders democratically, and everyone gets a vote, and—”
“And they fuck humans?”
“Some of them do!” says Malcolm, throwing his hands in the air. “Everything’s changing. The world’s changing. The marshes are turning to mudflats and the islands are sinking away. It’s time we change, too. Come with me tonight to Bloodsworth. You’ll see what I mean.”
I glare at the sun. It still looks like the moon, one white circle behind the clouds, all its rays smothered. “Todd Lakes kids are snitches,” I say.
“I haven’t told him anything,” says Malcolm.
I growl, low in my throat. I don’t mean to. It’s just the heart rate, and the adrenaline still.
Prince Malcolm holds out his fist. I glare at it. “Jeremy,” he says, warning in his tone.
I try to do it, to lower my face to his hand and kiss it, but I remember the feeling of my fists hitting him, his mouth and his gut, how easy it was for my teeth to come spilling out of my gums, and I can’t stop thinking of my mother spending all the money in her bank account on a digital clock for his father. I shake my head and walk away.
Malcolm doesn’t follow me. I know I’ll answer for this later.
I sit through math and hear whispers about the ambulance that took Caden away. Before the end of the day, the vice principal comes over the intercom system to tell us Caden’s in stable condition. He asks everyone to be on the lookout for coyotes, or medium-sized stray dogs. I frown when I hear that. My teeth are wide enough now, surely, to leave an imprint like a wolf, or at least a German shepherd.
The bell rings, and I linger at my locker for so long I almost miss the bus. Malcolm comes to find me, Drake in tow. “Hey,” he says in that unprincely voice, like he’s talking to a scared porpoise. “I’m not mad at you, Cownose. It’s alright. We’re cool.”
He thinks he’s the one who gets to decide that. I want to give him a piece of my mind for screwing a human—a human who threw a lobster at me—but I nod instead, because night is coming. In the daytime, at school, Malcolm’s my peer. He’s a senior and I’m a sophomore, but we’re about the same size, and that’s the only difference between us. In the bay, he’s a ten-foot monster that sends bull sharks cowering by scent alone, growing still, and I’ve maxed out at five foot ten.
We sit beside each other on the bus, and Drake sits in front of us, and if anyone else notices our stock-straight postures, they don’t say anything. Drake gets off before we do. He gives us a weak smile and a wave, and Malcolm waves back. I don’t. I stay sitting straight, until Malcolm grits out, “Wave to him.” It’s almost night. I raise a hand briefly in the air.
“You really like that crusty piece of shit?” I whisper.
Malcolm whispers back, “I told you. We’re just messing around.”
“You like him?”
“Well enough.”
I sigh out my nose. “Fine. Won’t tell your dad.”
Malcolm grabs my hand, forces it into a fist, and kisses my knuckle. I stare at him, eyes wide, eyebrows together. My heart starts squeezing too hard again. The prince should not kiss the knuckle of someone who’s meant to hide in widgeongrass. He drops my hand and smiles, like that was innocent, a kindness, like that wasn’t something his father would put me on a hook for. I look out the window for the rest of the bus ride.
We get off. We walk toward the trailer. “Bloodsworth tonight,” he says.
“I was gonna school with my mom…”
“Bloodsworth,” he says, and we’re home now, and he’s Prince Malcolm again, so I nod.
The trailer holds all sixteen of us in the afternoon. Our cousins and brothers and sisters start to stir on couches and futons and cushions on the floor, yawning off their dreams, stretching their arms, flexing their feet. King Malcolm snoozes in his throne with the digital clock behind him, and my mom sleeps on a comforter on the floor by his feet with two other women. Prince Malcolm and I sit by the door and do our homework, because we got visited once by CPS and King Malcolm won’t allow that to happen again. All children of the Nanticoke River clan must make C’s, King Malcolm decreed, or be subject to disciplinary measures. This includes the Prince, no matter how long his white fins grow.
When the sun sets, we go into the waves. My fingers web themselves together and the pores in my neck align and open up. My tail grows behind me, stubby beside Prince Malcolm. I leave him. I go find a place to shit. Then I find my mother and we spiral around each other. I visit with Laney. I hunt down a solitary crab in a soft-mudded area and I think of eating it, but I bring it to my mother instead. My mother thinks of eating it. She brings it to King Malcolm instead. All the while, I feel the shadow of Prince Malcolm looming above me, waiting.
I can’t put it off any longer. I go to him. He’s delighted by this. And my mother, watching, is delighted by it, too. He spirals around me.
We swim out into the deeper waters of the sound. Prince Malcolm stands out in the dark water, a streak of white twice as big as me, a tail that could thrash me if he felt like it, arms that could break me in half like that lobster.
I feel an even bigger presence behind us. The king follows, far enough away that he might think we can’t see him. His bald head shines like a second moon. I have to swim hard to keep from falling behind.
We dive deep as we cross the exclusion zone. It’s deeper than I usually go, and colder too. Prince Malcolm isn’t bothered, but I feel my shoulders tense as I swim. The green and red running lights of coast guard ships move like auroras on the water surface. This was a navy bombing range, once upon a time. Unexploded shells as big as me litter the seafloor here, but widgeongrass grows around them, unbothered. They’re half-buried, most of the shells, under sediment that smells like Tangier, Smith, Bloodsworth. I’m sure there’s more I can’t see under layers of silt.
The seafloor slopes up to meet Bloodsworth Island. Prince Malcolm surfaces, so I do too.
“You’re really gonna blow one up?” I ask him.
“Watch your tail,” he tells me, peering under the water. “Don’t touch the ground.”
I peer underwater too. He’s got his tail held still like a dead fish, barely brushing the surface of the sediment. Mine’s short enough that I don’t have to worry.
A voice closer to shore says, “Did you bring him?”
Prince Malcolm grins. He descends and turns and I turn and here is a creature like I’ve never seen before, human torso with jellyfish tendrils growing out of its bell-like abdomen, long and eerie in the water, moving gently in the waves. Its skin peels away halfway down its torso, so its lower ribs hang like ladders under its chest. A nematocyst brushes me, leaving a light sting. I cringe. It lasts only for a second. One gets Malcolm, and he grits his teeth and squeezes his eyes shut and I see a red welt form immediately, blistering underneath. Malcolm surfaces to say, “Watch you don’t get me, yeah?”
The jellyfish woman surfaces to smile and say, “Certainly, honey.” She goes back underwater.
“Who is that?”
“Mrs. Kropkowski,” says Malcolm.
“From school?” I squint. She’s topless, like the rest of us, covered in bioluminescent freckles, and her arms push her through the water while her jellyfish limbs trail aimlessly behind.
“Her people have real jobs,” he says. “We will, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Watch,” says Malcolm. He returns to underwater, and I do too.
King Malcolm surges toward us under the waves, bellowing, hands curled in rage. His eyes are bloodshot red, gills flared, lips in a snarl. I remember how my father looked hanging from a hook. His giant tail kicks up silt from the bottom, and it becomes hard to see anything but his white scales, a giant in the muddy shallows. I move to hide behind the Prince.
Mrs. Kropkowski glides ahead of us. Her nematocyst gets Prince Malcolm once more as she goes by, and he bites down on his hand until it bleeds red. I watch a dozen jellyfish people materialize from the shallows and wrap their limbs around the king. He thrashes. He screams. His skin blisters and his tail flops and hits the sediment once, then again, and again—A shell explodes and the king is sent up into the air, landing like rain, an arm here, a fin there. A few jellyfish people go up with him, but when they land back in the waves, their pieces join slowly back together. Not so for King Malcolm, whose torso shrinks back to man-sized as he lies belly-up toward the moon.
Prince Malcolm looks so unbothered by the violent dismemberment of his father that I think I ought to swim as fast as I can away from him. I don’t. I surface. He surfaces. He offers me a small crab.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 