I’ve had a very traumatic life. As a fetus, I was flushed down the sewers, where I was adopted by some albino alligators. They gently carried me around the pipes in cast-off shopping carts, and they cared for me and made sure I understood how to make good health choices. Unlike other sewer babies, I never took to smoking cast-off cigarette butts, and I learned that those things that let light through way up above me were portals to the outside world.
When I got big enough, I bid my gator parents goodbye and set out to see this super-terranian world. I quickly learned that I was going to need more money than those shiny little circles of metal that flowed to me on the underground currents of my childhood. I got a job as a babysitter, and I did my best. I was fired for not knowing how overworlders handled cleanliness. I knew that they became upset if they weren’t kept dry, a reaction that was alien to me. I knew that, when I took the baby from the bath–which I would think should be reassuring to him, to rest in flowing water again, as he did in the womb–he would cling to the water, as the water clung to him, to hold onto every last drop of liquid comfort. He’d been calm and happy in the bath, the warm bath, with the water gently swirling in the tub–how I envied him! But as soon as I took him out–which broke my heart–he began to cry, to shriek for the unnatural dryness he had come to expect.
I didn’t know how to comfort him, if it was really right to dry him, or how to treat him, or if his parents even wanted him. Didn’t anyone who loved their babies give them a wet, warm, shaded and gentle place to be, where food flows in and water flows through? Who would consign a child to dry air and dust? I did what I thought best for this foundling, this baby who was far too big for the grate by now, and whose life could hold nothing but suffering without protection from below. I put him in the microwave to give him a warm, moist, merciful death, since that was so obviously the best thing the parents could have asked. I even set the table with the best crystal and the embroidered cloth napkins, so the whole family could have a feast in his memory. I treated him with as much honor as I could, presenting him on the finest china with the nobility and grace his brief and dried out life deserved.
As the police were on their way, the family got a strange phone call they couldn’t place. It turned out that it was coming from the upstairs extension. The phone call worked as a diversion. It let me slip out the back door, running as far and as fast as I could.
I came to a lonely road, a dry road, a dusty, dry, crackling road, without so much as a single grate to give me hope. I longed for home, for the alligators and the goldfish and the children I had left behind. There was too much space, too much heat. The dust got in my throat and in my nose. It lay on my skin like a thin coat of loneliness and death. Confused, scared, and alone, I did the one thing I could–I stuck out my thumb and hoped the current of time would bear me easy along the next pipeway of my life.
And it did–in the form of a man who had lost a hand and replaced it with a hook. He was driving a rumbling truck. Next to him was a young girl dressed in a long shimmering sheath. The driver asked me “Where to?” and I said, “To the city,” praying that there I could find a portal back to the world of life and hope beneath. He told me to get in, that we would go downtown after we took the girl to her house, somewhere in the hills.
The man with the hook gave me water–blessed water, fluid of life! I started to see how one could survive in the overworld, though you had to carry water, instead of water carrying you! But at least there were ways to get it to enter you, and while I would never be fully nourished here, I would find ways not to become dust.
The girl said that she’d come from a party, but didn’t want to explain how it was she’d come to be there, all alone, standing at the side of the road. When we asked, she looked away, and said she couldn’t say. But she was charming, and she made me laugh. I started to see how overworlders could be appealing, even with their thick, dull skins and the dry hair that hung down, rather than floating outward gently around the face.
It was late, and I was tired. When we pulled up to the house to let the girl go home, we found that she was gone! Her purse, a small shiny thing with only a small metal tube of red grease inside, was all that was left. The girl’s father came out to meet the car. We tried to explain–he cut us off. “Yes,” he said. "I know who was riding with you. " He hung his head sadly. “It was my daughter, who died in an accident at that very spot, on her way home from prom two years ago.” We gave him the purse as a memento and went on our way.
The man with the hook and I kept on, though the blessed darkness, in the night. We talked, we laughed, we shared more water. In the warmth of the car, I saw a sheen of water appear upon his skin–water, warm water on the surface of this man! Shiny, sweet, like pure life and love on the surface of his body.
We stopped the car, and he let me touch him. He touched me. We hugged, and the sensation of his water against my skin drove me mad. I wanted to feel water through me, surrounding me, in darkness and comfort and peace, with an urgency I had no idea I could feel.
As I was sharing the water of his body, there was a sudden flash–of light on cold, hard, dry metal. A man with a knife had leapt up from the back of the truck to attack us in our nakedness and almost dry-ness! I fled, running down another street, when I saw a grate! A grate! Blessed entry to my home, to the warmth and darkness and love that had nourished me! I tried to enter, only to find that I could not! My dry skin had grown to large, too hard, to let me come home.
So now, every day, I stand at the side of the road, hoping that the current of my life will flow easy, at least. And so far, it has, I suppose, compared to some. I haven’t wanted for food, though I have to hunt it, and though I carry my water with me, and I have to seek it out, it does still exist with me and in me. I will not turn to dust–at least, not yet. But what happened to the man with the hook hand, whose skin, finer than the most splendid goldfish, I long for, I do not know. Nor have I ever seen the girl again.
I am between worlds now–too dry to slip down the grate, too wet to live under the sun. I find a cool, dark place in the daytime, and I roam at night. Some say I suck the blood of women, but that isn’t true; I merely wander, looking for water, hoping for a way to return to my home, to see my parents, to play again with the other children, to be carried again by the water that must still love me.
