Galatea
By: Kit Carmona
Tags: Gender, Ghosts, Fiction, Romance, Oceans

The sea caves are Selena’s special place. Tucked away in the dark and dank she’s safe from the prying eyes and prodding fingers of grown-ups, who are always telling her to be more careful. “Don’t climb so high,” they say, or “careful, don’t swim out past the breaks,” or “don’t feed it, mija, it’s filthy!” But grown-ups don’t know the sea like she does. They don’t know how to find a cave by the roiling froth stirred up when a wave flows through an unevenness, a hollow in the rough; or by the delay you can only just see when that wave gets called back to sea, like one searching tendril has forayed farther than its sisters and then has to run to catch up.

Some caves are scarier than others. The first time she went exploring she got a sea urchin spine stuck deep in her palm, and she had to steal her tía’s tablet to ask Google if the purple ones with the white center are poisonous. They weren’t, so she dug out the Band-Aids herself. Best not to ask for help — if her mama asked the wrong question and she couldn’t think of a lie fast enough, she was sure to get banned from the beach.

Her favorite sea cave is accessible almost all day long, except for when the moon is roundest. The entrance is so small she has to crawl on all fours to get through, and she has to be careful because the tidepools are bristling with life, but in the craggy nook beyond hides another world. This world is sharp, its every corner honed to a razor’s edge by a thousand years of brine, and it’s crusted with rough-edged barnacles and slippery snailshells. Light moves differently here: it swims across the ceiling in long sinuous lines like sea serpents, or sound waves. Selena has seen sound waves in science class.

The twists of the cave’s entrance funnel seawater into an elliptical pool in the far corner, which fills and empties with every break like the pulse of an enormous grey-green heart. The ocean leaves little treasures here: the pearlescent center swirl of a conch; a perfect unbroken fiddler claw; a living octopus, whose stardust eyes and coin-slot pupils so entranced her that Selena nearly didn’t see the tide coming in. It brings her human things, too: goggle strings and Doritos bags and soda bottles and once, a waterlogged magazine whose middle pages were almost entirely intact. When she peeled it open she found girls wearing candyfloss swimsuits or nothing at all, with fierce, growly expressions and round breasts and tight, elastic skin tented over sharp-edged hipbones — wild girls. She’d traced the edges of them with her finger and tried to scowl like them, chin up and lips pushed out like when her mama puts on lipstick.

The little lagoon is deeper than usual today, so Selena perches respectfully on the edge, sifting through only the shallowest of the outer reaches. She wouldn’t want to grab onto anyone alive by mistake.

Her fingers find something almost at once: a small, white knob no longer than her thumbnail, with two little legs that taper at the ends — unexceptional in both color and shape, except for the fact that she’s lived on this shore all her life and never seen a shell like this. She peers closer, holding it higher to catch the light that bounces up off the surface of the water. It’s not hollow, either. Of course! It’s not a shell, it’s a tooth.

Curiosity piqued, she reaches deeper into the pool. Last time she lost a tooth, the tooth fairy gave her a whole dollar for it, so if she finds enough she can maybe afford the limited edition mermaid Barbie with the green hair that Lexy’s been showing off to everyone at recess. Then Lexy will definitely invite her over, and Selena will sleep over in Lexy’s big queen bed with the real satin sheets, and they’ll whisper to each other even after Lexy’s mom turns out the lights, like they did when they were little. Her fingers brush against something hard. She seizes hold of it and pulls: another tooth!

Emboldened now, she reaches with both arms, submerged up to her shoulders. This time, she finds a finger.

Or, well. A finger bone, anyway — three short tubes like blackboard chalk, bigger at the bottom and smaller at the top, like a snowman. Selena tugs at the top wedge, fascinated. It’s neatly jointed, and bends and straightens like a spider’s leg.

If she knows anything about fingers, it’s that if there’s one, there must be more (and also not to use them to poke the jellies that wash up on the shore — always use a stick). She rolls up her sleeves and gets digging.

Her next find is the biggest yet. She has to use both hands and brace her knee against the bank to pull it loose from whatever tidepool-dwellers have their hooks in it, but when she finally tugs it free, it takes her breath away. It is long and bowed and silky-smooth, perfect ivory furred over in patches with a soft wet pelt of viridian and blooms of ocean-slick yellow-green. She lays it over her own leg, starting at the crux where her leg meets her hip. The skeleton is not much taller than she is, she observes giddily. Only a few inches!

The ribcage is her favorite of all. It is miraculously whole, seven slender white stripes that curve round from the spine in soft, arching lines to meet in the middle like interlaced lady’s fingers. The spine, too, fascinates: not a bone but a stream of them, cemented together by crusted, rubbery discs. A starfish has made his home between one short tube of bone and the next, and the whole of the thing is pockmarked with clusters of barnacles, like armor. Selena tries to squeeze herself inside, lowering first one foot and then the other inside, but her hips are too wide, and it gets stuck halfway up. She doesn’t tug too hard — the bones feel brittle and chalky, and she can’t risk snapping one off.

She does not notice the time passing until the sea spits up at her, licking at the soles of her feet: a warning. She must not overstay her welcome. But what of her new treasures? Quick as she can, Selena gathers the pieces — femur and tibia both, a handful of fingers, the sweeping arc of ribs and spine and beautiful pelvis like a cartoon heart — and tucks them away in the back of her cove, a nook protected from the worst of the ocean’s grasp. On her way out, the waves slap at her pettily, soaking her through to the roots of her hair. “I’m sorry,” she tells them. “I won’t take it away! I’m just not done playing yet.”

They draw away, sullen, but there is nothing she can do for them now. If the tide is at the cove already, she’s late.

***

When she finally trips through the kitchen door, Gabriela laughs, meanly. “Why can you never come home dry, Sela?” Gabriela is four years older, a teenager, and she knows it. She wears big gold hoops in her ears and this week she got sent home from school twice for dress code violations, but their mama doesn’t mind — she says to shake what she gave them. “But mama, what did you give us?” Selena asked once, and both of them cackled and asked her to say it again.

A lock of crow-black hair falls into Gabi’s eye; she brushes it back impatiently. “Mama, she’s tracking sand on the floor! I already swept today and I won’t again.”

“Clean your feet, mija, your sister swept.” Mama hardly looks up from the TV. She’s always tired. From eight am to five she works at the front desk of a law firm in town, scheduling appointments and answering calls for the men in suits who talk in loud voices the back rooms; and from six to midnight she works at a call line, talking on the phone with lonely grown-ups, she says, who need someone to talk to.

“Mama, I found something at the beach today — ”

“Hang on, baby, I need to get your food.”

“It’s cold,” Gabi tells her, snidely. “We had to put it in the fridge because you were so late.”

It doesn’t look cold. Selena sticks a finger in the beans — they’re crusty around the edges, but inside they’re still warm and runny.

“Ma, Sela’s being gross!”

Mama slides a spoon into her hand. “Don’t play with your food, baby.”

Gabi leans across the table, fox-eyed. “Were you hanging out with your boyfriend? Did you go swimming?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend!”

Her mama laughs fondly, eyes still locked on the TV. “I was the same at your age — a string of boys following me home, wrestling over who would hold my books. Don’t give your bag to anyone right away, mija, let them fight a little.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she says again, in a smaller voice, but no one is listening.

Selena swirls the beans into the rice, smushing them together till they’re both grey and sludgy. She uses the spoon to cut two smooth arcs into either side of the plantain so it tapers and then widens like a fish tail. When Gabriela isn’t looking, she wiggles the tail with the tip of her little finger.

On the screen, a white boy with brown hair is talking to this season’s Bachelorette, telling her he’s never felt so close to someone before. The Bachelorette this year is Ashley, a ballet instructor who loves dogs. Selena thinks Ashley sounds nice, but doesn’t know how she can tell her suitors apart. All of them are white boys with brown hair.

“You’re so little,” the boy says to Ashley. “I could just put you in my pocket.” He hoists her over his shoulder, fingers pressed tight into her thighs. “Put me down!” she giggles shrilly, and she keeps giggling even when he doesn’t.

***

When Selena clambers into the cove after school the next day, she heaves out a sigh, skin tingling with relief. Her bones are still here. That means it’s not too late for whatever else might remain undiscovered in the lagoon, too. She digs into it with gusto.

She can’t find the head, but she does find four more fingers. Selena lays the bones out from top to bottom: spine and ribs and two long, elegant arms, that perfect pelvis, and one leg, which stretches down from the middle of the pelvis. She’s already planned for this: she unfurls a sheath of seagrass and fans it out at the base of her new friend’s shin, like a sturgeon’s tail. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

“You’re perfect,” she tells her new companion. “Like a fairy tale. I could just put you in my pocket.”

She picks up one of its hands and holds it aloft between them, as though to say: stop, it’s too much.

“Let me get your food,” she tells it, scooping some wet sand from the bank of the lagoon and heaping it where the thing’s head would be. “You’re wasting away, you know? You need to eat more or you’ll never have any curves!”

An idea strikes her. She looks over the body laid out in front of her, daringly, and then scoops out some more sand. With the richest, darkest silt she can find, she sculpts two mounds at the top of the ribcage, a few inches under where skull would meet spine. That doesn’t look quite right. She shifts them down a bit: perfect.

“Let’s get you covered up, you…strumpet,” she tells it. Selena read about strumpets when they translated Don Quixote in ESL. When she asked the teacher what it meant he turned red and told her it meant a “certain kind of woman,” so she looked it up on the internet, which told her it meant “a promiscuous woman.” Prom-iss-que-us — she liked the sound of it.

A natural shelf in the shale at the back of the cave hides her favorite treasures, which rustle-squeak like styrofoam as she digs through them. The sand dollars she pulls out aren’t quite the same size, but they’ll do. She places them over the mermaid’s breasts, demurely.

“That’s better,” she tells it. “How do you feel?” She carves a mouth in the sand so it can answer.

Oh, I’m fine, she helps it to reply. I want to know about you, Selena. She takes its right hand and places it on top of her left.

“Oh,” she giggles, flustered, “I’m not anybody. You wouldn’t want to hear about me.”

But I do, Selena, it insists, looking straight into her. Tell me about school today.

And so she does.

***

She’s even later for dinner this time, but she’s safe from Gabi’s ire, cause Mama has a man over. When Mama brings her dates home, Gabi is sweet to her like she used to be — she’ll ask about her day and laugh at her answers, but prettily, like a show horse.

Gabi smiles at her as she sits down. “We waited for you, chiquita.” Her eyes are glassy, and the empty wine glass in front of her is stained rusty. Mama must be in a particularly benevolent mood.

“Sela, this is Ramon. He works at my office. Will you introduce yourself?”

“Hi, Ramon,” she says. He’s big all over: square-jawed and muscled like a haunch of ham, with fingers like great thick sausages. “I’m Selena. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too, Selena,” he says to her, with his eyes still on her mama. “What a polite girl you are.”

She’s not sure what to say to that, so she says nothing. He doesn’t seem to need a reply, anyway. The index and middle finger of his right hand are curled into a hook, lazily circling her Mama’s hipbone.

“How was school, baby?”

“Fine.”

Mama is up again, swinging her hips like a tomcat as she sashays to the oven and pulls out the tray. It’s a whole fish — a snapper, scales gleaming like moonlight.

“You never told me you were such a good cook,” Ramon tells her, eyes glowing. “It’s a beautiful piece of meat.”

It is beautiful, but he’s not even looking at the fish.

“Here,” he says, “let me help you.” He twines his left arm around her hip and takes the knife in his right, puncturing the snapper just under its caudal fin and then sliding the knife slowly under the scales, deftly separating skin from meat. Selena feels sick.

“Can I go to my room, mama?”

“You haven’t even touched your dinner, mija.”

“I feel sick.”

Mama disentangles herself from Ramon and puts two fingers on Sela’s temple. They smell like fish. “You might be a little hot, baby. You can sleep, Gabi will bring you some rice later to set your stomach. You want fish with it?”

“No, mama, I think I’m gonna throw up.”

She frowns worriedly. “Just some broth, then.” Ramon is standing behind her again; she looks over her shoulder and smiles. “Go to sleep, baby. You don’t want to miss school tomorrow.”

***

Gabi’s been skipping school to hold hands with boys since the third grade, so Selena doesn’t feel too bad about telling Miss Burkhart that she’s feeling nauseous and will need to go home early.

“Are you sure, dear?” Miss Burkhart peers down over cat-eyed glasses, fingers folded together neat as the pearly buttons on her blazer. Her shin-length skirt is bristly tweed like boar’s hair, and her lipstick is smudged. Selena’s mama’s lipstick is never smudged.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then you’d better go. Do you need someone to walk you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Off you go, then. Tell your mama hello for me.”

She won’t be home till 5, Selena doesn’t say, and she remembers to walk slow and to sniffle as she gathers her things.

***

It takes less time to get to the beach than she expected — the cove won’t be accessible for another hour, so she clambers up the bluffs to her favorite perch and settles in to wait.

The tide is receding, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the waves advance on the shore, endless and relentless. As far out as she can see, each smooth ridge like a serpent’s back slides forward till its crest sharpens and then curls, thrashing itself into thick white froth that trips over itself to tumble onward, onward, bigger now and more eager, reaching desperately for the solidity of land. And then even as her children thin themselves into impotent foam on the sand the ocean changes her mind; her call to home stretches them into lace like marbled glass, fractures them like a windshield after hail. She vacillates: patient and impatient. She’s fickle: casting her children from home but yanking them back when they get too bold. The waves never get far, but they never stop trying.

Selena was made in the sea. Everyone was, her biology teacher says. Life happened there first: the ocean was the womb for the whole world, thick and salty and endless, till her water broke and we pulled ourselves raw and pink and sputtering onto land. Selena’s not sure why we did that, when the ocean has always been so generous with her.

When the waves finally pull away from the mouth of the cave, Selena can’t believe how relieved she is to find her friend exactly where she left her, sandy curves smoothed by the tides but otherwise unharmed.

“Thank god you’re here. None of them get me like you,” she tells it. “Or — I don’t get them like I get you.”

What do you mean, it asks her.

“I don’t know what they care about; or I know what they care about and it’s stupid, and then I just don’t know why. They all want to go on dates, but even when you go it’s boring — it’s just the same stuff, but with less people. And they always think you’ll be different than you are.”

You don’t need to settle for them, it says. The waves rushing in through the mouth of the cove wash up Selena’s legs, soaking her up to the thigh before trickling back down past her ankles. You’re not for them, anyway.

“Well,” she says. “That’s awful romantic.”

If you say so.

***

“What are you,” she asks it curiously a week or so later, combing its fingers through her salt-frizzed hair. Its fingers have been doing a better job of sticking to its palm lately, though she couldn’t say why.

She can feel it pull away slightly. Why do you want to know, it asks her.

“You have to know who you are,” Selena explains knowingly. Her mama is always talking about ‘knowing yourself:’ about how the older she gets the better she knows herself, knows what she needs and how to get it. Selena isn’t sure about that. Selena has been Selena since she was born, but sometimes she thinks she might have known herself best when she was a baby: sandy brown and wrinkled like a turnip. Pudgy fingers, pudgy toes. Eyes creased with joy or hunger. Colic.

“Anyway, you shouldn’t keep secrets,” she adds. “Everyone knows that.”

Well, it asks her seriously — it always takes her seriously, she has always loved that about it — what do you want me to be?

Selena shrugs, suddenly shy. She can feel it soften (though not warm — never warm) to her. What are you, then? it asks.

Selena scratches at a scab on her elbow as she thinks, twisting sideways to get a better hold on it where it squats brown and brittle like scaled plate. She tugs fixedly on the edge of it, concentration curling the corners of her mouth down, until it comes loose. As she works it free, she can see the ragged skin that clings to the scab stretch upward and tear, leaving tiny beads of crimson on the fresh pink skin below.

That’s all right, it tells her comfortingly. You don’t need to be anything.

As they recede into comfortable silence, Selena explores its folds and creases with both hands, leaving constellations of tiny imprints streaming down its flanks. This is her favorite part. For the fifth time this week her quick short fingers brush barnacles and algal blooms and startle a small crab, which buries itself deeper between two ribs. There’s a whole world in there. She touches her finger to her lips: salt.

***

On the TV behind the dinner table, Ashley is crying again — one of the boys has left the show. He was in it for the wrong reasons, he says, and now that he knows what a beautiful soul Ashley is, he realizes he’s been wrong about himself all along. He needs to be alone for a while, he says, to figure himself out. The other boys comfort her, a many-faced chimera of thick tanned arms and spiky brown hair and heavy brow ridges humming soothing noise and running a dozen hands over her flanks.

Dinner is Selena’s favorite, a rich red chicken fricassee with chunks of potato floating like great white islands, but she can’t bring herself to eat — she can still taste the ocean on her tongue. She runs her tongue over the back of her teeth, left to right and then right to left, and tells her mama she’s feeling sick again.

“Okay, mija, if you’re sure — ”

“She’s said that all week, mama,” Gabi interrupts. “She hasn’t ate since Tuesday.”

Selena levels a glare at her, eyes cold and flat.

“Well, it’s true!” Her sister sniffs, righteous. “Mama, you haven’t seen her eat since Tuesday, have you?”

Mama is looking down at her worriedly, stirring guilt in Selena’s gut. “Is this true, Sela? Are you — did someone say something at school, to make you feel like…” She trails off and then starts again, angrier. “Some flaquita on the playground talking — was it that Alexa? I don’t like that girl, mija — ”

“No, mama, I haven’t talked to Lexy in forever. I just — ”

Before she can explain, the TV flashes and hisses, the boys’ words of comfort replaced by a grinding mechanical rattle, and Ashley’s tearful face eclipsed by black-and-grey text. It speaks:

The National Weather Service has issued a tropical storm warning. Residents who live less than a mile from the coast are advised to seek shelter further inland. Inland residents are advised to remain inside. The National Weather Service has issued a tropical storm warning. Residents who live less than a mile from —

The coast. She’s seen the caves after storms like this — shifted or tumbled or filled in entirely, wet sand like concrete where there were once whole worlds. She’s going to lose her friend, and then everything will go back to how it was before, with no one listening when she talks, and no one who knows what she means when they listen, and no one to teach her what it was like before stupid humans crawled up out of the sea so they could hold hands and buy toys and date twelve boys at the same time. She won’t give up yet, she can’t.

Mama sees the look on her face and reaches out, pinching her shoulder between strong fingers, but Selena is small and quick and her skin is smoothed by salt and surf, and she slips through her fingers and out the front door before Gabi can even stand.

Outside, it’s like the ocean has hiked up her skirts and stomped up onto land after them, thrashing thick wet tendrils to reclaim what’s hers. The rain streaks down in thick dark sheets, shoving Selena in one direction or the other like someone is upending whole buckets overhead, like the push-pull of the surf. She’s never seen the ocean so angry. She’s not sure she’ll be able to find her cove — she can hardly find the coast — but she and her companion are connected, she sees that now. Selena could find it anywhere.

It’s easier to move on the sand than on the asphalt; here she can sink her toes into the earth to keep the rain from washing her off her feet. She finds her way just as a wave crashes in, tumbling her feet-over-head through the mouth of the cave and smashing her against the rough rock within.

Inside it’s dark — not dark like the sea and sky outside but dark like the abyssal depths, where no light has ever touched. She’s not sure which way is up and which is down; all she can feel in every direction is sharp edges and sea spray, which would be blinding if there was any reason to open her eyes in the first place. The meat of her left flank where the ocean knocked her against the coral feels raw, like hamburger. When Selena was little, she punctured the delicate outer skin of a jellyfish with a sharp seashell, and then watched in horror as its insides all slorped out onto the sand. Selena wonders if her insides will slorp out.

Another wave rushes her, filling her mouth with a fistful of salt and sand and knocking her against something smooth and brittle. Selena seizes onto it, desperately, and with relief.

You shouldn’t be here, you know, her friend tells her. It’s not safe.

“Why aren’t you scared?” She can hardly hear herself, but her companion is better at listening. “The ocean — ” and now that she speaks she can tell that she’s crying, from the nasal whine under her voice; the ocean had assimilated her tears. “She’ll take everything. She’ll take you.”

I’m hers, aren’t I? Her companion shrugs serenely. I’m only going home.

“But I don’t want you to go! I want to go with you!”

It pauses, thinking, and then: You could, you know.

“How?” Her voice cracks with desperation. “I’ll do anything.”

I think you know.

And of course she knows. She’s known from the moment she fell in love with it. She still can’t see, but she knows every inch of it, so it is as easy as anything to reorient herself beneath its ribcage. She’ll need to be narrower, but she knew that, too; she empties her lungs (she won’t need them where she’s going) and slips inside in a single smooth motion.

Her new shell is too tight for her to breathe in, but breath is of her old life. In time her eyes will swell to flat round mirrors that reflect the sun, and her skin will fracture into perfect mosaics, till she outgrows it entirely. The ocean filling the cavern knocks her off her feet again but the water feels warmer now, as though it knows that she has made her choice. As her lungs fill with saltwater, Selena opens her eyes. She’s never felt so beautiful.