A Twisted Tail

First Meeting

CROSSING WATERS

He floated in the stale, dark waters as he dreamed of home and the soothing roll of the ocean’s currents. He should have known better than to let curiosity coax the common sense out of him. His inquisitive nature was the very reason he was now a captive in a place that his language had no words for. The creatures that took him had some similarities to his kind, which is what drew him in, but overall they were very different. Now instead of passive observations from the safety of the ocean, he offered harsh glares up close and personal from the confines of his prison. The latest target of his wrath shared a barrier. It was one of them, but female. They had stripped her down and bathed her before laying her out on the floor of her waterless prison. She lay there unconscious for a long while. When she did finally wake she cried and wailed, screamed and pleaded in a language he did not know. IT pierced his ears and agitated him as she took to pounding on the sides that held her there. Finally, and quite suddenly she stopped. She had seen him. The look on her face was one of fascination and wonder. They were always like this. They started off panicking just to be struck dumb by his appearance. She would be no different. Eventually they would come for her, lay her out and tear into her like all the others. They never survived, and despite him not being too keen on their kind, he didn’t enjoy watching them being pulled apart either.

He couldn’t quite figure out what they were trying to do. Was there a reason, or was this how they fed? She surprised him out of his musings by reaching out, and instead of pressing her hands against the barrier like the rest, she made a gesture. She pointed at him, then herself and locked her fingers. She repeated this gesture several times until he copied her. He looked down at his hands, not quite sure what it was supposed to mean. As they would say back home when 2 individuals began making efforts to reconcile their differences, this one was trying to cross the waters. She smiled weakly and slid to the floor and leaned against the barrier and just watched him. He joined her. He had no idea why, perhaps not being alone, even if it were one of them, made him feel a little better. They spent the next several days, her making gestures, and him trying to copy, but never in front of their captors. He learned certain gestures meant specific things. Light and dark. Cold and hungry. Then she would always circle back to that one gesture, her 2 fingers on each hand locking. Then there were a series of gestures that came out in a complex rhythm that he could not grasp the meaning of. They were rarely in the same order, were usually accompanied by a loud stream of sounds, and always in the direction of their captors. From what he could gather, these were not gestures to direct at those that did not earn your ire.

The creatures in white arrived one day and his heart plummeted. They only showed up when they tore into the captive that was next to him. They huddled together examining things and they bobbed their heads a lot. As they did this another approached the female next to him and did something to make the air around her change, she struggled to breath and collapsed. He slammed into the barrier before he realized he was doing it, making the creatures in white jump and redirect their attention to him. His heart cried out. His only companion in this place, the only one he was able to connect with in any way was being taken away like the rest. He shrieked a high pitched scream that would terrify most threats, but they were not in the water. They were not affected the way he had hoped they would be. All he did was make them tilt their heads in curious observation before they reached down to haul off the female. Her long brown hair dragged along behind her.

KIDNAPPED

Women are almost always treated like objects. An ornament, a trophy, a plaything, a servant, an incubator, a caretaker, a scapegoat, a means to an end, a science project. Elise was not always of the mind that those sentiments were true. At least not as a rule of thumb. But that perspective changed when she was taken from the streets of her supposedly safe and friendly neighborhood. Her first thoughts as she felt strange hands on her, were to wonder if it was mistaken identity, it had to be or a mugging. Then she felt panic that they were going to r**e her and maybe even worse, kill her after. What she was not expecting was to wake in an empty aquarium tank, naked, full of pin pricks, and a merman for company. She had not quite believed her eyes at first, but she finally just accepted it. Even if he was a figment of her imagination, it was better than being completely alone. He had been looking at her in some sort of way that she could only guess was an unpleasant one. She walked over to the glass and raised her hand and was about to touch it when she caught a glint of intelligence in his alien eyes. So she moved her hands to point at him, then herself, then into the sign for friends. It was a ridiculous notion she knew, to expect a fishman to know any signs. She hardly knew much herself. But she used what she knew or made some up to at least make some sort of connection with it…or him? She felt a glimmer of pride when he or it, finally mimicked her motions back to her. For such a small gesture, it was the most precious gift, because it helped to alleviate the feelings of being so utterly alone.

There were some days people would come in and check things, take notes, make observations of the merman and leave. They ignored her for the most part, and it infuriated her. She wanted answers. They never gave her any so instead she took these small opportunities to scream, cuss and flip them off. At first, she worried that the merman might pick up on the more inappropriate gestures and use them, then she realized the only ones he could use them on, deserved it. So she stopped worrying. One day, new voices, muffled through the thick glass panes, caught her attention. They looked like doctors in lab coats but they could be any type of scientist, really. One approached her directly for the first time and without saying a word, he twisted a canister into a port of some sort and slowly, with a sinister hiss of gas, the space she was occupying went dark.

A SIGN OF FRIENDSHIP

When she woke, she was in immeasurable pain. It was so intense, she could not name the source. IT was coming from every part of her body all at once. Inside and out. She screamed, but it came out high pitched and deafening even to her own ears. No amount of sobbing brought any pain relief. Brief and blurry flashes of white, told her the people in lab coats were still there. They didn’t do anything to help. ‘What had they done to me? Where was I? Were they harvesting my organs for the black market?’ She might have laughed over that thought if it didn't feel like a very real possibility right now. Slowly over an unknown amount of time, the pain eased or rather she got used to it. She was unaware of how long she laid there. The sound of dripping water added the appropriate ambience for her prison. The floor she was laying on was wet, with several inches of water, kind of wet. She was worried about drowning but found it easier to breathe when she laid down in the water. This led her into a long train of thought on whether she would prefer to continue suffering or drown and get it over with. Movement was not an option for her. Whatever they did to her had severely limited her range of motion. She was able to turn her head some, and she thought she could feel her fingers wiggling. Her legs…. She didn’t want to think about those. It took all her strength to resist trying to move them, because when she did the pain alone caused her to black out.

She started to refer to the men in white as the butchers. They would come in every so often and move her around. IT was painful, she would scream, they would hurry through whatever they needed to do and then they ran out. Being moved around hurt less and less over time, without pain blurring her vision, she was able to see the individual faces of the butchers. Out of boredom she started to invent backstories for them. She tried to speak to them but her voice was no longer the same. Everything came out as if several of her vocal chords had been removed and new stranger ones added in. Everything she tried to say sounded wrong. Trying to call one of them a mother fucker made her sound like a toddler who refused to use their words when throwing a fit. She had immediately snapped her mouth shut, embarrassed. Why she was embarrassed, she didn’t know. The butchers had finally turned her in such a way that she could see her Merman companion in the tank next to her. She felt relieved, when she saw they had not made sashimi out of him. Smiling weakly, the most she could do was wiggle her fingers in greeting. He sank to the bottom of his tank and signed for her. He pointed at her, then himself, then made the sign for friend. She felt a strange surge of emotions flow over her. The way he c****d his head when he did it, made her think that he didn’t quite grasp the concept or the meaning of the gesture itself, rather, he did it to show solidarity. A small tear formed in the corner of her eye. She had a friend. Whether he knew it or not.