When I see the dead fish scattered all over the floor, they’re lying lifeless and they’re all smelling so strongly that it’s hard to breathe. I hold the walls to walk. My exposed feet are covered in their scales and slime. How many of them do I crush underneath? I dare not look.
Always, just before I reach the end of the corridor, I wake up in the arms of the channeller. Her sweat and her heavy arms and uncling from me, and I take a minute just to catch my breath.
“Your mother’s going to kill the both of us if she finds out,” the channeller says. She feels the clattering beads hanging off of her wrists. They match the ones on her ears and around her neck.
I shake my head. When my breath is back in my lungs, I close my eyes tight briefly. “If all goes well, she will never find out.”
The channeller’s room in her three-room apartment looked so much emptier without any of the other followers crowding it. Chanting, nodding, counting their beads: they may be devout, but they’re always a nuisance. I’m not. I was chosen because I am better at being channelled than anyone else there.
“Besides,” I say, “My only real mother is underwater.”
In the next session, a day later, my body aches and stings. A pile of fish bones, discarded heads of prawns and squids, horrid eyes staring at me, and I’m struggling to get out of it, reach the floor. If there is one.
With wide sweeps of my arms, I push aside all the remains. They sting and carve me with the tiniest of points. The mound ends, and I feel the emptiness of air and dark. I am about to be free from the sea of dead marine life, when…
I root myself in the reality I’m in. I hold onto the seaweed and I dig my feet into the sand. The crabs skitter away, the shells are displaced and they sink, the schools of fish turn away in perfect synchronisation.
There’s no sun above anymore, it’s too much of a coward to reach down here.
I can’t hear the channeller’s voice, which tells me that I’m either dreaming, or I’ve really made it this time.
Her great, scaly arms envelope my person and lift me from the sand below my feet. The channels of water make way for me.
“You made all.” The bubbles escape my mouth, floating up to an unknown escape.
The first I see of her face are her teeth. Sharp, twisted, and in so, so many rows.
“You made all.” I repeat. “I have come to see you.”
Her eyes shine like a pale kaleidoscope, and the great black underneath that shimmer is focused on me. When she blinks, the water rushes over my person, makes my clothes cling to me and my hair try to float away.
Is that the channeller’s sweat? Is that the warmth of her hands on me? I feel I hear a voice. Something urgent, a warning, a breathless flustering. A slap?
“I surrender to you,” I say. I know who I’m speaking to.
Again, the shaking, the slapping. They’re trying to tear me away from my mother, she of the seas, and they’re trying to…
“I made all,” Mother says. “All the delicacies.”
Then, I no longer feel the channeller’s warmth.
