He likes to be the smartest. She doesn’t care and anyhow, people don’t like smart women mostly. Men show it off. Women mask it. She can only partially mask with her professional degree.

He’s pleased to walk on the beach with her. She is withdrawn, down. He can feel that. He does not ask why, ever. She slides neatly into the space his wife’s dementia left. His wife who was also depressed. He does whatever he wants, he’s not available, he won’t be trapped. Control.

She is withdrawn, down. She has a difficult task in a year that might kill her. Closing the clinic and working elsewhere. Maybe she only gets pneumonia when a loved one dies. Or maybe COVID-19 will kill her. There, the range is from make a lot of money to dying. It is hard to explain and people don’t believe her.

Tendrils from her time in the ocean brush him. Then they are longer and lit in the sun. They wrap around him, very slowly. The first after a year. Where the tendrils touch, he has scales.

Neither sees. They are too busy laughing. They are small children, wordplay, in the woods, on the beaches, talking, singing.

She thinks her mermaid self is separate, her dream self. She is safest in the ocean. Her microbiota, gut bacteria, are all from the ocean. Symbiotic. He has land bacteria, at least, he starts with them. They change the longer they are together. He says, “I can read your mind!” But he can’t read emotions, since his are locked away. They bang on the dungeon doors howling but his heart is locked there too. His head can’t hear, can’t feel. Only when the small child is out playing.

He is slowly turning green. Now he has a few small leafy tendrils too.

She goes in the sea, the ocean, the unconscious, daily. Unworried, free, happy, healed.

The year goes by. The clinic closes, she has a job.

“Why are you afraid?” He says.

“I am afraid I’ll get sick,” she says.

He has tendrils running all over from her. Half his skin has designs, stripes and patterns. The earliest ones have thickened and spread, rooted wherever they touch him, scales edging the roots. She is fully scaled, with the tendrils from fins and tail and hair. She smells of the sea.

She goes to work and is sick after two months. Very very sick with all it entails.

“You didn’t tell me about this!” he says.

“Why would I?” she says. “No one believes me.”

“I am watching and I don’t believe it.” He hates that her mind is unmasked. “I can follow you and it makes sense but you jump topics so fast!”

She shrugs. “Well.”

He tries to cut ties. Once. Twice. He can’t see the tendrils, so how can he cut them? But now she looks from the ocean and sees. The third time he tries, she grabs a shell and slices through the tendrils and dives deep. He could come in the sea. But he will have to choose.

He chooses not to. He thinks she is calling him from the sea. Every day he drinks a little more, smokes a little more, trying to drown the call.

But it isn’t her. The tendrils are his, now. The dungeon is flooded and the monsters and the small child swim in an ocean, fully scaled. They call him daily, to open the door, to let them out, to join them.

To join them in the sea.

________________________

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: symbiotic.

Sea of love.