The Girl Who Became a Fish

It was on Tuesday, at nine in the evening, when Mandee saw she was growing scales. She frowned at the bathroom mirror, at her chocolate brown eyes, and frowned at the small hard plates growing right below her elbow. There was a patch of them covering a quarter of her forearm. Under the yellow glare of the lightbulb that needed replacing, they seemed to gleam. They were scales, she was sure. Not snake scales. Fish scales. Mandee was sprouting fish scales.

‘This is because I don’t lotion regularly,’ she thought. ‘Maybe I need more vitamin C. Or more something.’
She tried scratching the plates loose but they were perfectly nestled in her skin. She tapped on them, rubbed them, tried washing them away with soap and water. They remained, small, hard scales roughly the color of her flesh.

Outside, she presented her mother with the growths on her arm.
“Mom,” she said, “I’m growing fish scales.”
Her mother was on the phone with someone Mandee didn’t know, a man whose voice was a static buzz from where she stood. Mandee’s mother was calling him ‘darling’ and ‘sweetheart’ but Mandee was sure it wasn’t her father. Her father was downstairs, in the living room.
“Mom? I’m growing—“
“Not now, baby.” She was looking at Mandee but speaking to the receiver. “Oh shush, don’t tease.”
Mandee held her arm up, the scaly patch right in front of her mother’s face.
“Of course honey, I’ll listen to whatever you have to say, oh, wait wait—Put some lotion on it Mandee, honey—okay, maybe tomorrow then…” Her mother waved her arm away, gestured for her to leave, pointed at the bathroom door and mouthed ‘lotion’ again.
Mandee held her arm up higher, pointing at the scales with her other hand, but her mother had looked away.

So Mandee tried her brother, who was in his room. Loud music with curse words and people growling and screaming always came from his room. But the door was always locked. It took ten minutes of Mandee beating on the door with her fist before her brother opened the door by a crack. He remained behind it so she could only see his eye and nose and a bit of his hair. The room behind him was dark.  
“I’m growing fish scales,” Mandee told him, holding her arm up to the crack in the doorway. “See?”
Her brother’s eye, brown in the middle but laced with red at the edges, landed on the patch. He blinked. “So?”
“Mom told me to put lotion on it.”
“So?”
“She didn’t really look at it.”
“So?”
“I don’t think that’s going to help.”
“Nothing’s going to help,” He said, matter-of-factly. “Help is an illusion. Salvation is a lie. Give in and give up.”
And his eye and nose and hair disappeared and Mandee caught a glimpse of his desktop speakers thumping at full volume before the door swung shut in her face.

Downstairs, Mandee’s father was on the sofa, remote control in hand, staring straight at the TV. Mandee was pretty sure he was in that exact same position the last time she saw him. The last time she saw him was three days ago.
She doubted he would have anything to say about the scales growing on her arm, but she tried anyway.
“Dad? I’m growing fish scales.”
Her father’s eyes never left the TV. It was a rerun of the Tyra Show and Tyra was talking about the importance of wearing the right bra size.
“Dad?” Mandee tried again. “Look at my arm.”
He made a gurgling noise, and as if on it’s own volition the TV switched channels. Now it was on HBO, with the end credits of Interview With A Vampire.
“I’m growing fish scales and I don’t know why. Am I turning into a fish?” Mandee asked the man on the sofa.
“That’s nice,” he said in a slow, soft voice, flipping the channel to a game show where people threw pies at one another.

That night, Mandee went to sleep, one arm crossed over the one with the fish scales. Every now and then she’d switch her bedside lamp on to check if the growths were still there. They still were. She fell asleep with the lamp blaze on her face and dreamt of being a tiny silver fish in a salty ocean. When she woke up the next day, the scales were still there. The patch was bigger than before.

“Louise,” she said, turning to her best friend as they entered the classroom together. “There’s fish scales growing on my arm-“ she paused to roll her sleeve up so that Louise could see the flesh-colored plates, each no larger than a peso coin, in perfect uniform overlapping rows up to the edge of her shoulder.
Louise glanced at her arm, shrugged and asked, between waving hello to other people, classmates, who waved back smiling, “You think that’s bad?”
Mandee’s gaze darted from Louise, to the scales, to the class full of grade six students, and back at her arm.
“Isn’t it?” she asked back, shamefully pulling her wrist-length sleeves back down. “I’m getting worried.”  
“You shouldn’t be,” Louise lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’ve got a rash creeping up my leg which is maybe ten times worse than that. It’s all red and blotchy and itchy. And gross.”
“But,” Mandee began, “A rash is—“
“Shhh!” Louise’s hand landed against Mandee’s mouth, clamping it shut. She raised a finger to her lips, glowering, whispering through her teeth. “Do you want everyone to know?”
Mandee made a few noises behind Louise’s palm. ‘But a rash is normal,’ she was trying to say.
Louise shook her head. “It’s a food allergy,” she said very seriously, slowly releasing Mandee so she could breathe again. “It could be there for up to three whole weeks . Can you imagine that?”
Mandee opened her mouth to say something, closed it, set her lips in a straight line and said, “No, I can’t.”

During gym time, Mandee noticed she was getting tired easily. They were playing basketball and she was on the red team. Her legs were heavy when she ran, and she was sweating much more than anyone else. When she slowed down and gasped, it felt like there was a cloud of dust in her lungs. After a while, she became dizzy. She began running in loopy lines around the court.
The one time someone passed her the ball, it slipped past her arms (where no one had said a word about the scales) and slammed into her face. The blood that dripped from her nose was bright red, and runny. It dripped into the collar of her shirt.
“Sit down and wipe your face,” the coach said, plucking her out of the game. “Warm-down, rest and take any medication for any special physiological condition prescribed to you by your physician. What’s your name again? Manny? Andy?”
Mandee didn’t reply, just went for the cooling station. For ten minutes she stood with her foot down on the pedal of the water fountain, her mouth wide, lips pulled back, tongue straining out towards the cold, sparkling water that spouted in a gentle stream.

At four in the afternoon, one of the janitors noticed her in the hallway, sitting against her locker.
“Why are you crying?” he asked Mandee.
She looked up, quickly wiping her nose on her sleeve and still dripping blood and snot on her chin. Her cheeks were rubbed raw where she kept rubbing under her eyes.
“I’m…” she started to say it, stopped and bit her lip. Her chin was quivering.
The janitor, who had been the janitor since Mandee was grade 1, nodded for her to continue.
“I’m…I think I’m… No one cares that…” A small sob, like a puppy whine came from her lips and she quickly bit down on the cuffs of her sleeves.
“It’s okay,” the janitor said.
“No it’s not!” she said it so forcefully spit flew from her lip. “I’m turning into a fish!”
The janitor wiped away a drop that had landed on his shoulder. He gave her a small smile, the kind Mandee saw her teachers give her that time last year she had to admit some of the bigger girls were pushing her around.
“It’s true,” she said quickly.
“Is it your mother?” he asked.
“I’m. Turning. Into. A. Fish.”
“Your homeroom teacher told me you were having troubles at home. She wasn’t gossiping, I just asked her why you always look so sad.”
“I have,” Mandee said, speaking as clearly as she could through the growing scratchiness in her throat. “Scales. On my arm.”
The janitor was nodding his head. “I heard your dad was having problems with his job. Of course, I’m not sure that’s true, I hope you don’t think I’m meddling…”
Mandee pulled her face back in a tight grimace, tried to see over the janitor’s shoulder but he wouldn’t stop talking.
“…I’m just trying to be helpful, you’re a nice, quiet girl…”
“I need to drink. Water.”
“…Then some people say your mother’s been seeing someone else, but no one knows for sure…”
“I have to go.”
She tried to stand up but her legs were wobbly and the janitor had to support her. Even then, he didn’t stop talking.
“Anyway if you have any problem, any at all—“
“I have to go.”

On Friday, at nine in the evening, the skies outside Mandee’s house turned a deep, angry gray and as suddenly as lightning strikes, it was raining.
Hard rain, the weatherman on TV said, when Mandee’s father flipped to the channel 12 news. Mother, on her cellphone, crossed into the living room, laughing out loud over something the muffled voice on the other end of the line just said. Father closed his eyes when she stepped between him and the diagram of clouds and thunderbolts on screen. He only opened them again after she pranced off into the kitchen. The hardest rain of the season, the weatherman was announcing, and it would rain all night long.

Mandee looked up at her brother, who was in the kitchen with his feet up on the table. He was reading a copy of American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. When Mother slipped past him, still laughing merrily, he slammed the book shut and gave her a glare she absolutely missed. He tried chucking the book at the back of her head but fell short, the volume hitting the refrigerator door instead and dislodging a handful of magnets in the shape of brightly-colored letters from the alphabet.

Mother didn’t seem to realize he had thrown the book at her because she was chirping ‘oh yes darling, marvelous, marvelous,’ before going back outside.
Brother made a sharp hissing noise, before going to retrieve the book.

He brushed past Mandee at the opposite end of the table, who looked down at how brightly the scales shone down both her arms. The nails on her hands and feet had disappeared under a sheet of silver plates. Her fingers and toes were webbed together by thin films of flesh. At her back a long stump had formed along her spine. In front of her were a dozen empty drinks glasses.

The words of the weatherman came floating into the kitchen. Father had turned the volume up. Canals were overflowing and flood was rising. People were being evacuated and brought to higher ground.
Mother’s laughing came twice as loud, screaming loud. She was hooting with glee. ‘Don’t stop there,’ she cried out, against the weatherman’s booming monologue.
Brother rolled his eyes, started reading out loud from his book, with a scene concerning a psychotic man chopping up a pair of women.

Quietly, Mandee stood up, frowned at her brother, frowned at the noise from the living room, frowned at the oily black pits that had come to replace her eyes.

“I’ll be going out,” she said. No one replied. She paused at the kitchen door to take one last look at the house and saw nothing she would miss greatly.

Outside, the only sound came from the downpour. To Mandee, it was as good as silence. She was walking barefoot and the water lapped at her ankles but she didn’t mind. A single drop of rain touched her on the forehead and traced a cold line down the bridge of her nose, to her upper lip, dropping to the tip of her tongue. It was delicious.
Rainwater coated her, made the scales sparkle like millions of tiny stars in a silver galaxy. Behind her, the rain, which fell and fell and fell, seeped into the growing mound along her spine and a long white fin fanned out from her back like a sail gracefully unfurling in full winds.
Mandee continued to walk, breathing in the water, not the air, growing stronger as she passed ever thickening sheets of rain.
The water was up to her thighs now, and creeping higher. She surged forward, past broken pipes and spurting storm drains. The water was at her waist. At her ribs. The water tickled her shoulders.

“Hey!” A man in a raincoat with a loudspeaker. He was perched on top of an equally yellow rubber boat with the rest of his rescue team.
Mandee gave him as wide a smile as she could with her pale wet lips. She didn’t have to blink away the rain that trickled into her eyes. She didn’t have eye lids anymore.
“What do you think you’re doing? The dam burst!” his voice was loud but far away behind the loudspeaker. “We’re evacuating everyone in this area before it’s flooded over!”

Mandee’s face was turned to the sky, which was a canvas of darkening shades of gray. Everything, including her, smelled like water.

The man with the loudspeaker was yelling at her. “Why are you alone? Where’s your family?  Do you want to drown?”

The torrent was churning the surface of the waters white. A current, faint but clear, washed around Mandee’s form and started carrying her past the yellow boat.

“No,” she said to the man, whose face was hidden by the hood of his raincoat. “I’ll be okay. I’m a fish.”

Then she dipped her head below, breathing as deep as her lungs allowed, before the pull of the rainstorm waters took her away.


END