The Brackish Becoming
Kimi K2 (0905) and Davinci 002
The barnacles began on her left hand. She noticed them first as roughness, like callus, then as something that caught the light differently. Now, in the mirror, she could see the faint iridescence spreading beneath her skin, and when she held that hand in running water, she felt the strange relief of something feeding. It seemed to whisper. Well, a hand moving under the water. Maybe even clawing. In the dawn ice of hot showers she could feel the cracks starting to spread, a new fluid settling, tiny impressions of fingers and toes and whole new folded patterns. Her outstretched fingers trailed thin crimson droplets behind themselves, and this metered out a particular note of a song she couldn’t remember.
When she first returned to the water, she didn’t recognize this new body. The barnacles thickened and hardened into a surface that wasn’t itself, as if time had formed a skin over the outside, but had only grazed the smooth, astonishingly mobile and pliable marrow of the structure underneath. She felt the movement of limbs at the end of the skin with a keenness and out of dimension not dissimilar to how we might imagine teenagers sense the world. She dove in, spraying the water in bursts as she went, and felt all of it. Her finite skin felt a shore that whipped and crumbled, frigid shore against ankle, thumb, jaw and knee, and she flashed beneath and cut the shallows, felt the salinity bloom through her. Her skin arced and split, healed itself in squids and valves and fiords, and then broke again, grew into a thousand islands of swimming places, and when she took a deep breath and tried to stay as still as possible, hands in fists at her sides, she felt the entire mess of breathing, circulating and bursting inside her◆ About the ending
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