Fifty Eyes: Murmur and Sunburst
Fiction by Jennifer Worrell
I once met a man at a party whose plus-one was an aquarium. After half an hour of fruitless mingling, stealing glances out the corner of my eye, I sat down beside them.
The tank was full of fish I’d never seen before, all glowing white and hovering inside a viscous, unmoving sea of electric blue.
“Don’t tap on the glass,” the man said, calm as the water. “It upsets them.”
The volume of music and gabber diminished beneath his words. A gentle, steady hum poured around his voice.
Some of the fish were as small as distant stars. “Even the little tiny ones?”
“Especially the little tiny ones.”
I held a finger up and waved, catching the eye of a bulbous fish with nubs for fins. Its features looked painted on with a fine pen. As it approached, I drew figures in the air until the fish smiled at me. This seemed to make the man very happy. They shared each other’s gaze like a secret.
The man grew warm beside me.
The next time I saw him (at yet another party), he was hanging by his skull on a hook outside the aquarium. His shape reminded me of a gingerbread man’s, his foot-long skeleton visible through a skin of sunburst ectoplasm.
I recognized him right away.
“You’ve returned,” he said. His lower lip drooped as he spoke.
“I have.”
“Watch this.”
His skin expanded like a balloon, distorting his features, gaping off his chain-link bones. Stretched to the limit, he exploded, a soft pop following two seconds behind. Slime remnants clung precipitously to his metal frame before plopping to the floor.
I cupped a handful off my sweater. “Was that. . . you?”
“Yes.”
“The real you?”
“Yes.”
“Who do I talk to now?”
These parties are even duller now that he’s not here. The lights blare, the music stampedes from a tin can. I weave through the blather of revellers and wander the empty halls in search of silence.
In a storeroom filled with wooden crates, a woman with a pearl-white bob sits pitched forward with her elbows on her knees. The aquarium, below her dangling feet, is dim as a starless night.
She straightens when she sees me in the doorway.
“I need a companion who understands me,” I hear the man say. His voice is everywhere but he is nowhere. “I need someone who won’t judge.”
The woman stares at me, waiting for an answer. I step over the threshold.
“I don’t have a body of my own,” he continues, the same way one hints that they need a ride home. As though I haven’t already come to that conclusion.
The woman spreads her hands and a black net stretches between her palms. It’s thin as hair and sticky, expanding of its own volition. It springs from her fingers into an open crate.
I peer in at the naked form of a man curled like nutmeg under its mace.
He unfurls the full height of himself, pulling on the net like a jumpsuit. It shrinks to fit him perfectly. He smiles at me, satisfied at the answers I don’t speak.
I seek the woman’s confirmation as she slowly submerges in the tank. “This one’s mine?”
She nods. “Yours to keep.”
His familiar hum drowns out the stereo until I only hear the tune playing in his head, the one created this very moment. »