Listen to the Water | FULL SERIES | Wattys 2022 Shortlist | ✔

(1) The Silt Hill

I didn't have a fish tail when I fell asleep. Then again, I don't remember falling asleep, so I guess my memory was a little suspect by the time I reached the fish-tail part. The blue above me is murky, filtered to a greenish tint like the predawn light is trying to struggle down through fog—but not a clear, mountain fog like any sane person would be breathing. More like the ghastly swamp-breath that sometimes rises off the wet patches of the island when the weather gets steamy. I would check the sky to gauge the time of day, except that there is no sky and no horizon, and most people back home would draw a goddess crescent on their chests if they ever saw this much water over their heads.

Water isn't air, but my aching lungs don't seem to have made the distinction yet. I take a careful breath. The exhale whooshes around my neck and pillows my shoulders in a cloud of silt. I'm stalling on looking down at my feet again, so I move an arm and startle myself with how fast it rises. My hand feels like it's floating. That's kind of neat, so I do it again. It's more fun than it should be, which means I'm either still in shock or have even less of a survival instinct than people say I do. Maybe I should focus on breathing in case it's the former?

I take another breath and nearly choke as I feel it flowing through slits in my neck. I have gills, too.

I sink my fingers back into the ground beneath me. Mud softer than bird's down flurries about my hands. The seafloor is less solid than I'd hoped for, which is my first clue that the in-shock hypothesis has more backing than the alternative. It almost makes me glad there's nobody here to see me. If I am to slowly lose my composure over the fact that I just woke up on an empty, grey hill under the sea, with a Rashi-forsaken fish tail and more new holes around my jugular than a sacrificial jungle fowl, I would rather do so alone.

If someone could come find me after that, though, that would be fantastic.

I lie back and spend the next hundred heartbeats hopelessly distracted by the fact that I can feel every breath along my collarbone. My hands have started shaking, so I remove them from the mud and sink them into my hair instead. It's as soft as feathers. I preen a little, hopeful that one of my favorite activities will take my mind off of literally everything else, but it doesn't take the bait. My hair, unbraided yesterday—or at least, I think it was yesterday—has risen to a luxurious cloud made soft by the water. My mind gleefully fills in the number of things it could now be hiding. Horns or fins, or any one of an abundance of other protrusions that goma Tashagi, the oldest village elder, brings up in her stories to scare the skirts off the village children on thundering wet-season nights.

Those stories tap at the edges of my consciousness, just out of reach. They're a world away: sea gods and demigods, caverns beneath the waves where the island god Rashi's sun doesn't shine, and the fish-tailed Luasa that roam the waters, looking for islanders who stray too close to their domain. They have upper bodies like humans, goma Tashagi says. Humans long ago lost beneath the water, cursed by the sea.

If I'm a Luasa now, Rashi help me, I had better not be an ugly one.

This thought at least diverts my attention, so I probe every part of my scalp in search of evidence to the contrary. There is a merciful absence of fishy embellishments. I have nearly gotten my hopes up when I withdraw my hands. The skin on the backs of them is glossed like a fresh burn, near-black against my already ebony complexion. I tilt them, and they turn grey. The patches are mirrored, with a silvery, scale-like base that reflects my hair or the silt or the water or the sky, depending on which way they face. My nails are black, and there are silvery freckles spattered up my arms.

This is, truthfully, better than I expected. I feel my face just to be sure, but my top half seems normal aside from some suspiciously pointy teeth. And I'm covered, at least. A material something like seaweed hugs my ribcage in a comfortably wide band from armpits to baby ribs. It is... flat. I guess being bare-chested makes Luasa better swimmers, but I definitely feel cheated.