Seabeast by Rachel Swabey
Maya bobs in the lizard-grey sea, just out of sight, as the gaggle of eccentrics, thrill-seekers and exhibitionists jostles on the pier, eager to leap towards glory. The serious-looking hang gliders have had their turn, so now it’s time for the amateurs dressed as giant birds or vehicles. The wind whips at their costumes and contraptions, but they’re all smiles and bravado.
A woman in a WWII spitfire costume launches herself from the ramp at the end of the pier and hangs in the air, a moment of elation containing within it the seeds of catastrophe. The freeze-frame spell breaks, and then so does the spitfire as the woman smacks into the ocean.
Lorna shoulders her way forwards, engineering a clear line-of-sight between herself and the local newspaper photographer in the dinghy below. The annual Birdman contest is always a double-page spread, often a front page picture too. Her white-feathered wings are as wide as she is tall and she’s wearing a silver halo on a wire and a silver swimsuit. Because, of course, only an angel would throw herself off a pier for charity, right? Her skin is several shades darker than usual, making her blonde curls and white grin doubly dazzling. Maya can hardly bear to look, but she wants to see Lorna crash.
*
Maya started at Catalyst four months ago. Lorna, the only other female designer, had already been there four years. So perhaps it was a weird animalistic territory thing, or something. Who knows? Maya had long-since given up trying to second-guess Lorna’s motives.
It was little things at first, like unplugging equipment at Maya’s work station or moving her stuff, rattling her and making her doubt herself. By the time Maya figured out what was happening, the roles were set. Everyone had her pegged as the scatty one. To blame her screw ups on unflappable Lorna, who always made sure there was plausible deniability, would have seemed defensive, even ridiculous. It would have asked people to choose, and Maya was pretty sure how that would turn out.
At lunchtimes, Maya would head to the beach and eat a meal deal tuna sandwich with ready salted crisps, washed down with a lemonade. Then she’d strip to her swimsuit and tiptoe into the sea. Some days it felt like punishment, the sharp stones piercing her feet, icy waves nipping her ankles, but the sucking undertow always pulled her back and, by the time she was thigh-deep, bracing to launch into the surf, it always felt like freedom.
And when she was submerged, muscles aching, salt on her lips, the push-and-pull solitude and oneness of the sea, she felt as though she could let go of whatever Lorna’s mind games had done to her nervous system that morning, as though the water leached it out of her somehow.
Afterwards, she would trudge back to the office to shower. Until the incident with her clothes. She couldn’t prove Lorna took them, of course, but she knew straight away. And she had no choice but to stumble into the office in her towel and announce that her clothes had disappeared. The team of seven male designers sniggered and shuffled like eight-year-olds on a fire drill after Lorna and Maya into the ladies’ changing room to help look for the missing changing bag. Lorna’s face as Gary pulled it from under a bench – where it certainly hadn’t been before – confirmed everything she had known as soon as she’d stepped out of the shower. Maya, still dripping, flushed and fought back tears.
After that, she dried under a changing robe at the beach.
“Oh, wow!” Lorna exclaimed one day, pulling seaweed from Maya’s hair, holding it up like a prize as everyone gawped. “We’ll have to start calling you Seabeast!” She cackled, to the usual chortling. Maya stared at the seaweed in Lorna’s manicured hand. There was nothing she could say. She swallowed and it was as though she was swallowing something solid, as though a pebble was lodging itself deep in her gut, or some kind of anemone, sitting spiky within her, just waiting for an opportunity to sting.
*
Every evening in the shower, Maya watched sand swirl around the drain, barely noticing as day by day the skin on her legs began to take on a grey-green sheen. She scrubbed at it, but she couldn’t seems to shift it. And besides, there was something strangely beautiful about its iridescence, especially in the water.
The colour deepened and spread, creeping up her torso, across her shoulders, up her neck.
“Are you quite well?” Lorna gasped when she noticed. “I hope you’ve been checking the sewage reports?” she added, nose wrinkling. “That can’t be healthy.”
Maya shrugged, saying nothing.
And she felt nothing either. It was as though the scorn ran off her more smoothly now, like water beading on her newly tough, slick skin.
When her skin began puckering into little lumps, she covered it with trousers and polo-necks. Perhaps she should have been more worried, but as her skin changed, it developed new sensations, as though her arms and legs could see, smell and taste everything they touched. It was intoxicating. The world became a riot of sensation. And swimming—swimming became particularly divine. She started going to the beach before and after work as well as at lunchtime.
*
On the pier, Lorna preens, enjoying her moment, if not in the sun then at least in the spotlight, then she takes her run-up and launches. Maya takes a second to enjoy the satisfying inelegance of Lorna’s freeze-frame moment hanging above the sea, then sinks and propels herself towards the pier. She looks up at the silver swimsuit and sodden wings, and reaches a tentacle towards a flailing fake-tanned ankle. The leg jerks and Maya hears a distant scream that turns to a gurgle as she pulls Lorna under.
Above, a ray of refracted sunlight illuminates a floating halo of white feathers.
Rachel is a mother-of-three and regional newspaper subeditor from near Brighton, UK. She has won prizes for her short fiction and poetry with Anansi Archive, Globe Soup and the Steyning Festival Short Story Prize and her work has been featured in print anthologies from Fly on the Wall Press, Pure Slush and Mum Life Stories, and online at Punk Noir Magazine, Every Day Fiction and FlashFlood Journal, who nominated her for Best of the Net 2021. She’s working on a novel, but can often be found bunking off with sneaky forays into poetry and short fiction. She is a big fan of Octavia Butler’s writing, cheese (all varieties), and Richard Osman’s House of Games. You can meet her on www.threads.com/@spectopia and find out more about her writing adventures in this interview: Meeting Rachel Swabey