jenny nimon
anatomy of a girl
Marcie rolled the corner of the page between her thumb and forefinger until the paper started to wear through. The book, which she’d found at the town library, was about a girl not much older than she was, who starved herself until her body turned eel. The image of the girl’s eel body, squirming and wet and strung across her sister’s arms, was caught in Marcie’s head. The more she tried to avoid thinking about it, the more vivid it became. She resisted the urge to wipe the imagined slick from her forearms.
The library had an unsettlingly large collection of books about women turning into animals. Rabbits, insects, birds. It seemed like an everyday occurrence. She prodded the squishy flesh below her ribs. It bounced back. Dry, soft and decidedly human.
*
Marcie was a Pisces. Allegedly imaginative, empathetic, generous, but more likely over-emotional, impressionable, closed off. The sign of the fish.
She didn’t know it until two Wednesdays ago, when a girl in her class pulled a Creme magazine from her desk and started asking everyone for their birthdays. The magazine moved around the room, faces pressing close enough to transfer BB cream to the pages. One girl’s horoscope promised romance that month. Another’s suggested buying a go-to red lipstick. Marcie’s horoscope, which was under a watercolour of two pastel-pink-and-blue koi, said she was moving into a ‘phase of transformation’. The crossword on the opposite page asked for eight letters relating to the sea. After that, she started seeing fish everywhere. Doodled into the back of reissued textbooks. Tattooed onto the shoulder of a passerby. In the salt grinder at the dinner table or the rush of the kitchen tap.
*
Her dad owned a rubber fish. It was one of those ones that bent off its mounting when you pressed a button, then ominously stared you in the eyes and flapped its mouth open and closed, while some irritating song from the seventies rasped through a speaker. She’d never seen the wallpaper behind it. As far as she knew, it could have come with the house. But lately, it kept swimming into her mind, like when you suddenly notice the hum of the fridge and can’t stop hearing it. Every time she went to the kitchen she could feel its eyes on her back from across the room. It watched her shuffle from foot to foot, skim across the tiles in her socks, fumble for spoons in the cutlery drawer. Every action felt performed, premeditated. When she found the chips in the cupboard, it judged her for choosing salt and vinegar. She entertained the idea of removing its batteries.
Instead, she’d taken to spending her time in the garden where its eyes couldn’t reach. It was that time of year when winter was drawing close but people were in denial about it, still wearing t-shirts. She didn’t mind the cold much, anyway. She liked to watch the sky over the top of her book. If she looked closely she could see ripples in the blue, seafoam in the clouds. The planes were migrating to warmer waters.
The quiet was interrupted by the sounds of too-loud men at the back gate. Her dad and his friends were back from their boating trip. They turned on the barbecue, and the smell of charcoal filled the garden, made the flowers droop. One man was gutting a fish. It looked a bit like the rubber one. She had seen him a few times before: generic face, balding. When she got up to go back inside, he stopped her, asked how school was. That was the only thing adults ever asked. Fine. She wasn’t really listening. She was watching him push his knife in behind the fish’s gills to pull off its head. His knuckles were too big for his fingers, and the sound of snapping fish bones was so loud it seemed to drown everything else out, so she missed how he turned the conversation to her body. He told her it would be changing soon. Eyed her chest, his hands still bloody. It was less a prediction and more a curse, a command. Her dad was inside getting veg. She could feel the sting of vinegar and salt in the torn bits of skin around her fingernails. She could see her reflection in the eye of the fish’s decapitated head.
*
The next morning she stood, naked, in front of the bathroom mirror. The tiles were cold, but her feet were warm and left prints of condensation behind them. The edges of the glass were still steamed from her shower: not just the mirror, but the window, the toothbrush cup. It was dark outside, but lightening. Her body glowed translucent under the fluorescent light bulb.
She lifted her arms. Twisted awkwardly to look at her back, her bum. Almost slipped on the bathmat. Turned again to see herself at different angles, in different lighting. Flicked the light switch off and on again until settling on the dim light of the sunrise: yellow across the bathtub and blue-grey across her body. Like being underwater when the sun hits the surface. She was starting to see it now, the way her body was changing under his instruction. It was just like in the books. Her hips were a different shape than they used to be. Her eyes were fish-like and glassy. There were even marks on her thighs – little pink lines where the skin looked different. Taut, like it didn’t fit her bones anymore. The marks made her think of the patterns on the koi fish in the magazine. She bent her arms and saw that her elbows were scaly.
*
A few days later, her mother served up the leftover fish for dinner. It was close to off, so it smelled of the sea. Someone offered her pepper. She didn’t respond, so they cracked some over her meal anyway.
Marcie could see her own body on the plate, sautéed, skin crisped. She imagined swimming into a net. She imagined being hauled out of the water, choking on air. She imagined being unwrapped from her plastic, undressed, that man’s hands on her body like it was his. The way he’d sling her onto a table with a knife to her throat, turn her inside-out, pick her bones out with tweezers. He’d score her skin. Lay her skin-side down in a hot oiled pan so she’d crackle. Rub her over with lemon juice and salt.
She looked around the dinner table and saw everyone eating, laughing, like nothing was wrong. They were talking about a game show.
She ate her vegetables then flaked the fish with her fork, spread the bits around her otherwise empty plate. Only the rubber fish saw her do it. Everyone else had an eye on the TV.
*
In her science class, they were learning about respiration. It was a windy day, and the classroom seemed to breathe along with them: cool air whistling through the windows, the creaking of walls like the gentle expansion of a ribcage. She could feel the swell of it, the inhales and exhales of energy in the room. It was in the way her classmates shifted in and out of their sleepy, heavy half-focus when the teacher inflected her voice in that certain way that signalled she was saying something important. The words in Marcie’s textbook blurred and swam together as she tried to keep herself awake. The clock ticked to nowhere, stuck on the same second.
The teacher interrupted their drifting to gather them around her desk where she had a wet plastic package. The Pak’n’Save sticker announced it to them before she could: trout, four kilograms, best before the fifth. As it was near the end of the lesson they were allowed to leave, she told them, if it made them feel uncomfortable. Some people left before it started. The teacher lifted the gills, reminded them that water only exited from there because it entered through the fish’s mouth. Then, as if it were just as mundane an action as the last, she took her scalpel to its belly, no pause or warning beforehand. Her hands were delicate, precise, but still Marcie saw a set of thick, oversized knuckles. She could feel hands at her hip, a knife in her side. Her eyes fixed on the too-clean flesh of a liver. A set of gills became the ruffles on her favourite skirt. The rest became her body, peeled open for observation, skirt hitched up.
Marcie moved to the back of the classroom, dazed and shaking, her damp shirt clinging to her back. Someone turned her way, said she didn’t look so good, offered her some water. She unscrewed the top from the bottle and drank for as long as she could go without air.
*
She was sitting on the lounge floor at her friend’s house, wrapped in layers of blankets. The carpet lacked a softness – felt more like hessian against her bare heels. She tucked the blanket back around her toes, bent her knees up against her chin, tucked her face forward so that only her nose and eyes were showing. Her friend was telling her about a recurring dream. It only came on cold nights, or on violent ones when the words from her parents’ bedroom and the sound of the wind against the glass scrambled together. Only when she slept with her head under the covers too, in that suffocating warmth, in that strange comfort of shallow breath. In her dream she never fell asleep, just lay there beneath the covers, eyes open to the darkness. All that told her she was dreaming were the dead birds she felt pile on top of the duvet, slowly, in real time, for the whole course of the night. By morning she was buried, the birds packed to the ceiling, bodies broken to fit. Then her alarm would go off, and the birds would be gone, but she’d still feel unslept. The birds outside would be singing. Marcie nodded and made a noise like it meant something.
She told her, in return, that she’d been dreaming she was a fish. It wasn’t true. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a dream, but the least sane things sounded normal in that context. She said that she was swimming in the bathtub, crashing into the porcelain walls on repeat. Her friend nodded and made a noise like it meant something. But she could half-remember waking one night and mistaking the sound of her own breath for the sleepy, rhythmic drumming of waves, although, maybe she had made that up too.
*
She used to like taking books to the bathtub. There was something romantic about it, dangerous even. She would pose like someone was watching her. Like she was being recorded for one of those black-and-white films that crackled across the television screen. Hand and book poised above the water, head tipped slightly back. Pages edging daringly close to bubbles. Steam puckering paper. Only, today it felt less like a film and more like surveillance footage. There were eyes in the walls, creatures inside the taps. They were reading the book over her shoulder. They were reading her body.
She got out of the tub early, hair not properly washed, and knelt, dripping, on the mat. The water swirled and screeched down the plughole and was gone. She sat there for a while in the quiet, just staring down the drain, waiting for something to come crawling out. She only realised what she was doing when the cold clawed at her body and she started to shiver. Her towel was in a soft pale bundle on the floor. She reached for it and wrapped herself, wiped her face, dried down her legs, tried to imagine the thoughts being wicked away from her body as well. But on the towel, blood. A small smear, just in the corner.
*
A few days later, she was still bleeding. There was a deep burning ache in her abdomen. It was a metallic pain, like how she imagined it would feel for a fish to be scaled with a knife, only it was happening to her insides, a scooping sensation. Something was scraping her human parts out of her body with a spoon. The pain moved like the tide, ebbing at her waistline, controlled by the moon. At its most aggressive, she’d dig her nails into her wrist to distract from the scooping scraping feeling, leaving behind little crescent-shaped prints. At its gentlest, she could almost pretend it wasn’t there until she laughed or sneezed or coughed and blood squirted out of her. She’d imagined the transformation to be a little more beautiful, a little less involved. She didn’t expect it to happen from the inside out. She didn’t expect to lose her innards to her underwear.
When her mum left to do groceries, Marcie watched the car pull out of the driveway from her bedroom window. Listened to it groan down the road until the street went quiet. Counted to twenty. She pulled the ice cream container out from under her bed. Peeled off the lid. The inside of the plastic had sweated, and it smelled like rust and a marina on a hot day. Damp like soil after rain. She buried the pairs of underwear in the garden, under the rose bushes. Tipped them from the container into the hollow she’d dug in the dirt. They were crusted and a deep shade of red-brown, the same shade as the roses that had caught too much heat in the last weeks of summer. She covered them over with earth and dead leaves. When she went back inside with the empty ice cream container, the rubber fish gave her a knowing look.
*
She sat in the changing-room cubicle, stuffing toilet paper into the gusset of her underwear and then wrapping more around the crotch, looping it through the leg holes. She looked at her swimming bag and tried to work out how to do the same for her togs so that people wouldn’t see. The floor of the cubicle where her bag was sitting was wet and smelled of chlorine. A whistle at the poolside marked the start of her lesson.
She didn’t trust the water, not since the bath had made her bleed. The scene unfolded in her head. The way she’d finish her lap with a little too much ease, not needing to break for air. The snatches of other swimmers’ screams. How the sound wouldn’t make sense underwater. How they’d climb over each other and kick friends’ heads beneath the surface just to get out of the pool first. Just to get away from her.
She left her cubicle, slowly brushed out her hair. Folded her towel, unfolded and folded it again. Stuffed it into her bag so that the folding was redundant anyway. She walked out, fully clothed, into a haze of steam, sweat and chlorine and told her coach she couldn’t swim. There were so many splashes and yells that she had to repeat herself. Her coach asked why, looked unimpressed. A boy whipped Marcie’s thigh with his towel as he walked past, goggles suctioned to his face, and said that she had her curse. She couldn’t understand how he knew about it.
*
It was her dad’s fiftieth birthday. The evening light glinted off a crowd of helium balloons that bobbed about the living-room ceiling like buoys. The rubber fish lingered just below – waiting for something, it seemed. The guests were the bottom-feeders: slack mouths, sucking small talk off the rocks.
The man was there, with his wife. They had brought along a potato salad. It had little bits of crisped bacon and a garlic dressing and everyone raved about it. It was one of those dishes that people talked about for days in anticipation of a potluck. Marcie thought it looked like any other potato salad. When she spooned a little onto her plate he winked at her and told her she’d like it. She didn’t. Later in the night, he commented on her skirt.
A few hours later, when speech started to slur, the dog was under the coffee table chewing on something he wasn’t meant to be chewing on. He regularly did this when he wasn’t getting enough attention: stole a sock, a shoe, a piece of meat from the table. Everyone asked, What’ve you got there? in varying tones, put their drinks down on coasters, pulled themselves up from the couch. Marcie got that sinking feeling people talked about in books and movies: fins slipping down her oesophagus, something heavy swimming in her stomach. Someone wrestled a pair of dirt-caked underwear from the dog. There was a lewd joke about dogs and pussies. She felt the rubber fish’s stare.
Marcie shut herself in the bathroom. She turned on all the taps, filled her ears with the sound of rushing water, but still his voice leaked through, louder than everyone else’s. It slid down the hallway, crept under the door, settled into the grout between the tiles. She got in the bath, submerged her ears. Her mother was on the other side of the door, knocking, calling her name, rattling the handle. Marcie listened instead to the splash of water against her body and heard the underside of some far-away ocean. Her body softened into it. She sank to some other place. There was another rattle, but when the door clicked open, she swam away down the drainpipe.
Jenny Nimon is a Wellington-based writer and editor. Her most recent credit is as the editor of A Vase and a Vast Sea, a collection of New Zealand writing connected to Whitireia’s Creative Writing Programme, published by Escalator Press in October 2020.