The Tide King by Jen Michalski

Author:Jen Michalski [Michalski, Jen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2013-05-06T18:30:00+00:00

1970

He awoke in the womb, water pushing into his lungs and eyes, dark and soundless. But he was a man and the womb a lake, its enormity both alienating and suffocating. He flapped his arms to drive himself up to the disk of pale light that rested on its ceiling, where the black gradually dissipated into layers of hazel and green. But he could not move, his foot prisoner to something in the cloudy blackness below. He groped around his ankle and felt a rock, its slimy ridges resisting his grip. There was no need to panic, no matter how hard his lungs screamed, the crescendo of synapses in his primitive brain that warned him of danger, of possible death. No, he had been awoken once, awoken again. Now he was alive again, and he’d chew his fucking foot off if he had to.

He hugged the sharp boulder and tried to loosen his foot, but he could not straighten it flat enough to wriggle it free from this narrow crevice. He wondered whether he even had a foot when he descended, a gelatinous mound of burned flesh, whether it had grown back and now was trapped in the place that had welcomed, anchored him, until he was ready to be born again. He strained, tried to push the rock from its location. His lungs burned, screaming for air, his eyes full of fireworks. He wondered if he’d pass out and wake up again, unable to dislodge himself, stuck in a Sisyphean nightmare.

He held onto the rock and twisted his leg as far to the right as he could, until he could feel the muscles and tendons straining, a pop, and then a warming, increasing pain as the space in his broken ankle filled with blood and produced a clot and fibroblasts to mend the space. He could feel the heat coming off his body, the accelerated steam engine of his healing. He yanked his foot, a broken hinge, out of the space before it had time to mend and floated up to the surface.

The sun burned his eyes, and he squinted as he paddled toward the shore. The lip of land greeted him with sharp teeth, the rocks tearing into his soft, milky blue skin, as he washed up against them, and blood seeped out of his hands and arms like a surprise. The pain came first, a bloated ache through his body, as he gasped for air, air, to fill every spider branch of his lungs, every tendon and muscle, for air to inflate his heart and arteries, to move the dark sludge of his blood. The smell came next, a sweet, bloody sour eggy steak. His smell. He closed his mouth as a spasm of air and gastric juices made its way from his stomach to his throat and pressed his face into the pebbled shoreline.

A rifle clicked overhead. He strained upward to the blur of body before him, the limp pale blonde hair, an ear. A woman. As his eyes adjusted to the light, the blur of her became older.

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