River Split Rock Slick

WRITTEN BY ELLIE KADDATZ (BRISBANIA - LIT SALON) PHOTOGRAPHY BY SAM HOPE

I crossed Coro Drive barefoot and dizzy, clutching at the traffic lights until the signal blinked green. My lips were hot despite the bite of the evening air. I couldn’t stop touching them. I wanted to rip them from my face.

The river was a blur of indigo and brown. I stumbled along the bikeway until I got to the section of bank where the fence ended and I could crawl down to the waterline. I stared at the water, waiting for the tearing pain in my chest to lessen. I’d fucked up a lifetime of secrets and silence in the space of thirty seconds, and I wanted to take the whole night and eat it, swallow it all at once and let it congeal in the black of my guts and never touch it again.

The rocks beneath me bled warmth into my palms the same way Rosie’s hands had. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember in the morning. Hope flashed through me keenly, but I could already feel the alcohol finishing its pilgrimage through my bloodstream. I wouldn’t get the luxury of forgetting.

A CityCat split open the river in front of me. I thought back to Tynealle turning up the music as our guests grew rowdier and Brisbane slipped into its evening wear. If I’d paid attention, I would have been able to hear the city hunkering down, the grumble of Milton Road traffic, the clink of my neighbours’ cutlery on their dinner plates. The fairy lights Rosie had hung up became strings of floating stars, and the yeasty smell of the XXXX Brewery made the air thick and warm and mellow.

Our house parties were all the same. Alcohol in our bellies, our blood warm and loose. We talked a big talk, but put us together in someone’s yard and ply us with beer and Chicken Twisties and suddenly we’d be content with our broad, nasal accents and inability to make a difference. The only person who would transcend that was Rosie.

It could have been her birthday instead of mine. It could have been her wedding, the way she sparkled. She stood a head taller than everyone at the party, so it made sense that my eyes always found her, and somehow her laugh always snaked its way through the ever-drunker crowd into any conversation I had.

The alcohol had gotten to me. I dropped a wine glass and stood laughing among the shards. Rosie and I laid down on the verandah and leeched warmth from the sun-soaked boards beneath our backs. Dusk slipped away until we sat in a shallow dark that reminded me of biking desperately down dirt roads to my childhood house to get there before night-time, of opening my eyes underwater in murky freshwater creeks, of curlews wailing just out of sight.

Unthinking, I grabbed Rosie’s hand and raised it to my beer-sticky lips. We giggled about Tynealle’s music and gossiped about guests. “I just miss the stars from up home,” she sighed. I nodded. “We could go camping?” “Imagine sharing a tent with Tynealle,” she laughed. I said I couldn’t.

“What about us?” she said. “We could share.”

She turned to me. I was drunk — we both were — and trying to focus on her face was dizzying. Still talking, she climbed on top of me.

“I would really want to share,” she whispered, her mouth just below my ear. I was shivering, and her legs were draping and slipping between mine and she was breathy and laughing in my ear and my beer bottle was on the floor and my hand was on her back and her mouth was on mine and she was arching into me, Rosie was arching into me, and a kiss had never been like this — A click in my head. A lock in my chest. I pushed Rosie off me and bolted. And now I was here, freezing and alone, watching ferries and ripples and — a figure on the rocks? Shit.

I moved closer to the dark form, beer-clumsy, breathing hard. Was that a person? Oh God, had someone jumped off the Go-Between? It wasn’t until I was almost next to it that I saw it wasn’t a person. Relief flushed sweetly through me, followed by a vicious drop in my stomach. It wasn’t a person, but it was moving. It wasn’t a person, but it had — an arm? fingers? scales? There was river muck in my gut. It — the fish, the thing — was slippery, uneven, difficult to comprehend. Water slapped at the rocks, percussive. The rhythmic slap of the runners on the bikeway laid out a steady beat behind me. The world was tilted.

The figure groaned. My shorts ripped as I scrambled backwards along the rocks.

I would look anywhere but at that thing. Look, look down at the shit-brown water. Look at the Grammar students viciously dragging their kayaks through the river. Look at the ripples stretching further and further behind that CityCat. Look anywhere but beside you.

It was no use. My neck creaked as I turned to look at the pulsating pile of flesh. Never mind fight or flight — I was always all freeze, and I was already aching from holding myself still. The air around the creature throbbed, as if the space it took up was pulsing and churning. It was unbearable. I couldn’t tell if I was just drunk, or genuinely seeing something that shouldn’t, couldn’t, didn’t exist.

It — the fish, the thing, the monster — stretched a mottled limb out across the rocks towards me. Its skin glinted dully in the redblueorange lights of the city. The creature curled its — fingers? — up at me in a gesture I had seen whenever Tynealle got too pissed to stand. That universal gesture for ‘grab, hold, help’. The thing was half-in, half-out of an abandoned net, the nylon twisted under rocks and held down by something unseen, below the surface. I watched the rocks scrape scales from flesh and claws scrabble at air. My blood was molten.

I grabbed the hand and pulled.

There was nothing human in that cold grasp. In that moment, I could have killed someone and been impassive to their gurgles and moans. This was the same feeling that dragged me relentlessly through dating men; the same feeling I’d gotten when my aunt declared, “I don’t care if they date, but they don’t get the same rights as me and my husband.” It was the same feeling I cradled every single day leading up to the same-sex marriage survey. My eyelids were squeezing against my skull. The joints in my hands were popping.

Slick body tore from net, up and out and over, and I was covered in moisture and moss and slime. I fell to the rocks, hard, feeling the skin on my wrists and knees bloom open. Blood mixed with river. I could feel the whole city in my veins.

We were both heaving. Someone slap-slap-slapped down the bikeway. Didn’t they see? Didn’t they see this mass of skin and spikes and scales that had dredged itself up and out of somewhere that didn’t even exist?