The Offbeat
tail around her neck and let herself sink deeper than she’d ever had before. At the bottom, where darkness limited sight, she made a bargain, a terrible bargain. She promised the qernao all ten of her siblings in exchange for the man. And so it came to be that this nalou swam to each of the rivers her siblings guarded, and she bubbled lies, and she bubbled truths, and she convinced them one by one to follow her to the qernao’s den, where the qernao expelled a sticky substance. The algae-breathing qernao swallowed her siblings in its mouthpiece. When the last sibling had been caught, and the last sibling had been swallowed, the qernao flared fire, and the den became very bright. The nalou could see that the qernao looked very much like a whiskered fish, only much larger and with sharper teeth. The nalou felt guilty. This was not how the world should be. The nalou felt her body stiffen. She fell into a very deep sleep. When she woke, she was very dry. She looked around her and found that she was not in the river, not even in the water, but on land. She reached her hand to the ground, rubbed the dirt with her fingers, and tried to lift herself up on her tail. A man from up on the hill shouted and came to help her, but when he saw that she was unclothed, he shrieked a little and ran to get an old woman who didn’t have straight teeth. The woman helped her stand. The woman had long, long gray hair, and she had long, long gray teeth. “You are beautiful,” the old woman said. “Where did you come from?” “The water.” The old woman looked at the water, then back at the nalou and her tail. “Very well,” said the old woman, “We all have our secrets.” The old woman took the nalou to a clay structure that was awfully rectangular and gave the nalou some clothes to wear. The nalou wore them wrong. The skirt inside out. The shirt backwards. Regardless, she remained the most beautiful creature anyone in the camp had ever seen. In the light on the moon ring, it seemed as though her skin shone silver. Everyone stayed up late into the night, and when one man asked to see nalou unclothed, for she had such a beautiful bottom, she lowered her skirt right there and then. Everyone gasped, and everyone laughed, until the old woman swooped over and dragged the nalou to bed. 162 | Goldin