Reflections

Originally published in issue no. 23 of Ink Lit Mag at the University of Iowa (p. 74, 2023).

He is the first reflection she sees of the world above. Longish dark hair and eyes like the shimmering abalone shells she collects from amongst the reeds. Upon first meeting them, unblinking, a stream of bubbles releases from Cassandra’s lips. Even through the ever-running ripples of her lake’s surface, she can tell he is handsome.

He leans forward, nearly close enough for the water to brush his lips, and she slips back. Hands splayed into the coldness, toes tucked into the waving grasses as she pulls herself against the lake bottom. For a moment, she is unmoving, the flit of a fishtail tickling against her elbow like seaweed. Then the water is still, too, like the sky above. A watercolor canvas behind the portrait of his face.

He turns away for a moment, his fingertips slipping into the lake’s edge. The slightest wave curls back along its surface, over and over, like a heartbeat, and she can barely swallow.

From behind him, the deep voice of an unseen man echoes hollowly through the water.

“Narcissus!” And, like a current, the boy jerks his hand back at the sound of his name, shaking droplets unknowingly over Cassandra’s head. They hit the water like pebbles; he stands.

Narcissus. Like the sound of the wind rushing through rain to hiss around the cattails lining the lake’s edge. Narcissus.

A moment later, all Cassandra can see is the top of his head and that soft, dry crown of dark hair, undifferentiable from the knobs of the surrounding trees to everyone but her.

But with thoughts of the trees come thoughts of the above world, his world, and so come thoughts of her mother.

Beware those who fear the water, her mother said. If they fear even what gives them life, do you think they will not fear you?

Her hand curls into the sand by her knees. It chafes into her scales there, the silvery blue coating the sides of her arms and legs like old mercury, and she winces.

A crab scuttles over her palm, legs sharp and shrill on Cassandra’s skin, and, for an instant, she is small again, a young water nymph barely as tall as three needlefish swimming end to end. She and her mother are leaning back against the smooth rocks on the lake bottom, the moss carpeting them into cushions.

She remembers her mother’s hand smoothing her hair, combing through silver strands caught with the shriveled leaves that fell into their lake as autumn cooled the air above. A leaf floats past Cassandra’s cheek, as frail as her mother’s fingertips, which Cassandra realizes are shaking. The lake is getting colder, but not so cold, yet.

What is it? Cassandra asks.

Every day, I wish you looked more like your father, she replies, a forced smile folding the scar tracing down her left cheek.

This is her mother’s first mention of him and, though she knows this is not a compliment, Cassandra cannot help but turn to her—past her mother’s hair as dark and shiny as the backs of the salamanders hiding under the rocks, past the rosy scales covering her entire body, and into her bright, geode-esque eyes.

What was he like? Where did you meet him? Cassandra knows the questions are common, but their answers are rare, and she wants to know. Wants to know how her mother, a woman who never dared leave the bottom of the lake, could fall in love with a man from the world above.

He was like a storm, her mother says after a moment. Coming to my attention quickly, as if the world opened around us. There was beautiful lightning—at these words, she squeezes Cassandra’s shoulder—and there was cold rain, and, in the end, I could only hope for it to be over.

But what happened? Cassandra scoots forward on her rock, flecks of moss speckling the water around her, and tries to meet her mother’s eyes again.

But Cassandra’s mother only picks another soggy brown leaf out from behind her daughter’s ear, forcing a laugh as she tickles it beneath her pale nose, and Cassandra can do nothing but sit and wait.

***

Cassandra sees the rippling reflection of Narcissus the next day, and the next, and the next after. One day, he brings a fishing pole, and when he casts the line, the hook snags the lip of a fish. He pulls it up excitedly, his eyes bright with fascination as he watches it squirm.

Cassandra’s heart sinks at the sight—but then he cups the creature in his hands, gently prying the metal free from its body before he tosses it back into the water with a smile. The fish darts by her, and she cannot help but smile, too. She and the fish she lives with are not different, really, and if he can love them—

Narcissus casts his line again and, this time, the hook hitches on the patch of bluish scales at her chest. Through the wall of water between them, she hears him laugh in triumph as he feels it catch, and, when he tugs at it, blood blossoms like a waterlily from where the hook is embedded into her skin.

She clenches her teeth against the pain, grasping the line to ease the pressure and try to maneuver it from her scales. It is then she realizes she is laughing, too. Blood is human, not godly. If she bleeds, there is nothing else she can be but what he is.

And he is beautiful, with lips like the first flushed flower petal she had ever seen fall into her lake. A soft pink, like the last lingering moments of a sunset on the horizon, or the water around her as her blood fades into the current and she lets the hook free. As it races back toward the surface, she sees on it one scale, like a large sequin, caught to its jagged end. When Narcissus pulls it up, he looks at it closely, his mouth parting in what Cassandra assumes is curiosity. Her scales, after all, are shinier than those found on any fish she has ever seen. When she was a girl, Cassandra’s mother told her they were like thousands of jeweled mirrors painted across her body.

Narcissus holds the scale closer, as if he is peering into it, and his eyes widen. Something sparkles in them, and it reminds Cassandra of the way her lake, arising from night’s darkness, refracts the first rays of sunlight every morning. Honest and hopeful and a little bit hungry.

Above his head, over the lush trees tangled in vines, the sky begins to cloud over. Lightning flashes with a boom of thunder at its back, but he doesn’t look up. He is still captivated, and she cannot help but swim closer, enthralled by his passion. Closer to the surface, closer to him. Grass curls between her toes as her feet kick off the rocks, and then she is mere inches below the surface.

So close she can reach up, if she wants, and touch his cheek or his lips or the smooth line of his jaw. So close that, if the sky were clear, he would be able to see her.

But he does see her, in a secret way. A moment of her, trapped in a shiny piece of her body like the way the voice of the entire ocean could be hidden in the curve of a shell.

He bends down toward the surface and she stills. She wonders, for a moment, if he can see her, her outline that is part human and part fish, with, according to her mother, the beautiful features of neither.

But he does not back away, does not trip in his hurry to escape her as the few people who have seen her have done, does not move except to lean closer to her. The tip of his nose is an inch from the surface—and from her own. Less. A distance the width of a clamshell.

The glimmer is still in his eyes, and he leans down as she leans up, his mouth dipping barely below the water. She meets it with her own, and his lips are soft and gentle, like waves lapping against a shore. Bubbles pop between them, against her nose that is almost against his, as his breath catches, and she draws closer. She wants to seep her hands into his hair, run her nails over the grooves framing his lips, trace his eyebrows with her nose as she drops kisses on his cheeks. She wants to pull him down, pull him into the water and into her, show him how, under the light of the sun, her entire body can sparkle like the scale still in his hand.

She wants to show him how, maybe, in the eyes of his love, she can be as beautiful as she always wished she could be.

Heavy droplets of rain spatter onto the lake surface, and Narcissus pulls away to look up. For the second she sees his expression, it is blank. Disappointment pulls through her heart like a current, but she swallows it away. Instead, she watches a drop of water trace down the tip of Narcissus’s nose. Another along his cheek, and a third over the upper lip that belonged to her a moment before. He quickly licks it away. Then, he squints into the heavens, glances behind him, and tucks her scale into this pocket, disappearing into the mist-drenched forest as the rain thickens.

Desperation, the first time she has ever felt it, chokes her lungs.

Before she can think, before she can remember anything her mother said the last time she asked about her father, she reaches toward the surface. Her hand breaks it first, fingertips curling in the rain, and then her head—matted silvery hair, a face to be feared. Everything that should have stayed hidden by the lake, now left exposed to the air she breathes for the first time.

As she takes another step onto the bank, Cassandra wipes her wet hair out of her face as she had seen a boy do once, when he had emerged from the lake after a swim. It was the first and last time she had seen him. She remembers her mother scolding her for watching him, taking her hand and pulling her to the lake bottom and holding Cassandra’s cheeks in her palms.

Nothing will become of it, her mother says. Human men, they aren’t ready for women who are…different. Women like us.

But you say Father was human, Cassandra says. And I’m half-human.

She remembers her mother’s eyes growing darker than the new moon, her lips pinching until they were as pale as the unscaled areas of Cassandra’s skin.

Her mother sighs. Not the half that matters. And, even if a man is there, even if you want them more than anything, it doesn’t mean they are ready for you. 

But I wish to fall in love. Cassandra’s hands clasp together in front of her, almost pleading.

That is what I wished for, too, when I was young. But a wish is a wild thing—like the water, it flows in directions you may not expect, Cassandra remembers her mother saying. I wished for a man who wanted to be with me—

My father?

Yes, it was him, and it was beautiful for a while. It still is, sometimes, because you are beautiful to me, Cassandra’s mother says. But a frown steals the wistfulness from her mother’s eyes, and Cassandra swallows back everything else she wants to know. Instead, she grabs a smooth pebble from the bottom of the lake, tossing it from hand to hand as her mother continues.

But then he tired of me, grew disgusted of me. My body grew old to him in the monstrosity that had first made it interesting, and so did you and I.

But—

No, Cassandra’s mother cuts her off. I do not want the same fate to befall you. When you are a woman, darling, or even half of one, it is better to be in love with yourself before anyone else. This is how men live already, and notice how the world treats them.

Cassandra remembers her mother pulling her into a hug, her skin slick with the film of algae and Cassandra’s silence as she thinks of the boy stepping out of the water, looking strong and harmless and—

This time, with the rain rolling down her back and between her eyes, Cassandra does not want to listen to her mother. She wants to forget her fears so she can live moments she wants to remember—a moment like her lips on Narcissus’s, certain in every way a wish isn’t.

She wants to fall in love.

Cassandra emerges fully from the lake, leaving the water to lap at the back of her heels before she steps into the grass. It’s damp and soft under her toes and, for a moment, she stops. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes, feels the heavy humidity in her lungs. Then she blinks them open, and the first thing she sees is the flash of Narcissus’s disappearing shadow, as vibrant to her against the trees as the lightning still flashing overhead.

She moves after him, tracing through the dangling vines that smack against her cheek as she pushes them aside. Leaves stick to her hair like algae, but she pushes herself to run faster, like Atalanta chasing after her golden apples.

Only a moment later Cassandra loses sight of him, his strong back blending into the foggy forest, and she collapses against a tree. Her long fingernails dig into mossy bark as she gasps for breath, the air harsher on her lungs with each dragging draw of life. This air, no matter how thick and cold, is not water, and she is not meant to breathe it.

Hands and lips shaking, Cassandra lifts her head, hoping to see something. A bubbling stream she can slip into, a pond’s surface she can dip her head under—

Or, what crowns the center of the clearing opening before her—a structure, stone and waist-high and cylindrical. A wishing well. And where there is a well, there is water.

Cassandra glances to her left and to her right, checking the area is empty before she leaves the tree line to cut across the open grass. Rain smacks against her bare back and shoulders as she runs, pooling briefly near her collarbones. She is only a couple strides away from the well when she hears a branch snap in front of her, and she stills.

The figure across the clearing, standing beside a drooping willow tree, is only a silhouette in the mist, but it is him. She knows, because all she has done for days is study him from below.

For a moment, she does not move. Her eyes do not leave the sopping grass at her feet and her hands do not rise to cover the rough scales she can feel marring her face. She can only wonder if he sees her—

Even at this distance, she can hear his gasp, like a wave rushing out from the gaps between rocks at a shoreline.

He has seen her now, she is certain. There is a brief second when she wants him to keep seeing her—wants him to drink in her sharp scales and scraggly hair like she has drank in every part of him.

He grew disgusted of me. My body grew old to him in its monstrosity.

A chill rakes down her spine and lightning snaps above, and she jolts forward, running to the well faster than she had ran after him. Her hands slip on its stone rim, moss catching under her nails, but she pulls herself up and over it, flopping as ungracefully as a fish into the water. Bubbles rush through her parted lips as she sinks down, landing amongst the dull shine of old coins and the rusty blade discarded at the well’s bottom.

She has barely settled there when she sees Narcissus’s face peering down from above—it is shadowed by the thatched roof, but she can tell his dark hair is plastered against his cheeks as he rests his muscled forearms on the edge of the well and looks into the water.

Did he see her before? And does he see her now?

And, if he does, will he say anything?

Will he tell her he wants to kiss her again? Will he tell her he thinks she is beautiful for him, even with every way she resembles a monster? Or will he flee in horror to a temple, pray to the gods to he never see anyone like her ever again?

But only one of his hands disappears from view, not his entire body, and, when it returns to dangle over the well, she forgets everything else. Narcissus holds her scale, the scale he kept, gleaming like a coin between his strong fingers.

As she watches, her breaths coming harsher, he turns the scale in his hand, looking at it as closely has he had after he pulled it from his fishhook. Then, he tucks it against his chest, over his heart. Under the water, Cassandra drifts upward, her hand pressed over the missing scale on her own skin.

“I wish,” Narcissus says, “to fall in love.”

Then, he tosses the scale into the water, watching the splash radiate his reflection to the edges of the well.

It drifts down to Cassandra like a feather through air before landing in her palm and, as it lands, its weight gives her certainty. He wishes for her.

She is an arm’s length from the surface. The water around her is clear, lit by the sporadic flashes of lightning overhead.

And she thinks, as he leans down, that he about to have his wish granted. Because he will see her in the water, truly see her, and he will love her for everything she is. He will love her mind and her body. He will love her despite her fears and her flaws and her fearsomeness. Maybe, though her mother will never believe it, he will love her because of them.

But Narcissus’s eyes are closed. His eyes are closed even as his lips meet the water, even as his mouth moves against the ripples he creates.

I wish to fall in love.

The water in Cassandra’s lungs grows as hot and dry as summer air. He has never wanted her. He has never even seen her.

He only waited at her lake to watch himself.

And now he has made his wish, and its water has flowed into the shape of him. Not her.

Cassandra’s foot kicks against the bottom of the well, and something pricks against her toe, drawing out a line of blood between her scales. The blade—old and rusty and jagged. Left in the water, unnoticed, like her.

She takes its hilt into her hand, unthinking.

She is at the surface of the well in a second. Her free hand finds Narcissus’s cheek, then his neck, pulling his lips against hers with the force of a riptide.

Now, for certain, he sees her.

I wish to fall in love.

There is a beautiful, cutting moment when he returns her kisses. Deep and insistent and hungry, a wave of honesty in the shallow water of his lies.

I wish to fall in—

 Then, she feels his neck tense as he chokes for air. His skin is hot and the water is cold, and his eyes widen with terror as she pulls him in closer.

I wish to fall—

Cassandra drives her blade into his chest, and Narcissus drops down into the water beside her as easily as rain falls from the sky. The splash from him rises away the blood coating her hand—bright red as toxic as coral and heartbreak, disappearing into nothing like Narcissus’s reflection.

She tugs the blade from his sinking corpse, holding it in her teeth. Against her tongue, his blood is tangy and hot as fire. Before his body is even submerged, she digs her hands into the well’s cold stone, hauling herself over its rim and onto the grass.

The rain has stopped.

She does not look back as she tosses the dagger behind her and into the well with a hollow splash. She does not listen to his gagging gasps as his mouth goes under, blood choking him as quickly as the water he is in love with. Now, it will finally show how it loves him back when it doesn’t share his face.

At the edge of the clearing, her feet splash into water, and she stops in the sticky imprint of two large feet in the mud. A wide puddle, as shiny and blue as one of Cassandra’s scales, edges from the tips of her toes to fan out under the trees. Their ragged bark and lush leaves wobble like tears until the ripples from her touch fade—

For the first time, she sees it. A girl’s face, though not fully, haloed in blond hair as light as a pearl. Her skin is as ashen as moonlight on grass, tinged with a sickly translucence that darkens the speckles of blood on her cheeks and the hollows of her eyes. Eyes sharp as her teeth and slitted, eyes unable to look anywhere but at her reflection.

I wish to fall in love.