Originally published in Dangerous Waters.
The night she died I lay awake for hours. At some point, finally half-asleep, I heard the tap running in the bathroom. Thought, oh that’s just Coral brushing her teeth. I barely had time to remember she was gone before she slid into bed with me. Cold despite the hot night. Cold and smelling of earth. Grave-dirt all over the sheets. She pressed the soles of her feet on my legs, like she always did to warm herself up.
She’d walked herself out of the earth and home.
That was thirteen months ago.
•••
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
A man walks into his bar.
And his best mate says, I’ve just seen your wife’s ghost.
•••
“Coral,” I remind Tai, helpfully. “That was her name.”
Tai flinches. “Coral.”
He twists his coaster until it rips. It’s nearly autumn, but it hasn’t rained for months. Sydney gets hotter every year. I pluck at my shirt and wipe sweat from my lip.
“You know the room with the yellow curtains? She was up there, when I pulled into the drive on Sunday.” Tai still brings me a home-cooked meal every Sunday. Sad Dave Day. He knows I don’t really look after myself, not since Coral died. “I saw her.”
I say nothing. Any response would either be a lie or sound like one.
The Aussie Rules match blares from the huge television over the bar. I’m grateful for the tiny screaming fans, the harsh lights, and the sticky surfaces; they’re all a distraction from this talk of grief and ghosts.
“I shouldn’t have said anything.” Tai takes a pull of his drink. “It’s not even been a year, has it?”
Thirteen months. And three days.
Instead, I say, “My wife’s not a ghost.”
“I know, of course. Sorry, mate. I know. I should’ve…I shouldn’t…”
“No drama, those curtains just move in the wind I reckon.” I drown a twinge of guilt with beer. “I thought I saw her around the place once or twice myself.”
He manages a smile.
•••
At first, she seemed just like herself. But change accumulates. Now she drifts around the house, unreachable. She flows around me like water.
In the first weeks after her death, her skin glimmered. Now it cracks and bleeds at every joint.
The word they used at the funeral was angel.
That’s the wrong word.
•••
Things I don’t tell Tai: That for two months after she died, Coral still made coffee in the mornings. She never drank it, but she liked the steam on her face, the warmth between her hands. Her nephew painted the mug for her at his primary school—a blob of a yellow sun, a wobble of blue sea, a fat fish basking in painted sunlight.
After the third month, she poured boiling water into that sunshine mug and smashed it through the window.
Sometimes I wake drenched in cold sweat, heart thudding, from dreams of starlight. Because after a star implodes, its light still reaches earth. So how can you tell if you’re wishing on something that’s already dead and gone?
How can you tell when gone begins?
•••
She was a marine biologist. She hated her real name, Elizabeth; she’d roll her eyes and tell people, “Only my mum calls me that.” But even her mum called her Coral.
She had bad circulation. She got her nose pierced the week before our wedding. She was kind, and funny, and swore all the time. Nobody could make her do anything she didn’t want to do.
•••
Have you heard the one about the person who came back to life, and everything was fine? Me neither. Not even in stories. There’s always a price no one can pay, a condition nobody can fulfill. You look back and lose them forever. Or they return changed.
•••
Coral’s eyes fade. Her lips and skin turn bluish. Her adult teeth fall out. A third set grows in. Thinner. Sharper.
It still hasn’t rained. No breeze off the sea. The drought stretches on and on.
Her eyes are glassy and dark. All pupil. Not dilated; more spilled like an oil slick, swallowing the iris and the white. The grass outside is dead.
I think of bones fused to wrecks, calcifying. In the news, the reef is wrecked, as bleached as bones.
•••
Her favorite film was Moana even though she was in her thirties when it came out. She said she wanted to come back as a stingray like the grandmother in it, and I said that was cultural appropriation because her family roots were Danish or Scottish or something, and she laughed and splashed me with water from the kitchen tap.
She loved leopard seals and jellyfish and basking sharks. Ghost shrimps and narwhals. The last thing that made her cry was the impending extinction of the vaquita. Nobody mentioned that in her eulogy. They only talked about angels. They all said Coral was in a better place.
•••
Her phalanges and limbs fuse and distort. When she cannot drift around the house she crawls. Like the sharks she loved, she is never still.
The sun beats down. The drought stretches, racking the land.
Sometimes there’s a sound outside—the Chen kids laughing next door or a mynah bird. Then her eyes flare. Hungry.
Other times, she hums, strange and high. It emanates from the house. The windows tremble. Nobody else hears it. In my dreams, it takes the shape of song. A siren or a lute. But I wake and it’s just that tuneless humming again.
What have I done? That’s the refrain that beats in my head. What have I done, what have I done?
Her nails harden and curve into hooks.
I thought it was a miracle. My grief, my love for Coral, stronger than death.
That man in the Greek myth. Orpheus. The only way he could keep the woman he loved was by not seeing her.
That isn’t love.
But I’m a slow learner.
I close all the curtains. The heat outside melts the tarmac. It kills the flowers and the fruit bats.
•••
If she’s still there at all, she’s deep inside herself. Down in the inky depths, where it’s cold and heavy and the sky is a small shimmering eye far overhead.
Maybe it’s peaceful, resting there. But coral needs light, doesn’t it?
I catch her staring at electric lamps, staring up at the ceiling like she’s forgotten what a house is.
•••
Coral drags herself into the back garden and tears a magpie apart. Blood and feathers stick to her mouth and chin. She doesn’t wipe them away. Her oil-slick eyes search for more.
I steer her towards the door until she crawls back in.
I call in sick to work. They’re very understanding. They think I’m finally having the nervous breakdown I should have had thirteen months ago.
•••
When the drought breaks, she stops crawling and listens. The rain roars like the sea. Then she faces me.
Normally I cannot bear to meet her gaze. This time she makes me. She moves herself into my line of sight, even when I try to walk around her. She places her clawed, webbed hands on either side of my face and holds me still.
I gather my courage and look back.
The planes of her face have shifted, her hair bleached and trailing, her skin parched and shrunk. When she’s got my attention, she tilts her head, listening to the rain. Her face animates. She’s Coral again. Her face and body and voice, her eyes and skin, even her skeleton has transformed. But she’s Coral.
For the first time since the funeral, I remember Coral as she was. Knee-deep in the sea after a run. Surfing. Her glee at the dolphins near Byron Bay. Teaching her nephew how to swim. Our first sight of the sea after the long drive home from her parents’ farm. She’d hang out the car window, following the coastline with her whole body.
Here I was thinking I was cursed, that I’d swapped a wife for a monster.
Here I was, convinced that it was the strength of my longing that had brought Coral back.
Here I was, thinking this story was about me.
•••
She releases me and flings herself at the door. She’s so fast, I flinch. But she blurs right past. Her body slams and the door shudders. Her claws bite into the ply and she hauls at it with all her weight and strength. Strange muscles move under her skin. I’ve prepared for this. The door chain’s on and the key is in my pocket.
I’m terrified. Of her, and of losing her. But the shock wakes my grief-numbed brain. I stride past her. I fumble with the keys and the chains, and fling the door wide.
Sometimes you have to let go, even when you have the tiger by the tail.
The rain pours down outside. Coral makes a high noise and the sound enters my bones. We thrum along with the glass as the floorboards drum.
The concrete steps are high so I carry her over the threshold. She shifts within her own carapace, a woman; a blaze of light; an electric storm; a woman. She flickers, agitated, changing every few seconds.
Thirteen months and six days and I finally get it.
“It’s ok, Cor. I see you now,” I tell her.
We buried her wrong. This house was only her temporary shell, a shelter while she shucked off death and grew a new life, waited out the drought.
And now the rains have come.
•••
I drag her over the threshold and into the rain. She flinches, then lifts her face to the raindrops. The hair on the back of my neck stands up. Water streams down her arms. She opens her mouth wide. A tension in the air lets go, like electricity earthing itself, like a sigh. She laughs, a silent surge of energy that vibrates through my ribs.
Soon she’s cool. Slippery. Her skin takes on a fish-belly gleam. She smells of salt and cloudburst. Petrichor. A hint of the coffin. Thunder rumbles again and again.
“Dave!” Tai is in my driveway, staring with his mouth wide open, a Tupperware in his slack hands. I forgot: it’s Sunday. Sad Dave Day.
The rain is torrential, the driveway already slick with water. The storm-drains pool and choke.
Coral goes light in my arms, and I gather her into my chest so that she doesn’t dissipate. Then she’s heavy as limestone. She’s playing havoc with our gravity, warping this world around her.
I shout, trying to make every word clear. “We need to get her to a better place, Tai!”
“Dave…is that…is that Coral?”
“Help me get her in the ute.”
Between us we haul her up. Her hair streams around her. Rain pools on the tray of the ute and runs down her arms. She lifts her stellate hands to the sky. Her fingers are webbed with skin and light.
Tai keeps craning his neck around to stare.
“Eyes on the road!”
“Is that—is that a tail?”
Coral’s silent laughter throbs again. Waves of pressure pulse through us. Tai drives with one hand on the wheel, one hand against his ear.
•••
Later I will sob myself hoarse and Tai will let me. He’ll make me a cup of tea, and his boyfriend Jamie will drape a towel around my shoulders. I’ll drip on their carpet and stain their new couch with salt water. They’ll order takeaways and stay up with me until I fall asleep so that I don’t have to be alone on my first night without Coral, thirteen months and six days after her death.
•••
But now Tai parks and we haul Coral onto the beach. I kick off my shoes and stagger into the waves, till I can hardly keep my face above the surface. It should be impossible to swim with her cradled in my arms, but she buoys me, even as I hold her, and propels us. Her claws perforate my t-shirt. Her fishtail surges through the water, trailing glistening bubbles. Her new, thick skin glimmers. Skeins of light warp around new muscles and sketch the outlines of scales, protruding spines.
Flesh and bone, honed by spirit.
Coral talks to me in memories. Hers. Ours. Stars mirrored in calm water. The wake of the ferry in summer. The sunset at that beach near Perth, the way the waves leaped gold.
The images wash over me. Luna Park’s reflections on the harbor. Those weird deep-sea things that Coral did her Masters on. Lunate jellyfish. St Elmo’s fire. Whale song. An octopus shifting colors, all three hearts thrumming. Sea anemones like jewels.
Things I don’t understand. Things that glow.
I’m scared. Her lovely, carnivore eyes hold mine.
I can’t even hear Tai’s shouts. The beach is a grey smudge behind the rain. Out here, Coral floats, her barely human face expressionless. Her oil-slick eyes gleam. Predatory. Luminous.
“Ashes would have been easier,” I try to say, but swallow seawater and cough and splutter instead.
I think of the old stories. Two songs. Siren and lute. One lures you out and wrecks you under the bright water. The other hooks you from the dark river and hauls you back to life.
I tread water and wait for her to swim away from me, or drag me down until seawater fills my lungs.
She laughs again as if she knows what I’m thinking. Her laugh rumbles and sparks through my chest. She brushes one cool hand over my forehead. I sense her joy.
She hums. I hum back. Not to force her back to land. Not to drown me in the sea. Another kind of song. She dissolves into sea foam. She drifts through my fingers.
I look around for her frantically, squinting through the sting of salt, blinking tears and brine away.
She is only water, but her lines are sketched in light. She’s just the moon’s reflection (though there is no moon) or the headlights of a car on the bridge (there are no cars) or the rain shifting over the sea. But.
She flashes around me, breaks the surface. Light streams from her flukes. Phosphorescence sparks. Then she flicks her tail and dives, down to her universe below the starless water.
