At the start of their affair, Doctor Fisc called her his flower. The Doctor would see Isabelle as his tulip — a beautiful thing that he could pick the petals off of and plant back on the ground. She loves me. She loves me. She loves me. Isabelle knew how he saw her. She accepted it. Before she became the second Mrs. Fisc she would meet the Doctor at their spot once every week. It was at the glade in the forest near her home on the outskirts of the city. There was a small pond there in which nothing lived. He thought it was romantic. She wondered how long it would be before he snipped off her stems, folded her between the pages of a dusty old book and placed her on his shelf. 

In the beginning it was like he was holding his breath around her. As though one stray exhale would scatter her to the wind like a dandelion. The leaves would paint dark patterns on her skin as he led her by the hand through to their own intimate world. He held branches back for her to slink under. He brushed bugs out from her hair, his fingers lingering on her neck. He lifted her over bubbling streams, the white foam climbing to reach for her toes. He stripped her of her clothes and fucked her on the grass right in the middle of the glade. He loves me. He loves me. He loves me.

“Was that good for you?” the Doctor asks, as he always does.

“Amazing.” Isabelle replies, as she always does. 

He edges his way out of the bed, pinching the sheet up before letting it tumble back down on her. He walks into the bathroom, his piss halters then cascades against the back of the pan. It is all Isabelle can hear. She listens to him open the shower door and clean himself – the stuttering splashes of water, the creaking shower door as he leaves, the droplets that spatter across the tiled bathroom floor. Her skin itches, she rolls and scratches in the hot sheets. She is sticky. The lukewarm sun that trickles in through the window irritates her eyes. Covering them with her arm, Isabelle brushes the tender, purpling flesh at her neck.

“Happy Anniversary,” she shouts through to the bathroom. 

“Happy Anniversary,” he calls back. 

That night Isabelle meets the Doctor at the edge of the woods, now an anniversary tradition. The sweet scent of rain is in the air. Its ghost hovers over everything, giving the trees a grey, bleak look. Their shadows reach out into the distance, great black fingers scratching into the earth. The canopy breathes in the wind and bleeds droplets down onto the leaves below. Footsteps squelch behind her.

“You look like shit, honey.”

“Thanks,” she says.

He closes in on her. He smells like sweat and chemicals. It cuts through the sweetness in the air. She kisses him, then turns and slips through the slick grass with him close behind her.

After walking for only a few minutes, Isabelle begins to feel that hot, sticky sensation again. She wonders how it can be so humid. She tugs at her collar and scratches at her arms. Her throat is parched. She takes off her jacket.

“Belle, it’s freezing.”

“Are you not warm?”

“No.”

“Strange. I felt like this at home too.”

“I hope you’re not getting sick. We have that dinner with the Chief on Friday.”

Isabelle nods and hurries her steps, searching for a stream.

A fog hovers around the stream before she reaches it. As she steps through the mist, she begins to feel something familiar in it, a certain kind of nostalgia, or kinship. It raises bumps and hair on her skin. It is both electric and ice cold. She feels each molecule upon her; each droplet rests on her like sunlight. It is suspended above her and around her. She wants to reach out and grasp each brimming particle and hold them within her until she overflows. It croons a high-pitched siren call. 

“Do you hear it?”

“Hear what, Belle?”

“The song.”

“There’s no music playing, Belle.”

She cocks her head to the side and listens. 

“Maybe we should just head home. You’re acting weird.”

“No, let’s keep going.”

The music stops when they break the cover of the fog and the hot sensation returns. She wants to peel off her skin and leave it hanging from a branch. The Doctor is getting annoyed. He begins to drag her onward through the trees, looking back to frown and growl at her when she trips. She thinks about how she will have to make it up to him. She scratches at her arm and feels the blood begin to run free down her hand.

When they arrive, the Doctor walks through the glade, heading straight for the middle of the grass, feeling the shadow of Isabelle’s hand in his for a few steps before turning to look for her. She is no longer there. Isabelle’s body progresses across the glade at a right angle from him. It cuts through straight for the pond and stops. Dead. It reaches the edge and crumbles. The head bends towards the surface. The spine curves, the slender frame a question mark, racked with shuddering breaths. She submerges with a sigh.

Isabelle’s new life began with coming home. First, that sensation of familiarity echoed again, a crooning deep within her. She remembers this. She remembers arching over the water, each disc of her spine protruding through her skin, ready to break the surface. She remembers seeing no reflection. She remembers her first breath.

She shattered the water like a pane of glass. Some unknown magnetism drove her deep, her skin burning, each flashing beacon of her nervous system alight. She contorted in the murk, her bones and muscles groaning, twisting and breaking and shrinking. With every drowning breath the darkness thickened at the edges of her vision. She shrieked through her burning throat. Then the calm came. Her blood went cold. She could feel it, coursing in icy currents. Then that first breath. It was sharp, it stung like a fresh wound, but it was sweet. It cut through her, through her neck — where her neck used to be. Freezing gulps, tentative, raw at first, then effortless. She exalted with a pirouette.

She is more aware of her weight, her impression on her surroundings, than she can ever recall being. She enjoys the vigor of her tightly packed little body. She feels like a knot in a rope, secure but swaying. Her powerful tail fin, hard spines bridged by a slick membrane, helps propel her along. The perfect synchronization of all her fins, with the natural oscillation of her body, allows her to zip around the pond at her leisure. Such little effort, merely a gentle press on the water for such exhilaration. It makes her giddy. She leaves satin billows in the emptiness behind her. 

It is serene, not silent. There is a deep thrumming — a slow, prolonged bass. It is the symphony of the water. Not invasive; it is a sonorous overture, peppered with the subtle tinkling of expanding ripples. She conducts waves with her fins and releases harmonies from her mouth by pressing her thin lips together and making an O. She swoops and sails. She dives down to the bottom and disturbs the dirt, skimming between twisters and gloomy asteroids. She rises again, hearing something muffled over the symphony, something guttural. 

“Isabelle?”

She flinches away from its harshness, from its alien sound. 

“Isabelle?”

It takes her a moment to find a glimmer of understanding in the noise. It is a voice, her husband’s. It is a name. Her name.

“Isabelle?”

The noise is grating, louder this time. She wants to dive away from it, to hide in the dirt at the bottom, to shut away the hazy memories that leak into her brain. A shadow eclipses her. A warped thing looms overhead. It pulsates, rippling. A face, her husband’s face, distorted by the water. She doesn’t remember his strong brows or the way she would rub her cheek against the dark stubble on his face like an old towel. She does not remember this face. It is of some strange ghoul, the skin flaccid and white, twisted in the disturbed surface. 

“Belle?”

She dives just as something blanched submerges. A hand. She remembers this. She darts away from it, already tasting its filth, its contamination. She can feel its taint already in her world, in her mouth and gills, it is all salt and dirt. Trawling the pond blind, the hand eventually retreats. 

“Isabelle?” The last one is heard in the distance. 

She experiences an epoch of peace, unfettered from time, the count of minutes and days lost. She hears circling noises from above but they don’t disturb her, except for the occasional spear of straight light that accompanies them. These spears plunge, wander, then retract. That world is forgotten. Warm light has hounded the cold dark several times now, revealing the beauty of her new world. An ethereal ballet, the grace and poise of shining, shifting reflections. Brushstroke kaleidoscopes. Polychromatic prisms. The reflections dance along her scales. Sometimes she swims as close to the surface as she dares, just to see her dull green, the color of the algae that has begun to grow, turn to emerald and jade. 

It is on one of these ventures that she sees it. A spectral figure, hovering at the edge of her world. It moves closer. She stays still. The figure hangs overhead. She feels something, some spacious sensation like touching at the ghost of a missing tooth. The thing makes a suppressed noise. Then again, clearer.

“Honey?”

The noise means nothing to her. It is dead sound. Remote. 

“Honey? Is that you?”

Again, nothing. She feels like she should understand, like she should remember something. 

“Isabelle?”

That sound. It is familiar. She strains to remember. She is rewarded with flashes, snippets of noise and fear from her earliest memories. Beyond that, nothing. She knows she has encountered this thing before.

Just as she comes to this conclusion, however, the thing swoops. It breaks the surface in a tempest of white clawing, sending her world into chaos. Storms take her and drag her spinning to the depths. She struggles to catch a breath. The taste is overpowering, repulsive. It is pollution. She is buffeted and bruised. The cadaverous thing all pale flailing meat. It flounders and splashes and grabs at her. She barely manages to slip away, feeling it scrape away some of her green scales each time it gets a grip. Her little fins working furiously, she tries to breathe, to hide. She begins to tire. Bubbles escape from her mouth. She looks up into the thing’s ghoulish face and stops. Its eyes meet hers.

“Isabelle.”

The thing stops moving for a moment, then it begins shuddering. It heaves. It wails. Juicy pearls of water splash near her. They taste foul. She waits. She breathes. 

They stay like this for some time, before the thing gives a final, relinquishing sigh. He says something she can’t understand. 

“…not a flower.”

“…not a flower.”

Their worlds were between light and dark when it left, and are between light and dark when it returns every day. When the sky above turns orange, the thing sits at the side of the water and watches her swim, watches her revel in her world. Sometimes it speaks unheard things; sometimes it says nothing, nothing at all.