Once, a long time ago, or perhaps only yesterday, a mother lived with her twin daughters, in a cardboard box on the shore of a vast ocean.
The twins were as good as they were beautiful, and they were quite beautiful. One of them resembled her mother. She was slender as an angelfish, and equally elusive; turning in the distance she disappeared for a moment and then reappeared. Her hair was the color of the sand that sparkled around her on the beach, but with none of the coarseness of sand; it lifted lightly in the ocean breeze and then drifted back to settle on her slender shoulders. Green were her eyes and as deep as the sea and her lips, pink and slightly parted, resembled a rare conch. Like the conch, she carried the ocean within herself, and she swayed with its rhythm when she walked.
The other twin was as different from her sister as a twin could be, but she was just as good and just as beautiful. She resembled her father, a dark and adventurous sailor who had, long ago, sailed away. Her hair hung in a thick cluster of black curls, hung like a full net of shining black fish hauled from the sea, and her eyes were blue-black as well. Tender as salmon was her flesh and, here and there, just as pink. She loved to play in the waves like the gentle dolphins.
The sisters spent all their days on the shores of the ocean and every evening, when the sun dropped down to kiss the sea, they crawled inside the cardboard box, with their mother to pass the night.
The box was a damp and lonely place, closed in on all four sides with its bottom sunk in the sand, always moist, hidden from the sun. To come inside each night the sisters had to quickly lift a corner flap and scuttle inside like crabs. The interior was infested with all manner of creeping, crawling, sea-side creatures who seek damp darkness, and green mold grew on the spongy cardboard walls. But the box that sheltered them each night served its purpose. It hid an awful secret. Their mother was held there by a terrible curse and the box saved her from the world outside—-from the taunting screams of the seagulls and the staring eyes of the sand creatures, from the frightened glances of strong men.
Once, the mother of these two beautiful girls had been as beautiful as they–more beautiful than they, with deep green eyes. She loved a young and robust sailor, the first man who had ever looked upon her with longing.
The mother’s name was Aquatine. She had grown up in a little fishing village far from the place where she now lived in her miserable cardboard box. Beautiful from birth, her beauty was overshadowed by her peculiar temperament.
Stand ankle-deep in the ocean as the tide washes out. Lose your balance as the sand sweeps away under your feet; you have felt Aquatine’s instability. Watch the waves as they run to shore and throw themselves desperately on the sand; see them turn and run from the same sandy shore that held them in their desperation. So were her moods. She longed for companionship, longed to join in the happy games and innocent flirtations of the other village girls, but she was wary of them and they of her. In the end, she spent most of her time alone, wandering up and down the beach, playing in the waves.
Aquatine developed a habit of walking with her eyes cast down. She was a wave, rolling and never able to stop. One look into her eyes was a startling reminder that everything rolls and nothing is fixed; what we lean on today may shift tomorrow. The villagers avoided her eyes and the reminder they carried.
One day Aquatine was walking out of the sea toward the shore. Her eyes looked into the water as she walked, and then at the wet sand, and then they stopped, for in front of her stood two beautifully formed feet. They were the feet of a man, planted slightly apart in the sand. They stood square and strong. There was a supple tension in the arches and the ankles grew out of the foot like the pillars of a massive cathedral supporting the man above.
Aquatine’s eyes moved up the legs, working their way along the firm muscles, clinging like barnacles to the small black hairs that shaded the legs. When her eyes reached the knees, a hand slipped under her chin and raised her face to the sun. Two fearless eyes looked into hers and fixed her to the spot. For a moment, her careening spirit held its balance.
On that day, her beauty was found. The fearless sailor held her face firmly over the still waters of a pool and gently forced her to look into her own eyes. He laid her gently on the sand and showed her the wonders of her own body. And, in the end, he touched her raging, rolling spirit and brought it to rest beneath him, kissed by the rising tide.
Aquatine and the sailor spent many months together near the sea on the outskirts of the village, living in a hut the sailor built of driftwood, eel-grass and blue-green sea-glass. In time Aquatine gave birth to twin daughters.
Despite their sweet beauty the sailor was indifferent to his daughters. He began to wander off alone and spent long hours gazing at the horizon. Aquatine felt his love wavering. She was becoming stable and she knew he feared stability. Her love for her children had changed her. Part of Aquatine’s spirit was spent on their daughters, only a part of her was left for him. In the end, she feared, he would return to the only thing he cared for as much as he cared for her–the sea.
One day, soon after his daughters made their first tiny footprints walking on the sand, the sailor stood, as he often did now, staring at the sea. On the horizon, he sighted a ship and decided, then and there, when the ship came into port he would join the crew. Even as he made his decision to leave, he believed that one day he would return and find the beautiful woman he once found playing in the waves. He wanted to keep his dream safe, so before he sailed away he made certain no other man would ever enjoy Aquatine’s beauty.
There lived at that time, in the fishing village, a horrible old hag who smoked cigars and cast evil spells for a fee. When the fearless sailor went into town to sail away from Aquatine and his twin daughters, he first stopped to see the hag. He stepped through the narrow door of her sagging hut and took from the bulging pocket of his pants a little bag of gold saved from his last voyage. From the left pocket of his shirt he took a lock of Aquatine’s hair coiled inside a clam shell.
“Keep this woman safe for me,” he said, laying the clamshell in the old hag’s palm. “See that no harm comes to her. But see also that no man ever wishes to look upon her again, except myself, and that no man ever wishes to lie with her on the sand. Except myself.” In her other hand he placed the gold.
“You have given good payment,” replied the hag, raising up the bag of gold, still warm from his pocket, before her sharp little eyes. “I will do a good job. This woman will be safe from harm, but men will turn away from the sight of her.” She put the clamshell on a shelf next to a jar of fish lips and slipped the bag of gold inside her blouse between her withered breasts. Then she led the sailor to the door.
The sailor left the hag’s house, boarded the waiting ship and sailed far away beyond the horizon that he had watched with such longing.
That same evening, after her children were asleep, Aquatine went for a swim in the ocean. She often swam alone when the sailor was away. The waves were a comfort to her. They held her, as the sailor seldom did now. The sound they made was deep and quiet, unlike the voices of her children. She floated near the shore and watched the moon rising above her in the night sky. Her hair floated out like a fan around her face and her arms and legs radiated out from her slender body. She turned her eyes upon the moon and the moon saw her tortured spirit, saw that she was again torn by the forces of her life.
As Aquatine floated in the moonlight, she felt herself quietly transformed. Her cares lifted and she was overcome with a sense of calm such as she had not experienced in all her life. She looked upon herself, floating in the water, and found evidence of her transformation. Her body had become transparent. She moved like a jellyfish and, indeed, she looked like a jellyfish. On that day, her beauty was lost. Or so it might have seemed.
The two little daughters found their mother the next morning, washed up near them on the sand. In spite of the change, they recognized her, as a very young child always knows her own mother. Aquatine knew she must hide before the villagers chanced to see her. She gathered up her children and headed down the beach in search of a new home, far from the eyes of the villagers and far from village gossip.
It was well she did leave because the old hag had vices other than smoking. She was an incorrigible gossip who loved to revel in the misfortunes of others, especially when those misfortunes were brought on by her own powers. The whole town already knew about the transformation of Aquatine and many felt it was caused by her own persistent strangeness, though the hag struggled desperately to retain credit for the curse. Many a man ran out to catch sight of Aquatine as she toiled along making her slow escape. All responded in the same way. Each blanched white as a sand-dollar and ran in the opposite direction, horrified by beauty gone awry.
In this way Aquatine’s grotesque fame spread up and down the coast in all the small fishing villages. In the end, she was forced to take refuge inside a large cardboard box she found discarded on the beach far from the village where she had grown up. It was there that she raised her daughters. People often saw the two girls playing together on the sunny shore and heard their lovely voices amplified by the ocean as they talked and laughed, sharing girlish stories. But the villagers knew that Aquatine, the jellyfish woman, only emerged from her moldy castle silently after dark. Even the bravest men avoided that part of the beach at night.
When the moon arose Aquatine would drag her deformed body along the beach in search of food for her growing children and herself. Often, she found trinkets and treasures that had washed up on the shore. These she collected for her daughters to wear on their bodies or fasten in their hair. She knew the day would come when her girls would leave the box and find their way in the world of other people. Her children were blessed with beauty and kindness as well as intelligence, but she wished for them also to have items of wealth that would stand them in good stead with people who valued such things.
On nights when the moon was full Aquatine would stay outside the box all night long. When she finished her lonely hunting up and down the beach she would slip into the ocean and float for hours looking up at the moonlight. One night, after many years of nights, she lowered her eyes and there, on the horizon, she noticed something. Though what she saw was no bigger than a speck, that speck filled her with terror. When she returned to the box she determined that this was the morning of the day when she must bid her daughters farewell and send them out into the world outside the box and beyond the small piece of shoreline where they had grown into young women.
She packed, for both, bags fashioned of fish net and sailcloth. The bags she filled with the treasures she had amassed for them and tasty foods from the sea for their journey. She sent them off against their will, for in their kindness they wished only to live where they might protect and care for their mother. Aquatine knew theirs was a different story, meant to unfold far from the moldy, miserable cardboard box and the limited stretch of horizon which it faced.
As she watched her beautiful daughters walk away she remembered the days of her own lost beauty and the handsome sailor with his sturdy feet planted, for such a short time, in the sands of her shore. She knew that the speck that grew larger and larger on the horizon was a ship bringing him back.
That very evening, after the rising tide had swept away the final traces of her daughters’ footprints and the ocean breeze had carried away the sweet, salty scent of their youth, Aquatine emerged once again from her box. She waited outside, her eyes cast downward as she listened to muffled footsteps approaching on the sand. Finally, two feet stood before her. She felt the sailor looking down in dismay at her deformed body heaped upon the shore, touched with compassion by the edges of the tide.
The sailor fell to his knees in front of her on the sand and stretched forth his hand, closed around a lock of hair encased in a clam shell. Aquatine knew the evil spell would be broken if she accepted this offering, knew she could be, though older, a beautiful woman once again. She wanted to look up into the face of the sailor, to feel again his strength and succumb to the power he held over her. But she felt another power, its source deep and unseen within her transparent self. Turning away from the outstretched hand she dragged her body across the sand and deeper into the water.
Not looking back, she let the waves carry her from the land, farther and farther away with each wave. Finally, she looked toward shore and the sailor appeared as a far-off, faceless figure squatting miserably on the sand in front of a dilapidated cardboard box, his hand outstretched. Later still he became a tiny speck and finally he disappeared. Then the shore, where her daughters somewhere walked, disappeared. Finally, all that remained for Aquatine was herself and the moon and the sea. She let that self, with all its new-found beauty, be carried deeper into the water.
There, she might spend her days pushed to and fro by the capricious sea. She might decide to travel up and down through the depths of the sea by her own power as well, not thinking, but responding to the ocean around her. Under the water, hidden from the sun and far from the shore, she could drift among the anemone and sea cucumbers. She knew that she might, perhaps, return to land someday and accept the severed piece of her hair, locked in a shell, offered by the handsome sailor, older now and waiting hopefully on the shore. She might. But perhaps she would not.
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Joann Kielar is a writer and visual artist, and a native of Pittsburgh, PA. She has just completed a collection of nature essays inspired by her travels on the water in a one-person kayak. Joann is happiest when surrounded by family and friends, or completely alone–on the page, in the studio, or in the natural world.
© 2024, Joann Kielar
Halfway Down the Stairs 