Rajnar Vajra: Her Scales Shine Like Music

So much for certainty.

I kept myself as busy as possible the next morning, partly to keep from obsessing. Certainly, a wide array of things to obsess about remained available. Should I relocate my shelter farther from the lake, just in case? Should I continue my evening trysts with the giant, or avoid them like a sensible poet, since I had no way to know if they put me in danger? Was I willing to avoid the most interesting thing on the planet? Were there other monsters in the lake? I decided that prudence demanded that I move the tent, and let floating giants lie.

So, naturally, I did neither. That afternoon, I relocated to the beach equipped with snacks and a reconstituted “beverage” of indeterminate nature. Trusty whitepad in hand, I began a new poem. The title came to me instantly, and the subject was hardly a surprise: “Her Scales Shine Like Music.”

That, I decided, would also be the first line. Second line? I had nothing. But as I rolled the title around in my head, I noticed with a touch of amusement that my momentary inspiration had made the monster female. I tried substituting “its” for “her,” and that just felt wrong.

She didn’t appear until twilight had settled in, but did her tilting routine right away. For perhaps another half hour, we just performed our staring duet. Then I found out that something major had been hiding in the surprise bag after all.

Thin tendrils slowly rose from the water. A flotilla of them. Alien water snakes? My new burst of fear helped me remember the hula skirt of tendrils around the monster that I’d glimpsed yesterday.

“Well, damn,” I said out loud. “You’ve got tentacles.” So a creature nearly the size of a naval destroyer, a giant fishy version of a centaur, came equipped with things to grab with?

“Tentacles” wasn’t quite the right word. Taken individually, these were smoothly covered with tiny silver scales and seemed delicate to the point of fragility. Taken as a group, they scared the hell out of me. I lurched several steps backward, and then a few more as they kept extending. When they stopped extending, they were a lot longer than I liked, long enough to reach and coil around me. I resumed slowly backing up, but stopped when the tendrils suddenly bunched up and appeared to be engaged in bizarre maneuvers, twisting around each other, almost tying themselves in knots. Flexible buggers, each one capable of multiple bends in multiple places.

A worry crossed my mind that all this activity was meant to hypnotize prey. As the only prey around, I didn’t care for that idea.

Another worry wasted. As I watched, the intricate tentacle weaving began to take on a more defined shape, which suddenly tightened into something similar to a sculpture.

I don’t have Artist’s sense of proportion or perspective, so this artwork might’ve had technical flaws beyond my untrained discernment, but it was easily good enough to recognize what it depicted: me. Parka, gloves, and boots included.

Another eerie moment. So my titanic companion was no mindless beast, unless she did portraiture by instinct. One thing for sure: she was damn good with her, um, hands. I used my glove-covered ones to applaud softly. Nothing else happened for a very long time, until she pulled her sculpture apart, drew the tendrils back into the lake, and sank out of sight.

Our tête-à-têtes over the next three weeks followed a similar pattern with a few troubling variations.

Every evening, at some point, she’d reassemble my image and hold it for up to an hour. One non-balmy evening, after her daily tribute to my pulchritude, she built a different representation, almost touching the first. I stared at the barrel-shaped living sculpture, the tendrils so tightly packed that the barrel’s surface appeared smooth, and recognized it as the largest artifact at the alien campsite. She gave me plenty of time to admire the juxtaposition before freeing her tendrils. I expected them to slide back into the water as usual, but this time they wafted closer to me, stopping near my feet just as I seriously considered abandoning my chair. I’d begun to trust my leviathan, but doubt I would’ve had the courage to keep sitting if a nearby tendril had so much as twitched. They didn’t, and she soon departed.

Days passed, and I paid progressively more attention to the sky, watching for a flash from descending twistships, and listening for any telltale rumble. Afternoons, I set up by the lake, worked on poems, and waited. Before any stars appeared, she would. She’d taken to creating and destroying those same two sculptures three times in a row before sending her tendrils near me, closer each evening.

I don’t know why, but I started talking to her. Her magnificence deserved oratory, but I seemed to be in short supply.

“God, how I wish we could communicate,” I remember saying, doubtless louder than necessary, since she wouldn’t understand a word. “My name is Ross, but on the ship that brought me here we have this tradition of using people’s hobbies as names. So I’m also ‘Poet.’ I’m from the planet Earth. Well, ‘Earth’ is what we call it where I live.”

Pathetic, Ross, Olympic-level pathetic. Why don’t I further inform her that my hometown is Vancouver, and offer to provide her a pamphlet of scenic attractions?

But once started, there was no stopping my mouth. “Are you alone, the last of your kind? Except for you I’m alone, but not for long. More of my kind should be here within the next few days.”

I blathered the stars up, and only stopped when my audience slipped silently away.

But after another two weeks, my kind still hadn’t arrived, and my anxiety level soared. No matter how I calculated it, RE crews were long overdue. From then on, every passing day further confirmed my sense that something had gone wrong. I cut my calorie intake dramatically to stretch my food supplies, but after the supplies were gone a month or maybe two, I’d be gone as well. Yes, the idea of dining on tendrils crossed my mind, but even if I were willing or able to injure my floating companion, the possibility of safely digesting alien proteins seemed as remote as Earth. Better to starve than die in convulsions.

Maybe I got a bit emotional. The night her tendrils finally touched my legs, resting gently against them, I opened up about my family, my mother’s death, my sister’s battle with cancer, my dad’s slow recovery from a major heart attack, the money issues that made me quit graduate school and accept my glorified bodyguard job with RE.

Then I talked about Tara, her kindness and understanding, the plans we’d made for our future together that demanded long periods of painful separation. How my being stranded here meant we’d probably never see each other again. I sensed bands of tension around my chest snap one by one, compression so constant that I hadn’t been aware of it, and my feelings poured from me as poetry, bad poetry and rhyming, but I didn’t care.

Her eyes, so deep and wise.

Her heart, as pure as skies.

Appalling stuff, but I meant every word. It was only when I heard my voice cracking hoarsely that I felt my tears streaming, freezing on my cheeks. The night had turned colder than any I’d experienced here, and despite my parka’s efforts, I shivered.

One of her tendrils lifted up and, so softly, touched my iced face. Did she somehow understand how I felt? I don’t know, but all her tendrils pulled away and she slowly tilted farther than I’d ever seen her tilt, until part of a mouth that could’ve held a herd of elephants came free of the water.

She bellowed like a thousand foghorns resounding at once. I felt the vibration through my insulated boots, and standing wave patterns rose on the lake’s surface as if her cry tortured the water. Then she vanished, this time pulling a cloud of bubbles after her.