Tag: the fisher princess

He licks his upper teeth, tongue bulging from under the pink skin above his mouth. He shuffles a stack of papers over the tabletop, dull gaze tracking the motion of his hands as blandly as a crossing guard monitoring traffic. He smacks the edges of the paper against the dark green linoleum. Only then—the task completed, its tedium radiating through the room and holding them in bored, expectant thrall—does he look up at Cal and Max, sitting silently on the other side of the table.

Max can’t stop shivering. The room is small, box-like, windowless, and tiled along both floor and ceiling. Only a wilting fern tucked in a corner, its leaves edged in the yellow of old parchment, serves as decoration. She has the distinct impression that the space is kept purposefully cold. All warmth—bodily warmth, emotional warm—that enters is immediately quelled by the chill in the air, the silent devastation of the fern, the cultivated disinterest of the officer.

“I’ve had a chance to look at your testimony,” the officer now says. He is expressionless in a way that is obviously practiced. Nothing in his face betrays his thoughts—not their content, nor their existence. Nothing emerges from the waters of his tone—not even the shadow of a living thing with a beating heart beneath its surface. A man like him serves as an obstacle.

Max shifts in her seat. She’s almost offended at his lack of reaction, no matter how studiously affected. Overwhelmed by a silence that stretches uneasily into its tenth, blistering second, she breaks. “And?”

(more…)

Max’s vision narrows, then darkens, like the spiral of a camera lens closing in on itself. Far below, she hears water lapping against the shore. Light, misty and moody, reappears from somewhere above.

A soft wind, warm as an exhalation, ripples through. Max won’t be able to recall what she sees here, but the feelings will linger forever. A sensation like waiting in a tunnel.

Max feels the stranger’s touch again, this time on her shoulder. Something inside her sparks in response, as though struck with flint. A tendril of information enters her mind, softly but assertively, stripping away any other thoughts, like a melody triggering a childhood memory. But it’s not a memory belonging to Max.

Max looks at the stranger in confusion. The stranger’s face has twisted into a pained grimace. She’s on the cusp, Max realizes, of breaking into tears. It’s like seeing her mother crying for the first time; the shock and fear are crippling, and Max’s hand, possessed by a longing for closeness that confuses her later, reflexively moves up to cup the stranger’s cheek. Her eyes widen. Instantly, a fresh, smooth, dark heat like moonlight radiating through space—

(more…)

“Hi,” Max says. She gets up from the table, arms held stiffly at her sides. The stranger is sitting up on the couch, still wrapped in the sheet. Her face is covered in darkness, as though alighted upon by a black, tarry brushstroke. A thumbprint of charcoal. The braid swings across her back like a pendulum. Max wipes the sleep from her eyes like dragging a rag through a puddle, her heart rising, fast and hot as a cloud of steam, into her throat.

Max has awoken past dark a thousand times over in this room, but the dimensions of the cabin feel different now. The walls have closed in like the sides of an enchanted labyrinth. The night flexes, casting its shadows over the furniture, casually wielding its power to transform ordinary space by way of scattered moonlight.

She reaches for the propane lamp at the center of the table—her arm feels longer, her movements sluggish, her reach unending—and flicks it on. She meets the stranger’s eyes and is surprised by the plainness of her face. No trace of beauty there. But her eyes are shards of veined glass catching the reflection of the moon on the window panes, and she holds Max’s gaze with a sense of authority, of determination, that Max wants nothing more than to turn and run from.

(more…)

The Fisher Princess I / The Fisher Princess II

The stranger lies on their two-seater sofa, a wrinkled cream-colored bed sheet tucked neatly around her body. Her hair, still damp to the touch, has been arranged so that it falls over the edge, pooling on the corded rug. Max kneels down, a plastic comb in her hand. She begins very slowly carding through the fine strands, stopping only to delicately pick through the worst tangles with her fingers. The stranger doesn’t stir.

“How you doing?” Cal asks, bringing a wooden chair over to sit by them. 

“Plummy keen,” Max says, an old inside joke. Cal feels relief then, clear and warm. In the truck headlights, arms wrapped around her chest, in a state of partial undress and shivering furiously, she had looked not fragile, but frighteningly unfamiliar to him: alien, threatening. He’d had to push past the feeling to rush to her, peeling his fleece jacket off as he jumped out of the truck, but still it had lingered—a ripple of fear in an otherwise placid mind.

Now, secure in the cabin, he feels the last of that emotion release him. He eases into the chair, resting his chin in his hands as he examines the stranger’s face, studiously, methodically, as though searching a craggy mountainside for a foothold. Her oval-shaped face is completely, unnervingly still. Every muscle is relaxed, pliant, freed from the burden of expression. A pallid canvas. But underneath purple-veined lids, her eyes move feverishly, unnaturally.

(more…)

The Fisher Princess I

The stranger hovers above the water, perfectly upright, as though her body were an ornament hung from heaven. Her toes point down, rippling the surface ever so slightly. Max stops moving. The cold water laps at her as she stands at the edge of the red-orange square, looking up almost shyly, like a child encountering an imposing work of art. The stranger’s chin is tucked against her chest, and her long hair obscures her face, but the breeze shifts the strands and Max catches a shard of her unconscious, inanimate expression, a glimpse of her plummy, veined eyelids. Max breathes in sharply. The spell instantly breaks. The stranger, consumed by gravity, falls like a rock, straight into the water. The red-orange square vanishes.

Not thinking, Max rushes forward. The lake bottom drops underneath her, and she is submerged. Blind, she swings out clumsily, her open hand making contact first with the stranger’s hair, which she grabs by the fistful. She finds a limp arm, and then a shoulder, and Max reaches in to encircle the stranger’s waist and prop her up so her face is above water, just like Cal had shown her on the first day. Max pulls the body in towards her own; the stranger is warm to the touch, like peaches left in the sun. At this depth, Max can just barely touch the lake bottom, but she finds it in the blue-black darkness and she pushes against it hard, swallowing water in her exertion. The shore is hardly ten feet away but it takes all her energy to half-swim, half-drag, the stranger there.

Max leans down on the sand, her ear above the stranger’s mouth, and one hand on her throat. She waits there for a moment that feels like it expands like elastic into an eternity. But eventually she hears how the waves beat in time with the stranger’s heart and improbably steady breathing, and she sighs with relief. The rush of adrenaline that powered her disappears, and the weight of her exhaustion drops hard onto her mind and buckles her legs. She allows herself a moment’s rest, her chest heaving. A bird cries out somewhere on the other side of the lake. Max fishes out a walkie talkie from the zippered-up pocket of her canvas pants and presses the large central button. It buzzes, and a voice appears on the end of the line.

“Max? What’s taking you so long?”

“Hey, uh, C-Cal…” To her surprise and horror, Max discovers that she can’t answer without her voice breaking.

“Where are you?” She hears the creaking swing of the cabin’s front door as he steps outside.

“The l-lake, just off the path. N-Not far. Can you bring the truck around?” Her teeth chatter loudly. “And blankets.”

“Stay put, OK? Don’t go anywhere.”

Max laughs bleakly. “Where would I go?”

The line beeps, and Max sets the communicator aside. She drops onto her elbows, next to the stranger. Looking over, she remembers with a start that she is naked, and quickly she removes her t-shirt and drapes it over her. Unsure what to do but convinced this is not yet enough, Max arranges her arms alongside her body, and gingerly brushes the remainder of her wet hair onto her shoulders and chest. The glacial stillness of her features, freckled with water and sand, seem to suggest a rest far beyond dreaming. Max reassures herself that the stranger is breathing and then returns to the path, shivering in her sports bra, to watch for the truck’s headlights.

The Fisher Princess III

At about half-past nine in the evening, a red-orange square appears over the lake. It ripples against the water like a vast impermeable sheet, or the reflection of a bloodied, disfigured moon. The square itself is invisible from the dirt path, but Maxine, bicycling back to camp, immediately notices its light, which appears as a wash of color that bathes the dark treeline in orange. Her body reacts before her mind does, and she clamps down hard on the hand brakes, skidding to a halt.

Her weight shifts, and one foot comes down to rest against the path. Between the dense boughs of pine, Maxine watches as the bright red-orange light flickers, intensifying and deepening in color. Her eyes track the color as it projects itself, a wave of dark orange, onto first the dusty path, then the front bicycle wheel, and her old sneakers. The effect reminds her of Venetian blinds against a window, blocking the rich sunlight and scattering it into bars against the floor. For a moment, she is convinced she’s lost track of time somehow and passed out on a bed of pine needles. What she’s seeing now must be the reflection of the dawn on the path. But it is almost completely dark out, and the red-orange is too impossible, suggesting an artificial, rather than a natural, origin. Max frowns as she examines the treeline more closely. The light looks almost like neon of a searchlight, or a particularly strong flashlight, and she imagines a lost camper in a canoe whirling one around in terror. In her mind’s eye, the canoe tips over and the anonymous camper sinks wordlessly into the lake, arms akimbo, the tendrils of her hair coloring the surface of the clear water like an ink stain. Panic rising, Max quickly gets off the bicycle; it tumbles into the dirt as she pushes past the foliage.

Maxine’s sneakers, scuffed up after two months of summertime, sink softly into the sand. Catching her breath, she stares at the square. It lays, rippling but unmoved by the tide, a few meters from the shore. She cannot make sense of it rationally, but still her mind tries on different interpretations: A bright orange mainsail, ripped from a pleasure boat during a squall, a waterproof picnic cloth, a strip of shimmering industrial plastic, brought by the west wind. Which could it be?

She’s still lost in thought when the square suddenly erupts, doubling in size in a matter of seconds. Its sides quiver and shatter, blossoming into smaller geometric forms that group and reform into the original square. Despite this frantic activity, the rest of the lake water remains undisturbed. Max watches, perfectly still, her gaze fixed to the image as it decomposes and recomposes, over and over. She blinks a few times. The panic she felt earlier has gone. Her mind is instead dominated by a peculiar wave of calm. With barely any realization of what she’s doing, she rolls up her pant legs and sheds her shoes to wade into the water.

It doesn’t occur to her that something so paranormal, so explicitly removed from nature, could pose a danger to her. Later, when she tries to recall the setting, she remembers only the water, cool to the touch. A clouding of her mind, as though each of her senses were filled with white noise, bars any other possible memory. She is almost knee-deep into the water when the stranger emerges from the dead center of the square.

The Fisher Princess II