natural sex

by Indigo Carter

The waves don’t crash because they aren’t violent they just go and go. White foam rushes to the tips of my toes and falls back again. My hip buckles as I walk across the sand. I lean slightly to the left to counteract it. My shoulder with a knot like a ball that burns with each turn of my head draws me to the salt. The healing of water. It rushes to my ankles.

I have to walk forward to make it stay and it does now. Up to my knees and cold and fizzing wildly. Crisp delicate things like shells roll beneath the water and the more the tide pulls the wetter I get until I am submerged. Until the memory of Isabella finally hushes under the pressure of the ocean.

When I am under I open my eyes and they burn but there is an outline of my ten fingers all long and blurry as they attach to palms that are flat and soft before connecting to arms that are bobbing with the current.

At the bottom there is an outline of a color and I swim down to reach for it and bring it up. I watch water drip off a conch shell with a snail inside. His eyes are yellow with big black circles in the middle and they hold my gaze.

I ask a question only the snail can hear.

He says There Needs to be a Beginning Middle and End. There Needs to be a Soft Body to Pin Down and a Curling and a Coiling.

I say but I don’t know where things start. The vast majority of mutations are harmful or have no effect at all and I know this.

The snail says Do You? Try to Imagine an Inverted Triangle. I stop talking to him because all I can imagine is water.

In the ocean the night comes slowly. I like the sounds most of all the wet moaning of water hitting sand. And the beat of my heart just going. A deep rush. It sharpens when I notice it. It quickens in my ribs. Each one vibrates until my throat is full of the pulse. My ears ring and empty piercing holes sting and I know that I am becoming clean.

The sky goes dark and the conch in my right hand feels like a tingle. I swim past the waves until I float on my back. Until my mind is just all white nothing. Just bright and nothing and my body is parting open and something is coming inside. The water is coldest between my legs.

What’s inside is the memory of her hands. Thick and warm and tan with life.

She never read my stories but always said she was just about to. All of my pages stayed piled on her desk. Her hands reached for them once.

She had the most gorgeous palms I ran my fingers over until she told me to stop. She kissed me sometimes. Those times were the best. She was funny we would laugh she was cruel we would fight. All of my desperation belonged to her but now it belongs to nobody. I try to sink it and ball it up and spit it out into salt water but I feel just as sick as before. The conch has a pink inside. It’s in my hand. A stomach foot that crawls and crawls. A spiral that pulls so tight until it disappears. I am following the spiral the accidental curve of it as I suck in air and submerge my head again.

Underneath everything is cold and dark and rushing. My body feels pink but my eyes are squeezed shut because the salt burns. It burns bits of my skin that I didn’t realize were cut. It goes into my nose like fire and inside each fingernail. Coming up for air is when my hair slicks down my back wet and thin. The skin on my face is so dry that it stretches as water beads off. I paddle further out.

She spoke in Spanish to her mother and I couldn’t tell what she was saying. It was all this fluidity and a knowing of a world that I don’t. I held her Bible in my lap feeling the thin pages and yellow ink of her marker that highlighted sentences like—

God will take with him those who have fallen asleep. But sleep seems too simple. For the conch the octopus the gulls that circle. For us.

There are so many visible stars. I am deeper than I started and in all directions is black. She told me that after we have sex she repents in the morning. I didn’t think that what we were doing to each other was called sex.

She Left You the snail says with his beady eyes. Suddenly he’s like an alien to me. Something gross and unnatural and cruel. She Just Left You Like It Was Nothing. I drop him in the water. He just sinks down. The feeling of his shell against my skin crawls up until I’m shivering and turning frantically in all directions. Kicking like hell and my legs burn all over. It’s all dark. I can’t swim anymore so I just lay there. I just float. The water is crisp against my neck. Like It Was Nothing says the conch again. Or the octopus or whale or fish. Something deep below me. So I sink down to find that voice because I want to kill it.

The thing about drowning is you watch yourself do it. You see two upside down triangle breasts poking out the top of the water. A freckled nose below these big gray eyes. They look like fish eyes with how big and wet and open they are. You see transparent hair all spread out in the water and you watch as everything starts to sink. You want to ask the body if it feels like anything but there are bubbles and they spread out before popping— a pattern. Water folds in on itself. You wait for the body to kick and fight.

Underneath the water I see Isabella in my bed sleeping next to me. It was the last time we saw each other. We said nothing we just slept. I let my pinky brush against the side of her arm and everything was alive but she pulled her arm away and I knew that she must be awake. She must be slowing down her breathing on purpose and staying still and quiet just like me. I wanted to tell her of the octopus and its quiet sleep all still and pale and slow and relaxed until the chromatophores become inactive. We would agree on this. But the active sleep—

The skin flashing through rapid color changes and moving of eyes under lids and pulsing mantle behind the head. What of this? The five hundred million neurons are more than we can understand and we’re not meant to but she would try.

So I stayed still with my eyes closed and felt her get up and felt her walk and heard my front door close. Even after she left I stayed still pretending for hours and then touched myself until I came. It was the type of cumming that is prolonged and makes you want to write a poem about mama octopus laying hundreds of eggs. The type of orgasm that reminds you of life and creation before resting its moment of bliss upon your stomach and balling up like a hard rock of shame after it passes.

The water is heavy and pressing against me. For a moment my chest heaves against itself. My lungs might split and every single blood vessel in me is constricting. I thrash.

But there is stillness.

And there is her—Isabella—reading my pages with the blankest stare. Saying this is not me. Saying you see me so wrong. Asking who is this woman you’re writing?

My body doesn’t kick or swim or beg for air. It doesn’t choke or fight it just sinks down. Like I’ve never needed oxygen. The beat. The horrid beat of my heart becomes rapid and uneven. I see an image of something soft and wet and pink like a body of some sorts until the beat is so frantic that it splits into three. Each split comes as abruptly as it can. Cracking and slicing my heartbeat until it multiplies throughout me. The pulse moves up deep and slow and the pressure of water becomes like air.

I need to exhale but I have this thin tube so I draw in water instead. My fingers grow. I watch them elongate. I watch them stretch and morph into cords of muscle. They curl. They burn like fire so hot that it’s cold and everything is freezing now and pumping. The body that I had is contorting and slipping into something else and I know that I am breathing but it is not with the lungs I was born with and it hurts so much that it screams and the scream is so loud that it sounds like silence. Everything is sore but it quiets. It feels almost good.

Is this repentance is this—

an event in which an individual attains a divinely provided new understanding of their behavior and—

I am splitting. My vision is splitting into something that can sense light from nearly every angle. It becomes me. Every angle—

and feels compelled to change that behavior and—

My skin grows slick and porous. The pores widen until they leak a clear mucous film. Under what used to be my collarbones are small frills that pulse and taste the water. A faint metallic tang. The soft acid of a coral reef. A decaying snail. Shape and distance and movement.

I am—

There is no I. It all breaks apart. The I loosens and spills outward ‘til each arm thinks and knows and is. I am—

and begin a new relationship with God.

Octopus.

I am the male blue-ringed octopus my eighth arm is full of the world. Full of two thirds of my neurons and their private logic and sensory maps and I know this. I know everything.

I know the den where I suction and crawl. I know how to change colors on my skin and how to stalk crabs and snails and shrimps. I am opportunistic and I am hunting. I know the shadows and folds of corals and fractured stones I arrange my den with. I know the memory of my human body. I feel her studying the insides of me. I know how to change the light of my skin so I can blend in with the shadows. I know that I am small but I feel that I am venomous and hungry.

In the night I emerge. The human girl in me is alive and watching as I suction and crawl. There is salt and sand and something sweet from a broken conch. A snail. I know the direction of it. My body slides and slides.

There is a heartbeat underneath me. In the sand. The outline of a conch. My hunger becomes like everything. I lower close and let the sand stick to my skin so I disappear. One of my arms slides forward and tastes. The conch shell is wedged between rubble and coral but I can wait so I do.

He crawls. I move all at once. The skin between my arms unfurls and the conch is trapped. I let him thrash. I let him try to escape. I watch in horror and awe and wonder if he can experience pain. Does damage feel like anything? To a snail? Or to this specific one?

I draw him close beneath me while my mouth is black and gleaming. I find a part of his body that is soft and bite fast. My venom passes through me as a pulse until his body stills against mine. A cold thread empties into his blood. There is an experience I am having of the ocean of the conch of my venom that is not unified that is not understandable. Feeling creeps into existence but there is so much I am tasting that it blends into the gray of the water. The human in me is projecting a subjectivity that rolls through my suckers like lies. I want to get rid of her. She wants this to make sense.

The dark of the night is lifting in layers. My den is waiting with its mouth open. I wedge the shell of the conch into the wall. Something in me is mourning but it is not the octopus. My skin goes pale with the reef. Time folds and I am still with my eyes open but I am asleep. My arms are coiling and tucking. I am asleep but my suckers are awake. I am asleep but the girl in me is stirring as day breaks.

Water tastes the same in the light but moves differently. Slower and warmer. Pulses of life and activity and an ocean that goes and goes. There are three hearts in me but the main one is the loudest. The pump of it. The other two just push blood but the main one aches with something more. Isabella.

Who is this woman you’re writing? But it was her. It was exactly her. It was her God and her hands and her words but she didn’t see herself in them at all and she was convinced of nothing. Light is shifting through the reef and I wrote that I loved her. A woman should not love another woman the way you love me and a tide pulls.

Water outside the den grows warm and quick. I taste it all. This is when she comes.

A new presence. Faint like metal and salt and the scent of skin. Female skin. My third arm twitches before the others. All of my suckers flex open and the light of day should keep me in my den but I turn toward her. I can’t tell if I’m deciding this or if it’s my body. My mantle. It all feels the same to me. I darken my skin slightly and it tightens and stretches as I emerge from my den with hunger. I creep along the reef careful and quiet when I see her. She is a shadow moving through the coral her arms coiling and uncoiling with a precision I can feel. She is larger than me and sleek and soft and flexible. My skin ripples soft patterns. Notice me. She moves a fraction a curl an inch.

And when the female octopus knows I am here all of her blue rings light up as a warning. Raised and flashing vividly to deter me but I know my nature. I’m sure of it. She flashes these sudden blue flares I can taste all over my body. She looks beautiful in this state. It only makes me want her more but the human girl in me is thinking of Ecclesiastes-

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted.

I am angry and sick of her attempts to experience instead of actually doing it. Her attempts to explain and understand and relate things to each other that have no place. I move low and press my arms against the female's mantle. The girl in me is saying

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.

But it is not the real girl. It is Isabella's Bible and I know this but the girl does not. She thinks it is her.

The female octopus lashes as she spreads her webbing sharp and sudden. She does not want this. Me. I press her anyway. She bites and the venom is numbing all over. I am disoriented. I am dizzy. I am hearing Isabella but am unable to make out her words because they are not in my language. But my grip remains secure. But my hectocotylus slides. I push my sperm packets into her mantle cavity each one sliding in as my body strains against the numbness. Her blue rings are blinding but I see with more than my eyes as my long arms twitch and press her even harder. I know the shape of her cavity and the texture of her mantle and the current against us. I am in ecstasy for a single moment. I am a part of the world. Of God. But there is my release and an instant of completion and I become empty and she becomes still and the blue rings fade and we are apart again. My body here and hers there.

In one to three months she will lay a cluster of hundreds of eggs. She will spend weeks guarding our eggs and she will not hunt and she will die. She will die shortly after our eggs hatch because she sacrificed herself to care for them. Her organs will deteriorate and her muscles will weaken because she can only reproduce once in her life and I decided when.

I retreat. My den is the same as I left it but my hearts are fading and skipping and my third right arm hangs limp with all my packets empty.

When everything starts to slow I feel nearly human again like I’m still on the edge of the shore missing Isabella. The way she only came over at night when everyone else was asleep. The way she could only touch me if she had been drinking. If we had been drinking together. The way she looked into my eyes but I looked slightly above hers because if I had— gone right into the brown of her iris—I would cry. The way she did when she rested her head on my lap and the tears came and came no matter how many times I wiped them away. This isn’t right is all she could say so I hushed her until she fell asleep but I don’t think she ever really was. And I didn’t believe that our relationship was unnatural but by the time she left me I was shrinking into what I have become now. A body with three hearts and eight arms and the ability to paralyze. So I blame her for this.

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

It becomes even slower. What I have left is like a bubble rising and popping. The girl. The dying girl in my hearts knows things. She knows that we have urges like creeping along the sand in the dark. She knows that we are dying in a den because we couldn’t overcome the urge to pin the female down and know how the inside of her feels. And as we are dying I’m thinking of leaving the ocean with a gift. Some beauty from me that makes it all okay and natural. That’s not love I say. But my beak opens and I have no vocal chords. So the water goes dark again because that’s what it does at night. But not for forever says the girl. But I can’t tell who is saying what.

Photo of Indigo Carter

BIO: Indigo Carter is a poet and fiction writer from Florida and a current MFA candidate in fiction at Sarah Lawrence College. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Flare: The Flagler Review and Strike Magazine.