t’s morning, but there is no light. Overflowing drainage ditches are teethed with traffic cones. Side roads are cordoned by sawhorses. The bus she’s riding slices through a foot of standing water that buffets the tires. All of it, the earth’s gush, the sprawling darkness, reflects her anguish. She has checked the river levels twice a day since the downpour began, an act equivalent to carving out her heart ounce by ounce. Tomorrow, Dr. Hoffstetler will get his way. She and Giles will load the creature back into the Pug, drive to the foot of the jetty, lead the creature to the water’s edge. Today, then, is her last day and night with the being who, more than anyone ever, sees her as more than she is. And isn’t that love?

She looks at her feet. Even in the lightless murk of the bus floor she can see the shoes. The shoes; she still can’t believe it. Yesterday, before managing a few anxious hours of sleep before going to work, she’d lived out a dream. She’d gone inside Julia’s Fine Shoes, and though stunned by the spicy scent of leather, made a quick turn to the window display, nabbed the low-slung, square-toed, silver-encrusted lamé pair from its ivory column, and marched them to the checkout counter.

As it turned out, the Julia of her long-held imagination, that formidable beauty with a brain for business, didn’t exist. She’d asked about it, and the woman at the register had told her. It was just a nice-sounding name. This had soothed Elisa as she’d gone home and snugged the glittering shoes around the sides of her feet. If Julia didn’t exist, why, she’d be Julia. Providing for the creature had drained her funds, and this extravagant purchase left her flat broke. She didn’t care. She still doesn’t. The shoes are hooves and just this once, over this final day, she wants to be a beautiful creature, too.

Elisa gets off the bus and expands her umbrella, but it feels wrong, a cumbersome human contrivance. She tosses it into the gutter, turns her face to the sky, and loses herself in water, tries to breathe inside it. She never wants to be dry again, she decides. She’s drenched when she gets home and glad of it; rain patters from her clothes as she heads down the hall, forming puddles she hopes won’t ever evaporate. Before the creature’s trip to the theater, she’d never locked her front door. Now she feels for the key she’s ferreted inside a defunct lamp and fits it into the lock.

Giles isn’t at his usual spot. He told her before she left for Occam that he’d check in, but that he’d wanted to complete the full painting for which he’d been training with his charcoal sketches. He was on fire, he’d told her. He hadn’t felt so inspired since he was a young man. Elisa didn’t doubt it, but she also wasn’t stupid. Giles, too, knew the end was at hand and he wanted to give her space to say her farewell.

He’d left the radio on for her, of course. Elisa dawdles by the table to listen. She has come to depend upon the radio: politics, sports scores, dull listings of local events that provide sane counterpoints to the untamed fantasy she is living. She has kept it playing nonstop. Yesterday the creature, wrapped in sodden towels, had sat at her table with her, his first time on a chair—a tricky thing with his spine fins and his short, plated tail. He’d looked like a woman fresh out of the shower and she’d laughed, and though he couldn’t possibly have understood, he’d lit up, his version of a laugh, golden light pulsing about his chest while his gills wiggled.

She stirs Scrabble tiles with her fingers. She’s been trying to teach him printed words. The day prior, she’d brought home magazines from work to show him things he’d never otherwise get to see: a 727 airplane, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Sonny Liston punching Floyd Patterson, a spectacular movie still of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. He’d learned with such fervor. With the delicate movements of one accustomed to tearing things with his claws, he extended a long index finger and thumb, picked up the still of Elizabeth Taylor, and placed it atop the 727, which he then set atop the New York Philharmonic. Then, like a child playing airplane, he pushed the 727 across the breadth of the table until it landed at another photo of Cleopatra’s Egypt.

The meaning was clear: For Elizabeth Taylor to get from New York to Egypt, she’d have to take a 727.

It was information, of course, he didn’t need. He did all of it, she was certain, just to see her smile, hear her laugh.

None of that means that he is well. A grayness has settled over him like grit from a factory. His brilliant scales have lost luster and turned teal like an old penny on the sidewalk. He seems, in short, to be growing older, and this, she fears, is her most unforgivable crime. For how many decades, if not centuries, had the creature lived without losing a notch of vitality? At least Occam had filters, thermometers, processions of learned biologists. Here there is nothing to sustain him but love. In the end, it isn’t enough. The creature is dying, and she is his murderer.

“Heavy rains expected to deluge the upper Eastern Seaboard today,” the radio buzzes. “Baltimore will continue to get the worst of it, expecting anywhere between five and seven additional inches by midnight. This storm isn’t going anywhere, folks.”

She picks up a black marker left on the table from language lessons. A desk calendar sits there, too, each day devoted to a cornball inspirational quote that she can no longer read without tearing up. She uncaps the marker. If she doesn’t write it, if she doesn’t make it real and see it for herself, she doesn’t know if she can carry through with it. Moving the marker across paper is like moving a knife across her own skin.

MIDNIGHT—THE DOCKS

Tonight, she will call in sick for the first time in years. Even if Fleming registers it as unusual behavior, it will be too late. Will she return to Occam on Monday? The issue feels trite. Probably not—she doubts she could stomach it. What she will do for money, she has no idea. That, too, feels like the banal concern of a stagnated realm she has left behind. Giles had a certain look the day he came to her saying that he would help break out the creature. She thinks she must have this look now, too. After bidding good-bye, there will be nothing left to lose that matters.

This is a joy she will miss above all others: The creature coming into view after a period she has spent away. This is the last time she’ll feel this delirious thrill, so she does it slowly, entering the bathroom as she might cold water, inch by inch. He sparkles like chromatic coral beneath the surface of a virgin sea. She is powerless to resist his call.

Elisa closes the door behind her and comes forward, chest hitching enough to make her dizzy with what first feels like tearful sadness before she feels the stronger, guttural pull and identifies the emotion as passion. There is, all at once, no question of what she will do, nor any surprise. It was always going to end like this, she realizes, from the first moment that she looked into the tank in F-1 and was pulled inside, not physically but in every other possible way, by the star clusters of his scales and supernovas of his eyes.

The plastic shower curtain is bunched against the wall. Elisa yanks it. A metal ring pops free. She does it eleven more times, rings tinging off the walls and getting lost in foliage, each tear of the curtain an astonishing, irreversible act of destruction no graveyard-shift janitor on the planet would have dared. She spreads the curtain across the floor like a quilt onto a bed, tucking it into the wainscoting and stretching it over the gap under the door. When the plastic is as taut as she can make it, she stands. She can’t command water like the creature, but she has the next best thing: modern plumbing.

Elisa plugs the sink and cranks the knobs. Water fires out. She leans over the tub and does the same. Running both faucets at full-blast is another thing no poor person would ever do, but she’s not poor, not today. Today she is the richest woman in the world; she has everything she could want; she loves and is loved, and as such is as infinite as the creature, not human nor animal but feeling, a force shared between everything good that has ever been and ever will be.

She removes her uniform; it is the unburdening of quarry rock from Chemosh’s toilers. She unsnaps her bra and peels off her slip; it is the unshackling of any creature trapped by another. Each item of dropped clothing makes no sound: the water has overflowed both sink and tub and is filling the spread curtain, lapping at her ankles, sliding up her calves like a warm hand. Only her silver shoes remain; she props a foot on the edge of the tub so the creature can see it, a flipper more fantastic than any he has ogled on her bedroom wall, the only thing she has that is as bright and beautiful as him. It is the most brazenly sensual posture she’s ever struck, and she hears the Matron calling her worthless, stupid, ugly, a whore, until the creature rises from the flooded tub, a thousand silent waterfalls cascading from his body, and steps over the edge into her waiting arms.

They curl to the floor together, her parts finding reciprocal space in his parts, and his into hers. Her head sinks underwater, a wonderful feeling, and then they roll, and she is on top, gasping, water pouring from her hair, and he is under the sloshing surface, and to kiss him she must dip her face under, which she does, and ecstatically, the tedious lines of her rigid world softening, the sink, toilet, doorknob, mirror, even the walls themselves relinquishing their shapes.

The kiss reverberates underwater, not the fussy wet tsks of human lips, but a rumbling thunderstorm that pours into her ears and runs down her throat. She takes his scaled face into her hand, his gills throbbing against her palms, and kisses him forcefully, hoping to stir the storm they’ve started into a tsunami so as to force a flood; perhaps her kisses, not the rain, can be what saves him. She exhales into his mouth, feels the bubbles tickle past her cheeks. Breathe, she prays. Learn to breathe my air so we can be together forever.

But he can’t. He uses his strong hands to force her above water so she won’t drown. She’s panting, for all sorts of reasons, her hands planted to her chest to help it rediscover oxygen. Her hands, she discovers, are covered with the creature’s twinkling scales. The sight enthralls her, and she runs her hands over her breasts and belly, spreading the scales, wishing this was how she really looked. From the theater below she hears a passage of dialogue, one she’s heard a hundred times: Trouble your heart no more. Be strong through this time. For from the widow of your son will issue children, and children’s children. Yes, why not? Each bead of water on her eyelashes is its own entire world—she’s read such things in science articles. Couldn’t one of them be theirs to populate with a new, better species?

No bathtub fantasy she’s ever had can compare. She searches out his every crest and pocket. He has a sex organ, right where it should be, and she has hers, too, right where she left them, and she pulls him inside her; within so much rocking water, it happens easily, the tectonic shift of two subsea plates. The effulgence of the theater lights eking through the floorboards and plastic are overwhelmed by the creature’s own rhythms of crystalline color, as if the sun itself is beneath them, and it is, it has to be, for they are in heaven, in God’s canals, in Chemosh’s slag, every holy and unholy thing at once, beyond sex into the seeding of understanding, the creature implanting within her the ancient history of pain and pleasure that connects not only the two of them but every living thing. It is not just him inside her. It is the whole world, and she, in turn, is inside it.

This is how life changes, mutates, emerges, survives, how one being absolves the sins of its species by becoming another species altogether. Perhaps Dr. Hoffstetler would understand. Elisa can only perceive the edges it, glimpse the foothills of the mountain, the horn of the glacier. She feels so small, so gloriously tiny in such a huge, wondrous universe, and she opens her eyes underwater to remind herself of reality. Plant leaves swim by like tadpoles. The curtain has ripped and flaps at them like worshipful jellyfish.

The storm outside, in the real world, doubles with the storm from The Story of Ruth, the end of the biblical drought. Her body convulses with sensations, each like the unclenching of a fist. Yes, the drought is over. It is over, it is over, it is over. She smiles, her mouth filling with water. Finally, she is dancing, truly dancing, across a submerged ballroom and fearing no misstep, for her partner has got her tight and will lead her anyplace she needs to go.