7 DAY STORY WRITING CHALLENGE #12 1st RUNNER UP

And the winner is…

Anna Gebbie

FISHWIFE

DYSTOPIAN

Mhairi was a fishwife, although she was not married, and she was not sure that the creatures whose bellies she slit were really fish. Maybe they used to be. The boquies, as she knew them, had arrived in one of the warmer currents years ago, and the boats still came in heaving with them every day. Mindless creatures, Mhairi thought, with no desire to live. Sometimes they would even fling themselves up out of the water and flail on the docks by her feet, staring up at her with their bulging black eyes. Their skin was smooth and yellow, and their flesh was so translucent that she could watch the passage of her knife. Not much taste to them either, but food was food, just like work was work. From her work, Mhairi could bring home a few boquies, and some coins to buy the gritty rice from the English paddies.

Home was a cold square room at the top of a tenement stair, kitted out with a bed, a rug and a chair. The building was high enough up Leith Walk that it had not been reached by the rising water, but if Mhairi craned her head out the window and looked down the hill she could see the docks and the sea beyond. Those docks had been built before Mhari was born, when the levels finally stabilised, and to her they marked the edge of Edinburgh, but she knew that the Walk had once continued much further, and that tenements just like hers lay below that grey water. Sometimes at work, she imagined she could make out a chimney beneath the swirling scum, and it sent a thrill up her arms. What lay in those murky rooms, submerged for so many years? Furniture, of course, and anything else too heavy for the evacuees to carry. Maybe there were exotic foods preserved down there in the cold, like bananas and bread. And what about the people who did not make it out? Were they too suspended, bobbing against their ceilings like pickled carrots in a jar?

Mhairi was not raised by the sea, but in a wooden shack on spindly legs, clinging to the side of a hill to keep from falling into the bog below. When the water was high, Mhairi paddled to school in a boat carved by her grandfather, but she spent most days wading around, catching frogs in her hands and hunting for blaeberries. Back then, when she looked at a frog, with its panicked eyes and tiny outstretched fingers, she almost always let it go. Now life and the boquie-knife had whittled away that empathy.

One long-ago summer day, when the steam was rising off the bog, Mhairi had been tracking a frog with some of the other children, laughing as it leaped from leaf to leaf. The little creature hopped into the water, and Mhairi followed, copying the movements of its green-blue legs, opening her eyes wide to see through the murk. Before her, a forest appeared, with twisting green stems interspersed with the sturdy trunks of her neighbours’ homes. She hung suspended in the water, marvelling at the mirror world. When she was ready to return to the game, Mhairi stood up, grinning as she shook the water from her hair, but her friends were not laughing any more. She realised her thin T-shirt had slipped off her shoulders, dragged down by the mud and water, and she quickly tried to cover herself up, but it was too late.

From that day on, the other children called her “creature”, and there was no more playing or wading in the water. Mhairi’s parents kept her bundled up and dry, always balanced in the middle of the boat, but the changes kept coming anyway. What had been pale lines running across her arms opened up into slits that gaped uncontrollably like thirsty mouths. The webbing that had always connected her fingers and toes grew more prominent, and took on an iridescent sheen. Mhairi grew accustomed to covering her arms every day and always wearing gloves, and to hearing her parents speak through gritted teeth. One night, she returned to the bog one final time, swimming across its surface in the moonlight to begin her journey into the city.

When Mhairi was working at the docks, her secret was a surprising comfort. If someone laughed at the wifies or made a grab at her, she imagined slashing out with her boquie-knife, flicking her wrist across the offending neck in that well-practised arc. As the crowd gasped, she would pull off her gloves, revelling in their horror, and dive off into the water, finally feeding those hungry gills. Perhaps that new world would feel like home, and she would never return to the surface again. For now though, she stood on the stones at the edge of the city and worked for her fish and rice.