The Thirst
SARAH ARCHER

The second-best cigarette he ever had was his first one. The best cigarette was the

one he would have today, his first in the seven years since he’d given them up. The urge to smoke had overtaken Gene as he set foot on the wet sidewalk outside his Chicago brownstone to walk his daughter to school, her hand hot and papery dry in his even in the misery of November. The need kindled not in his head or his heart but as a little tug somewhere behind his navel, like a primordial instinct seeded long before humans cultivated tobacco. It resurfaced from nowhere, as if to prove it had been not dead but waiting all along. 

As he and Ella passed ramen pop-ups and medspas and cheap holdout pizzerias

with Powerball signs in the windows, the tug became a yank. He felt twitchy, embattled. Little electric jolts were pricking between his toes, behind his eyes, and the only thing that could call them off was nicotine. Normally he savored his morning ritual with Ella. He’d pack her lunch with mortadella and gruyere tea sandwiches that he cut into stars and dinosaurs with cookie cutters. Then he’d walk her to school, and she’d stop along the way to splash in puddles in her cobalt boots, or to stare up and class the clouds into her own taxonomy: rabbit tails, dust, preacher beard, old woman’s fingers. Now, as the craving grew, he felt with guilt that he couldn’t wait to get rid of her. 

By the time he handed her off at the front doors of Chaste Heart Elementary

School, he was wasted with desire.

He hurried down the block, around the corner, and across the street, as if Ella might

otherwise spot him in the act. Then he stopped on the sidewalk and pulled his pack of American Spirits from the inner pouch of his work bag. The box was worn, the nubby pulp of the paper coming through where the graphic Indian’s profile had been rubbed away. The edges of the lid were soft and wrinkled, and the cigarettes inside, when he allowed himself a sniff, smelled disappointingly neutral. Gene had only smoked one cigarette from this pack—the back left corner was depressed into the hollow spot—before kicking the habit when Ella was born. It had felt more feasible to quit when he kept the pack with him, a way to tell himself that he wasn’t truly giving them up. 

Now, he wasn’t sure if he should rejoice that he still had the smokes or regret that he

had made this too easy for himself, but in the moment, he didn’t have time to consider. He pulled the first available cigarette from the back left corner, took out his lighter, lit the tip, and inhaled. He let the smoke unfurl into his lungs. It was like waking, breathless, from a nightmare.

He stood on the sidewalk as pedestrians bent around him and smoked the cigarette

down to its smoldering end, then stepped off and tossed the butt into the gutter. He heard a splash and looked back just in time to see a warm glow of light breathe up and disappear. He squinted into the darkness of the aperture, then continued to work.

Gene enjoyed feeding his family. That night he cooked duck with shallots and

broiled chestnuts, paired with a copper-colored Sauternes. Then he and Brenda retired to bed after watching some mildly interesting murder show from one of their streaming services. Their ceiling was painted an ecru the decorator had said would reflect light gently for nighttime reading, and their bed had a device with tubes fitted under the bedframe, which puffed the bamboo sheets with warm air in the winter and cool in the summer. 

“I’m worried about Ella,” he said. 

Brenda looked up from her phone, where she was watching a movie he remembered

her watching before, something with glamorous Italian women in red dresses. She often revisited the same favorites rather than trying anything new. Her eyes—dark half-dollars with straight brows slashed atop—had been the first thing that caught him about her. They’d made him think of a 1960s film star of the French New Wave. Now, sometimes they struck him more as bovine. 

“She asked me on the way home from school if the trees knew her sins,” he went on,

“since they grew out of the dirt which was full of old bones.”

“She’s just imaginative,” Brenda said.

“She’s morbid. Moralistic in this regressive way. She worries too much for a seven-

year-old.” Gene scratched at a shaving cut on his neck. In many ways he resembled his cohort of upper-middle-class 30-somethings in the city: wavy hair with a speckle of grays and neatly trimmed temples, white teeth and a baritone laugh, a growing barrel shape to his middle. But he kept his nails a millimeter or two longer than most men’s so he could pick at scabs. 

“You worry too much.” She rolled over to him, the softness of her stomach within

her sweatshirt coming to rest against his side. “You have a smart daughter and a loving wife. Be happy.” She lay her cheek against his, and stiffened. “Your hair smells like smoke.”

“Went to lunch with Jake. He was smoking on the walk back.”

“Do you ever miss it?” she asked.

“It’s been years. Why should I miss it now?”

The next day he stopped again to smoke after dropping Ella off. He would throw

the pack away after this. Just one more cigarette wouldn’t make a difference, except to quell the craving that had been clawing at him all night and morning. 

When he threw the cigarette butt into the wide opening of the gutter, he heard the

splash again, and this time, a voice: “Thanks.” The sound was raspy, with extra sibilance on the S, and echoey, like it had come from the sewer itself. He looked around, but no one was talking to or looking at him. He crouched and peered into the gutter. A face swam up to him out of the darkness. 

“Oh my God,” he said. “How did you get down there? Are you okay?”

“You don’t look so hot yourself,” the woman said. Her voice sounded old, but her

heart-shaped face was young, with upswept green eyes where he caught flickers of orange, like a corn snake vanishing through grass. She was faintly green, too, around her temples and her Cupid’s bow, and at the tips of her short, childlike fingers, where she balanced his cigarette butt. 

“I mean are you stuck? Here.” He kneeled and extended his arms, but she laughed, a

gritty sound. 

“I ain’t no landlubber, and I don’t get picked up by strange men that easily.” 

With a great swish, she pinched her side and flicked up a long tail, muscular and

iridescent. Its scales caught the sunlight before disappearing back into the black. Gene blinked as shock engulfed him. But there she still was, and she laughed again. She grinned at him, plush pink lips exposing finely tapered teeth, and sniffed his cigarette butt, then ate it. 

Gene stumbled back on his heels and hurried away. 

Throughout the day at work he performed subtle checks to see if he was sane:

covering one eye and reading the faded Heinz Tomato Ketchup Factory sign on a brick building out the window, confirming the date and the president’s name on Google. None of his coworkers looked at him like he was a man who’d just seen a mermaid. The hotelier clients he spent much of the day on the phone with, as the VP of a purveyor of bespoke plumbing systems, spoke to him as if he were a person who occupied rational society. So he concluded that he still was. It must just have been the influx of nicotine. He wasn’t used to it after all these years. Maybe the cigarettes had gone bad. He supposed that was a thing cigarettes could do. But he didn’t feel sick. If anything, he was keyed up. The jokes he made with clients landed, 100%. He twirled his pen in the air and caught it effortlessly every time. 

He should forget about what he had seen. It couldn’t be healthy to dwell on a

hallucination. And he should definitely not smoke again. 

But he couldn’t stop thinking about the mermaid and her flickering eyes. Maybe if

he could go back and check the gutter, he’d see what had produced the vision—a trick of light off water deep in the sewer, some creative graffiti—and he’d have resolution, then he could forget. 

What if there really was a woman down there? How could he abandon someone

who might need help? Her little fingers with their shell-like nails would close around the back of his neck as he lifted her out, the pert flower of her mouth laughing in his ear. 

He left work fifteen minutes early to go check the gutter. And of course, on the way

there, he had to smoke a cigarette. 

This time, he looked around to see if anyone was watching. People ignored

“eccentric” behavior anyway. It was easier than getting involved. So he bent deliberately and chucked the butt in the gutter, then waited. Her laugh bounced up to him before she rose, already swallowing the cigarette. Her dark wet hair was plastered around the sides of her face, like someone had licked it in place, and the buoyant brown flesh of her chest was daubed in mud mixed with little bits of broken glass and shredded junk mail. He wanted to sink his fingers into her.

“I was getting hungry,” she said. “It’s about fucking time.”

As the weeks went on, Gene guessed it really was true what people were always

saying about how you should drink more water. The more he visited the mermaid—after dropping Ella off, on his lunch breaks, before picking Ella up, any time he could conjure an excuse to leave the office—the thirstier he got. Maybe it was the cigarettes drying his throat. He told himself he’d just get through that pack of American Spirits so he didn’t waste it, but he tore through the pack in a few days, sucking on each cigarette like a greedy infant, and immediately purchased another. He started carrying a water bottle, made of recycled fishing wire, in his bag, and drained the bottle four times a day. He figured that was why he was losing weight. The curves of his deltoids began to bulge through and his waist nipped in. He felt faster, stronger, and his hair grew shinier. He was in too much of a rush to shave every morning, but the stubble sculpted his jaw. To mask the smoke smell, he started wearing Armani cologne. He had some misgivings about the ethics of luxury brands, but on his way to the restroom one day, a young female coworker swiveled as he walked past, angling her eyelashes at him. “You smell delicious,” she said.

Even with coming into the office late and leaving early, and skipping out more and

more during the day, he was closing more sales than ever. He worked like a fiend. Sleep became an afterthought. He filled the late hours with writing poetry, which he hadn’t done in years. Poetry had been his first love. He’d written songs and poems as a teenager, then studied writing at Vassar, had fantasies of making his name as a poet, but that meant working a day job as a creative writing professor. When Ella and marriage came along, the fantasy wasn’t sustainable, and one by one, his poems left him. Now they came roaring back, demanding release onto his old journal, or valet tickets, or scrawled around the logo on a Starbucks napkin.

Ella delighted in her dad’s new playful energy. She tickled him relentlessly and

rhapsodized over his pantomimed agony. Even in the cold, she’d pull him through the park, collecting feathers, stones, clods of moss, and twigs, then spread her treasures in front of him on the grass like tarot cards and tell him their stories. 

Brenda enjoyed Gene’s new energy too. One night as she was brushing her teeth, he

came up behind her and stroked her buttocks over her shapeless nightshirt. “Wharrudoing?” she asked through a mouthful of toothpaste. He pulled her nightshirt up and panties down. “Gene!” she laughed, trying not to swallow. They rarely had sex in bed anymore, and never out of it. But he lowered his boxers and took her there over the bathroom counter. She laughed and sprayed minty flecks on the mirror.

But more and more, when Gene wasn’t with the mermaid, he was thinking of her,

and when he was with her, he was consumed. Her dirty voice made his hair prickle. His Banana Republic trousers got stained and scraped thin because he kept swiveling on his knees, hunkering at the gutter, trying to see more of her from every angle. He’d see her face, a strange, shadowed moon, but her body would be lost to the blackness below, or she’d flip and swim and he’d see her slick tail, shiny, like motor oil on the surface of water, but the rest of her would just be a whip of wild wet hair. Sometimes he glimpsed the swell of her hips, like the rounded lobes of a heart. She smelled like sex. 

“You always leave me hungry,” she complained, after he had smoked three cigarettes

in a row to give her the butts. So he started gathering other food for her. Everything had to be hot. He’d light scraps of poetry he wrote or bits of newspaper from the ground, and she’d devour them, still sparking. He bought her scalding coffee that she drank in a gulp, and a stick of incense that she worked like a lollipop. He scoured the trash of a wood-fired pizza place and found her a bag of ash. 

But it was never enough. “What are you trying to do, starve me?” she asked. “You

don’t like a girl with some flesh on her bones?” She cackled and licked her upper lip, hoisting her mud-smeared breasts. 

“Doesn’t anyone else ever feed you?” he asked. 

“No. It’s only ever been you.”

She reached her little green fingers up from the grate and pulled on the collar of his

sweater, lowering his mouth, a cigarette still dangling in it, to hers. She closed her lips around the smoldering end and drew the whole cigarette into her mouth, her wet tongue flicking his. He felt, for a moment, he had died.

Gene grew thinner as winter came. The skin of his back crept tighter around the

ribs, and the skin of his thighs bagged. One night he paused in the doorway of Ella’s room on his way to bed, picking at a crust of blood on his loose elbow, where he’d scraped it on the metal lip of the gutter. The girl kneeled by her bed, hands propped below her chin, whispering, a sound like moths clamoring around a light. She prayed every morning and night, though neither he nor Brenda had taught her to, or knew to whom she was praying. The blue moonlight sculpted the orbs of her eyeballs, fluttering fervently behind her closed lids.

He started when a hand pressed the small of his back. It was Brenda. 

“Come to bed, it’s nice and warm,” she murmured, sliding her hand down.

“I have to shower first,” he whispered back. He resented their warm bed now, and

the app that let him adjust the lights in the home remotely, and their weekend getaways to Jackson Hole, and the organic oat milk that kept the acidity of his coffee off his stomach. It was all too easy, too soft; he’d built it all for his family and in quick sharp moments sometimes he hated them for it.

In the shower he scrubbed hard, sloughing at his raw knees and elbows. There was

grime, or maybe tobacco, in his nailbeds, which he dug out, letting it flick the white tiles of the shower, then blasting the walls clean with the showerhead. He tried to ignore how good the water felt. He let the shampoo sting his eyes and tried not to think about how the water flowed through the city, through the gutters and pipes and up and back and down, how she floated in it on her back, her long hair spreading on the currents, droplets beading on the hot skin of her stomach; he let the steam enter his pores and the water douse him, lifting his feet and spreading his toes so it didn’t miss a speck; he tilted his head back so it could gush down his throat. 

“That was quite a long shower,” Brenda said when he slid into bed, spent. “Look at

you. Fresh as a daisy.”

The mermaid wanted more and more, not just from him, but of him. “I’m

starving,” she moaned. “You’re the only one who can satisfy me.” She writhed her tail and he caught a glitter far below, like sparks from a severed wire. Then she sank into the shadows.

So he started bringing strands of hair from his brush, or clipping small tufts from

his head or arm with the multi-use tool on his keychain, and lighting those on fire for her to eat. He put nail trimmings in a Pepsi bottle cap and tried to light them for her. They didn’t really catch, but warmed enough that she devoured them anyway. He took money from his wallet and rolled the bills for her into cigarillos. Still, she’d pout and sigh. “You don’t care about little old me at all. Asshole.” She swished her tail and laughed, dove into the water and blew up a stream of bubbles.

Gene didn’t feel much like cooking anymore, so Brenda made do with picking up

take-out on the way home from her teaching job. He still couldn’t sleep, but it became harder and harder to channel that wakeful energy into work or writing or play with his daughter. Instead, he listened to music, Bon Iver to Eminem to Kendrick Lamar, letting it pour through him, the only thing that reached his soul. He started taking his earbuds into bed and playing music while he lay there awake, otherwise, all he could hear was her voice, a sound that snaked tendrils around him, always on the edge of a laugh or a hiss. He felt she was everywhere, slipping through the sewer system, sliding up the pipes, atomized into the atmosphere like vapor. 

His thirst was out of control. He’d abandoned the recycled water bottle and started

carrying a gallon jug everywhere, which he’d drain in half an hour. “I think I’m addicted to water,” he told the doctor. “And I’ve started smoking again. And I’m losing weight.”

“Good job on the water. Keep it up,” the doctor said.

One day a major client came in for a meeting: a big fish, one he’d been chasing all

quarter. Gene had led the department in laying the groundwork for this deal, doing site visits at hotels around the country to develop the exact specs for this brand’s plumbing systems, schmoozing the ops head with three-course dinners. Now all he had to do was clinch it.

As the execs took their seats around the conference table, Gene tried to focus on

small talk, not on the glasses of water placed at each seat. “How’s Syed doing?” he asked one guy. “Did he make the soccer team?” He realized two minutes in that he’d already emptied his own glass, though he couldn’t remember even touching it. His tongue felt like a block of paste in his mouth. 

“Sheila, can you bring up the deck?” he tried to say when they were all settled, but

the words got lost in a cough. His neighbor pushed her own glass over, which Gene took with barely a nod and depleted in a gulp. The relief only lasted a minute. As the junior account lead went over the deal points, all he could think about was the glasses on the table, the small body of water in each coy beneath its flat, implacable surface. The water was beautiful, clear as diamonds, trembling almost imperceptibly in its sensitivity to the touch of the atmosphere.

“Excuse me,” he said, then took each remaining glass, one by one, and drank it,

lunging across the table in his sweater and sport coat to reach the farthest ones. Everyone froze and watched.

When he left the office twenty minutes later, out of a job, he was still thirsty. 

Though he no longer went to the office, he continued to take Ella to and from

school every day and went on long zigzagging walks through the city in the cold wind, filling his chapped lips from the water jug. One day as he walked with Ella, they passed the mermaid’s sewer on the other side of the street. He turned and saw the mermaid’s laughing face flash through the opening, followed by her tail, lashing all the way out. Ella saw it too. 

“Daddy, look, it’s a pretty mermaid!” she cried. 

“There’s no such thing, honey,” he said.

“But you also said there’s no such thing as God.”

The next time he visited the gutter, the mermaid tipped her head at him slyly. “I saw

your little girl,” she said.

“You leave her alone.” He coughed on a knot of phlegm, then exhaled cigarette

smoke into her face. She drew it in, the coils of smoke winding into her nostrils. 

“She looks tasty. So much uncut energy. Pure, white-hot.”

“Aren’t I enough for you?” he asked. 

“Come here.” She floated up, taking him by the collar of his jacket, so that her warm

briny breath covered him. She kissed his mouth, then each of his closed lids, then pressed her lips to his forehead, right between the eyes, and attached herself there with the suction of a barnacle. He felt himself go limp, tethered to life only by her lips, and energy passed from his forehead to her. She was emptying and filling him at the same time. He had never felt such ecstasy. 

Every time he went back, they performed this same ritual, the mermaid feeding

directly off his essence. It was delirious in the moment, but left him depleted. His restless wakefulness vanished, and at home he barely did anything but shower and nap, rousing himself to pull sleepily at his water carton before shrugging on his coat and heading out into the chilly city again. He didn’t bother to disguise the smoke smell from Brenda anymore. He felt disgusted with himself, even scared of himself, helpless, but a small part of him liked raising her ire. She had never seemed to sense how their safe mutual contentment was his greatest source of discontent.

“I lost my job. Let me lick my wounds,” he said in one of their many arguments,

slapping his hand on the kitchen counter.

“This started before you got fired. There’s a reason you got fired in the first place!” 

“Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Look for another job. Stop smoking. Help me with Ella. Take care of yourself.

Shave and brush your teeth, don’t just fucking shower!” Brenda went to his coat

hanging in the entry, wrested his cigarettes from the pocket, and flushed them down the toilet. 

He went out for a walk and bought another pack. 

“This is the last time,” he told the mermaid that night, passing a leaf down to her,

its singed edge red and crackling. “You’re killing me. You’re killing my family.”

“Oh? Are you serious?” She snatched the leaf and crunched it down. Her nostrils

flared and her eyebrows lurched inward over her flashing eyes. “You think you can just leave? Have you thought about how you’re killing me?” 

“You were here before I came, and you’ll always be here.”

“Don’t you forget it. Miserable cunt.” She spat up a stream of black water, then

somersaulted back into the depths. Wiping the droplets from his cheek, he felt a thrill of need for her. 

It drizzled that evening. Gene sat on the fire escape. The rain kept putting out his

cigarette, and every time, he’d cup his hand and relight it. He felt as if he’d been pounded very thin and spread over the basement of the world. Even holding his head atop his neck seemed like pointless, conscious labor. He wondered, if he tilted his head just so, if enough rain would eventually hit his nostrils to drown him. 

A voice filled his ears, a strange tuneless rhythm, like someone humming into a glass

bowl. Either it came from the whole city, or it came from inside his mind. He gripped the slippery rail of the fire escape and bent himself back in through the window. “Do you hear that?” he called out.

Brenda came in and stopped, looking at the dirt and water that had blown all over

the bedroom carpet. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Have you had the window open?”

“Don’t you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The music.” He gestured with his cigarette, dropping ash, and paced through the

bedroom, tracking black footprints.

“Gene, your shoes! The carpet!” 

“I’m tired of the carpet! Why the fuck should I care about carpet?”

“Because this is our home! We live here with our daughter!” Brenda followed Gene

as he stalked through the house. She began to cry. “I don’t know how to offer help if you won’t take it. I don’t know how I can make you better.”

“What do you want me to do, leave?”

She shook her head. “You’re already gone.” Her sadness rang a distant note

somewhere in him, but it wasn’t enough to penetrate the song he was still searching for. He followed the music to the bathroom, but when he got there the door was locked. He shook the handle. 

“Why is this locked? Where’s Ella?”

“I thought she—” Brenda looked at his wild face and gripped her hands around his,

jiggling the handle too. “Ella?” She darted off through the house, calling Ella’s name, but Gene knew where his daughter was. He rammed his bony shoulder into the doorframe, again and again. With each second that passed, Ella could be—little flares began to pop in front of his eyes. Finally, with a crunch, the wood gave way. 

“Gene!” Brenda shrieked, and came running back, her sweater flopping, hair

swinging out of its bun, in time to see their daughter floating on her back in the full bathtub, her bloodless skin as pale as the porcelain, her eyes closed, and face wrenched in an expression of agony or ecstasy. 

Brenda gasped and pulled her from the tub, water gushing over the sides, and folded

the girl to herself and hurried from the room. “Baby, what were you doing? You know you don’t lock yourself in there in the bath.” As they passed, Gene saw Ella’s fingers twitch and heard her shallow breath. He breathed too, trembling all over as his heart and lungs came back. 

But the song was still everywhere. It was louder than ever. A low, cackling laugh

came alongside it, shaking the glass-green water in the tub. 

He dipped his hand below the surface to flip the lever and open the drain, but a

force sucked his fingers down, so violently his whole body followed, and he tripped into the tub facedown, water slopping out. He hooked a foot over the rim to try to pull himself up, but the force drew his head underwater. Tendrils of long dark hair crept up through the holes in the drain. As his forehead was suctioned down onto the drain cover, he felt the metal holes cut hard against his skin and the hair lick his face like butterfly kisses. Energy flowed from him, a different feeling than the searing departure of oxygen from his lungs: like letting go of something he hadn’t even realized was so heavy. He was exiting himself, but being filled too, surrounded and invaded by her in the water soaking through his clothes and sloshing into his mouth and down his throat. 

For a moment, he stopped thrashing. It was easier this way, even heavenly, to open

himself to that feeling of her tipping the osmotic balance of his cells.

But it wouldn’t be enough. It was never, never enough.

The force through the drain was separating his skin from his skull. She was still

hungry. And if she couldn’t have him, she would take someone else. He had to draw her away from his family.

Gene pushed his hands against the base of the bathtub and powered every muscle to

launch himself to his feet, water splattering the ceiling. He gasped and stumbled from the room, his ears popping, fractals exploding across his vision. In his waterlogged shoes, he went through the apartment, grabbed his coat, and walked out the door. Brenda made no noise to try to stop him. Maybe she was distracted with Ella, or maybe she didn’t care if he left. 

The city outside was slick and hazy, the rain picking up and turning to steam on the

street. An electric sign at a bus stop flickered, its cord sparking against the black sky. Fog floated from the sewer grates and manhole covers, so dense it could be campfire smoke. Sharp whispers filled his ears, but he couldn’t tell if they were the hiss of tires on wet asphalt, or her. 

As he walked down the sidewalk, the brume and the rain seemed to grow around

him. He squinted, almost hitting a passing pedestrian. It began to feel like the rain was pushing him, like thousands of tiny hands, and he had the sensation of being moved along in a mob. Nobody else appeared to notice. Not even as the rain thickened from individual drops into crystal ropes, and then whole solid panels of water that braided around him like a funnel, ushering him forward. Was what was happening invisible to everyone walking by? Or was everyone else just absorbed in their own worlds? 

Then the force was not just pushing him from outside, but pulling him from

within, like all the water in his body—in his blood, in the fluids in every organ, even in his very brain—was dragging him forward in a motion as inevitable as the righting of a compass needle. He could no longer see where he was going, the city just darkness and blurry lights through the tornado of water, and then he felt himself lift from the ground, tilt, and slide down, his feet and elbows knocking something sharp along the way, the water flattening over his face, forcing the breath from his nostrils, a roar like a waterfall in his ears, and then he landed, and it all stopped. 

As he sat up, he blinked at what looked like a photographic negative of the outside

world, all blackness with diluted swaths of light. The deluge had disappeared. There was only a trickle at his feet. He was in the sewers, circular concrete tunnels extending to his left and right. He felt as if he had slipped into the subconscious of the city. 

He stood on his own power, and since the water didn’t exert pressure one way or

the other, he chose left and began to walk. Despite the cold of his soaked clothes and hair, it was warmer down here than on the streets above. The humid air was full of the stink of stagnant water and carrion. Trash littered the shallow stream—condoms, gummy toilet paper. He found a piece of mostly-dry newspaper balled up to the side and picked it up to carry it with him. The slap of his footsteps played against the periodic crash of water down the side drains and the thump of cars overhead, pierced once by the shriek of a raccoon who skittered by. There was no sign of her, no tailfin disappearing around a corner, no feeling of force from within or without. Her absence increased his fear. Maybe she was giving him a chance to back out—but he wouldn’t do that now.

The farther he got from the opening, the darker it grew. He took the lighter from

his jacket pocket and used it only in controlled bursts, once a minute or so, to ensure his way forward. Flash: the walls had transitioned from concrete to old, crumbling brick. The water got higher as he walked, sloshing his shins, and the sounds of the city faded, replaced by the ring of water dripping from the slimy ceiling. He made sure to keep the balled-up newspaper from getting sprayed. Flash: clouds of steam hovered above the rising murk, smudging his light into a quaking halo. Flash: a transept of other pipes branching from his, then farther ahead, a colonnade, running parallel and then veering off, carrying the chorus of its water with it. Flash: red and blue graffiti shining on the damp bricks, like stained glass. 

Now he did begin to feel her, pulling his ankles forward with mounting aggression,

and he knew he was caught in her tide. Flash: stalactites of mineral buildup suspended from the ceiling, cragged like coral. He allowed the intervals of darkness to lengthen as the putrid water crept up to his chest, splashing his chin as he half swam, half walked. He tucked the newspaper into the collar of his shirt to keep it above the water. Flash: a reflection of small animal eyes that blinked out before his flame. Flash: anthropomorphic bundles of twigs, hair, and mildewed cloth nailed in a row down the bricks—in one, a cigarette butt. Things that felt alive slipped past his ankles. 

Flash: the mermaid was two feet in front of him. 

She gleamed out of the darkness like a fallen star. Gene froze, and she glided toward

him and pulled him into her arms, and he felt her fully against him at last, the silkiness of her flesh, and the hardness where it transitioned into scales. She breathed a trail of warm steam up his neck, along the rim of his ear, then kissed him with her lush lips. Moving to his forehead, she pressed her mouth there, and he began to feel her siphoning his energy. He could see faintly even without his lighter, as if a weak luster exuded right from her skin. 

But Gene ripped himself away, sloshing back. 

She smirked. “What? You’re not that kind of boy?”

In a tunnel winding off theirs, he saw a ledge next to the rushing drain, and he

swam toward it, pulling whatever trash he could grab from the water as he went, then hauled himself up onto the platform, shoulders smarting. He crouched at the edge and collected everything that went by in arm’s reach: sticks, a sneaker, a flyer with its dyes bled into a puddle of brown and pink. He blew on them and fanned them with one hand while he harvested with the other. 

The mermaid dipped into the sludge, only her head above water, and looked up at

him with round eyes. “Don’t play hard to get. I’m too good a fuck to waste time flirting.” 

Gene took out the dry piece of newspaper and lit it, positioning the other pieces of

trash nearby to burn off their moisture, adding to the fire as he could. The arid heat danced pleasantly on his hands.

“Ooh, a treat for me? Sweets for the sweetie?” She sprang from the water like a

dolphin and did a backflip, laughing. When an ember of newspaper floated into the air, she caught it, then used it to draw a heart on the curved wall in soot, which she licked off. 

Gene noticed the twist of her slim waist as she arced back, and the way her long

tongue uncoiled from her mouth like a scorpion’s tail. But he kept building his pile. “This is for me. Not for you,” he said.

Her brows lowered and she zoomed through the water so quickly she was next to

him in half a second. “I’m so wet right now,” she purred, and chuckled, the low sound tickling his ear. He didn’t look up. “I’ll die if you don’t feed me,” she declared. When he continued blowing on the flame, her voice turned plaintive, echoing through the tunnels like the calls of a search party in the woods. “I’m nothing without you. Look.” 

A glint on the water caught his eye, and he saw scales starting to drift off her and

toward him, pearlescent on the muck, like flower petals on the surface of a lake. One touched his hand as he grasped in the water, and a thrill shivered through him, but still he built his fire, by now a sizable mound. 

“You think you can resist what’s always been?” she hissed. “Energy is neither created

nor destroyed, only taken.”

“You don’t have to take.” 

“Don’t I? I never wanted to hurt you, or your little girl, or anyone,” she said, more

softly, and he wondered if this was sincerity, or at least faithfulness to the only truth she knew. “If you’re not willing to suffer a little, how do I know that you love me?” No coy dip of her chin, or glance through pitch-dark lashes—she looked at him fully, waiting for an answer. 

He saw that now that he was in the sphere of her black hole, he and everything

around him would continue to annihilation, that neither she nor any other power could prevent herself from taking what it was in her nature to take. She was as enslaved as he had been—and for that, he pitied her. But he, at least, had a choice.

Gene had calculated that they were pretty deep underground at this point,

hopefully far enough from the buildings and people above to mitigate any damage. He knew plenty about plumbing systems from his work, and was well aware of the dangers of flammable gases in a sewer not adequately vented. If he kept lighting fires down here, it was only a matter of time before something exploded. But he was far past the point of playing it safe. He just hoped, selfishly, it would be over soon. 

Gene figured that someone up there must be pleased with his sacrifice, because the

whole thing went up almost the instant he stepped into the pyre, with only time enough for him to glimpse the ghastly exhilaration on the mermaid’s face. As the pain cracked him open, he shut his eyes and drew the smoke inside.

Sarah Archer's debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for the screen. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy's Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board’s Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and reached the finals of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com.