I awoke to a flounder standing on his tail fin. He had grown bat wings and they maintained the spotted pattern on his body, extending it out to the entire surface of the wings themselves. He was singing me a lullaby. I can only assume it was a lullaby by the tonality of the singing—it was in a language I did not understand and furthermore could not recognize.Somehow, this was the most distressing element of the scene. I shot up from where I was laying—a bed, I observed—and noticed the flounder was not singing to me at all. Now, how self-indulgent of my to think this gentleman of a fish whom I had never met before would bother with the quality of my sleep. Instead, there was a man across from the flounder. His hand was on his face in a gesture of judgement. Above the man’s head, a halo of pure steel. Though how it floated with no support I suppose I shall never know. Upon this man’s shoulders were two enormous birds. No—upon further inspection and a vigorous rubbing of my eyes, only one was identifiable as a bird. A Cockatoo, perhaps. The other may have been part bird but had the distinct head of an oversized lizard.
I sat up straighter in my bed, naturally rustling the sheets, and the flounder stopped singing. The man continued to watch as the fish turned to me and wrapped his bat arms around himself. Somehow when he did this they disappeared entirely. I looked from him back to the man with the halo, but this man never broke his gaze at the singing amphibian. I had to assume amphibian, as here he was, breathing air—at least that is what I observed. The flounder began a new song, this time in French. He began singing of a boat among choppy waves, a boat that was destroyed by Neptune on orders from Jupiter, who knew his precious Minerva had been captured and imprisoned on board. His singing remained slow and sweet, and I recognized that we were surrounded by candles—the only source of light in the room. The candles had burned low and had been transformed by their own nature into teardrops of wax, melted puddles all around them in a massacre of what once were their clean, tall forms. These candles flickered close to their end.
The man with the halo held a book in one hand, which he now opened and examined, then placed at his feet. The cockatoo preened itself, the lizard flicked its tail in a long, lazy cursive pendulum pattern. The man had a scroll under his arm which he now removed and held out in front of him, allowing it to unfurl to the ground. It hit the floor with a soft sound. The flounder sang on about the men aboard the ship for whom Neptune had no cares. He sang of their watery grave and how some tried to escape, but were violently returned to the ocean floor by Neptune’s servants. Some were devoured by sea creatures and made to live through the creatures’ feasts. Only once the creatures had been satisfied would Neptune allow the men’s lives to end. My stomach churned at the thought. Some men choked with no air, and again Neptune allowed them one thread of life until his point had been made, and even underwater the men cried and begged for their death. If only I had not known the French language, the song would have been beautiful. Instead I could feel dread rising within me, panicked for a moment that I had been the one to kidnap Athena, but then realized that was not true and somehow relaxed.
Then another turn as I realized the room was rocking gently. Had I been more ignorant, less observant, perhaps this would have calmed me, lulled me back to sleep, even. Instead as the flounder described each man’s final fate, as he detailed Minerva’s escape from her mortal cage by transforming into sea foam—as her chains fell to the floor, I realized mine were now tightly in place. The man with the scroll reached for an enormous quill in an ink jar the size of a powder keg which I had not seen before. He looked at me then. The steel from his halo was somehow sharply reflected in his eyes. The room swayed and my mouth felt as though it had been stuffed with cotton.
Minerva rose to the surface and I knew my path was in direct opposition. The room swayed and sank, swayed and sank. There was a door I had not, seen as it was overgrown with thorny rose vines. Impossible, I thought—though heaven alone knows why this became my primary concern—A rose cannot grow without access to sunlight, and cannot take root without soil! Furthermore, it would grow on a bush, not long and tall like the vines of ivy that enveloped my mother’s cottage. I planned to protest the absurdity of the situation when at once water began creeping through the door on all four sides.
The room continued to rock and sway.
The man with the quill announced my name, staring me dead in the eye as he did so. It startled me, and I knew as the cockatoo squawked and the lizard hissed; as Minerva breathed air once more, that this next breath of mine would also be my last. I defiantly refused to breathe, then.
The flounder, however, suddenly crescendoed on the last note of his lullaby and the note was so pure and clear that I gasped. I saw the man drawing the last letters of my name on his scroll. My eyes began to sink closed, the water surrounded me, and the flounder took a bow as he burst into sea foam himself.
My last thoughts, at least, were pleasant. They were of roses and steel—a city devoured by the gardens of the country, of flounders and sea monsters floating through the air alongside the clouds, and of Minerva’s new found freedom from the greed of man.
I realized, as I my eyelids finally plunged me into the darkness of death that the man with the quill had been naggingly familiar. His face had been one I had seen in a mirror my whole life—
