Requiem in Blue

Laurent Aguillard wiped the sweat off his brow with one hand and led his daughter gently along with the other, silently cursing the sun of the South Pacific. Somehow, in spite of the abundance of trees, the two could never seem to stay in the shade. “Wear a hat,” they’d said. “Make sure you use SPF 60,” they’d said. “It isn’t really always sunny,” they’d said. They were jackasses, and their advice did nothing to keep the heat from seething off the ocean, steeping in his skin, and whisking away the last reserves of his patience and goodwill. He vowed never to take vacation recommendations from Baptiste again; the guy was nice enough, but...fuck nice, this was too damn hot.

“You sure you’re all right, dewdrop?” Laurent asked, looking down at the little one trotting alongside him. She looked up at him and nodded. He smiled; Ophélie had grown into, in so many ways, a little mirror image of her mother, but those eyes she’d gotten from him. A mercurial blue, bright as the summer sky when struck by light, deep as the sea when cast into shadow, surrounded the faintest ring of gold. The former Madame Aguillard may try to remove any trace of Laurent from the daughter they’d created together, but those eyes remained an incontrovertible testament to his fatherhood: Félice couldn’t erase the Aguillard blue.

He squeezed her hand and followed their guide, trying to remember to breathe through his nose, kind of succeeding, and mostly just feeling sweaty. Why wasn’t the guide sweaty? He just glistened—who glistens? Laurent could smell the beef-and-onion odor of his own armpits seeping through a layer of cologne. The guide probably smelled like...oh, vanilla or gardenias, something outlandishly idyllic and tropical. Laurent, following absently behind, almost stepped off the edge of the path where it abruptly dropped into the stream below. Their guide swept an arm over the water.

“And here, my friends,” he announced, grinning a little too widely, “we have the sacred eels of Huahine.”

Laurent glanced over the side of the simple concrete slab into the shimmering water. Underneath the surface, he could make out some slow, serpentine shapes moving around the base of the stone.

“Would you look at that.”

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He squeezed Ophélie’s hand once more before retrieving it and answering the call, striding off into the shelter of one of the leafier trees. His daughter frowned in his direction before looking down at her sandals, crinkling her dress in her hands. Temātua, the guide—Papa may not have remembered his name, but Ophélie did—heaved a sigh and squatted down on his haunches.

“Your dad’s a really busy guy.”

Ophélie nodded, still looking down. Temātua's words sounded a little funny, but they were soft, kind. She liked that.

“He’s so busy that he doesn’t have a lot of fun, does he?”

Ophélie shook her head.

“But you like to have fun.”

Another nod.

“And I bet you’re not afraid, either. You’re a brave one, I can tell.”

She looked at Temātua, his shining eyes, his broad smile. Her gaze drifted back away to Papa.

“I’d like to introduce you to some special friends of mine. It’s Ophélie, right?”

Nod.

“All right, Ophélie. Would you like to meet them?”

Ophélie glanced sidelong at Papa, who gesticulated forcefully at a bush.

“You won’t get in trouble, I promise. I’ll tell him it was all my idea.”

Temātua held out his hand. It was darker than Papa’s, without the chimpanzee hair on the back, but it looked just as sturdy, not to mention less sweaty. Ophélie looked up and smirked, taking his hand.

Temātua led her carefully down the steps to the bank. They waded into the shallow stream, surprisingly cool as it rushed over their feet. Ophélie looked up at Temātua.

“Where are your friends?” she asked.

He grinned again and pointed to the base of the concrete wall that marked the edge of the road. Long, waving, brown-black bodies started to pour from the darkness underneath. Ophélie’s eyes widened as she took a step back. She inhaled sharply and grabbed Temātua’s arm with her free hand.

“It’s all right, I promise,” he cooed. “Watch.”

He approached them and knelt down on one knee, the tiny waves lapping at his shorts, and stretched out a hand into the pool. One after another, the eels undulated and slipped over and around his arm and then his legs, simply making contact. They moved deliberately, calmly. One clambered around his hand, pressing its snout eagerly against him.

“No, no food this time, friend. I’ll come by with some tasty fish for you later.”

He turned back to Ophélie, who watched, mesmerized.

“They’d love to meet you, Ophélie.”

She gripped the hem of her dress and swung her fists back and forth, twisting at the waist with each motion, biting her lip. After a few moments, Ophélie took a deep breath and stepped cautiously out into the pebbles, feeling her sandals tug away from her feet as the water clung to them. She stumbled a little, and Temātua held out his hand again to steady her.

Slowly, gently, the eels made their way over to Ophélie. She realized just then that they were bigger than she was from head to toe—or in their case, head to tail—their thick, dark bodies shimmering with patterns like pebbles—or freckles, she thought, touching the coppery spots on her arm. One eel looked up at her through the water, and she blinked as she almost saw her own eyes looking back at her: two circles of bright, light blue, and as she looked more closely, two smaller circles of gold.

An eel slid slowly over her feet; Ophélie giggled at the sensation, faintly slimy like the skin of a frog. Another slipped by her ankles, and another. She laughed as they tickled her, and finally shrieked and squealed when it was all just too much. She splashed back out of the shallows, still squealing as one of the eels wiggled after her.

“Get the fuck away from her!”

The words came from above as a stone hurtled through the air and struck the eel on the rocks, which flailed and flipped back into the stream, leaving the pebbles behind it stained red as it struggled to return to the water.

Laurent flew down the steps and across to Ophélie, hoisting her up into his arms and breathing heavily as he stared at the sea serpents fleeing back into their cave.

“Are you okay, dewdrop?” he asked the little one in his arms, running a hand through her hair and kissing her cheek.

“Papa, I’m fine, I just—”

“What the fuck was that?” he demanded, staring furiously at Temātua. “What were you thinking, taking my child anywhere near those goddamn monsters?”

“Please, Monsieur Aguillard,” replied Temātua softly, holding out his hands, “They’re harmless, I promise—in fact, they love kids. Ophélie was in no danger—”

“No danger,” Laurent cut in flatly. “No danger, my ass. You had wild animals chasing after my little girl, and you’re telling me there was no danger. This is bullshit. The tour’s over. Take us back to the hotel.”

Temātua opened his mouth, and then closed it, looking down.

“Yes, Monsieur Aguillard.”

That night, Ophélie dreamed that she woke up back by the sacred eels, staring down at the stream. Blood still darkened the pebbles at the waterline, the uneven surface of the rocks a speckled burgundy under the silvery light of the moon. She made her way down the steps and into the water, more easily than before, the sound of the creek as much as the flowing water trickling over her.

Slowly this time, the eels began to emerge from their hidden place, staring at her with those same eyes. Their speckled bodies looked strangely dark, even in the faint light, but their eyes shone a brilliant blue. Ophélie sat down in the water. Her nightgown began to soak through, yet she didn’t mind; the humid night air held steadily onto the heat of the day, fighting the chill. The eel in front looked up at her. She held out a hand in the water, and it nestled its head into her palm before retreating.

“I’m sorry Papa hurt your friend,” Ophélie said softly, almost whispering. “He’s real busy, and he forgets to pay attention and gets confused sometimes.”

Another eel slipped past her knee, another past her wrist resting in the water.

“He didn’t mean it. I still wanna be your friend.”

The long, waving shapes slipped over each other in the water. Ophélie glimpsed one moving in more staggered, lilting undulations than the others; the red spot on its back seemed less angry, but no less painful.

“Please don’t be mad at Papa. He was just afraid.”

The wounded eel made its lopsided way gradually to her, heaving its body into her lap. The pebbly sides of its body sparkled in the light as it bobbed near the surface, and its movements slowed. Smaller sparkles fell from Ophélie’s downcast eyes and splashed on the brown-black body.

“Please. I’m sorry.”

With a twitch, the eel looked up into the night air, made a sound like a rustling leaf, and vanished into nothing. Ophélie looked down at her now empty lap, frowning.

“Where’d—”

A violent lurch knocked her forward, and she caught herself on her palms, ripping through the water. She coughed and sputtered, retching as her lungs voided of air. Ophélie’s eyes streamed with tears as she continued to drool and spasm; all the while, the eels churned through the water beneath her. The spittle turned into a stream and then a cascade as she vomited water, too much water, into the stream beneath her. Her arms suddenly gave way beneath her, and her torso slapped heavily into the stream, her body flailing and rocking in the water. Her ribcage flattened with a wet, dull crunch as the flesh of her abdomen spilled out into the water around her, the shape that once was Ophélie collapsing, decaying.

The vomit erupting forth from her lips began to foam and bubble; mucus dribbled out of her mouth, now slack, and her head elongated, the skull snapping and splintering as it deformed. Her arms and legs, shriveled into wormlike, wrinkled sausage casings, billowed and bobbed in the current. Only her blue eyes, still flooded with tears, remained Ophélie.

With a rippling movement that overtook the whole of her dissolving body, she threw her head forward once, twice, thrice; and she hacked out a desperate, wretched cough that severed into a strangulated scream.

The man with the fancy clothes screamed at Maheana at the hotel desk, then at Temātua, then at no fewer than seventeen people who happened to work for some important man half a world away; those seventeen included a cleaning man who made the unfortunate mistake of glancing the fancy man’s way. He began each day screaming into his pillow, and he ended each evening screaming into a black metal box that shot his screaming voice across the ocean into another little black box which then screamed at someone else. He screamed at the stream, at the palm trees, at the heat, at the pebbles, at the sun. He screamed until well into the night, when his screams finally buckled and weakened into weeping. Only then could he sleep.

We heard him scream. We watched him pace back and forth over the stones which had long since shed the blood he had spilled. If only he would look back into our waters, he might see the blue of his own eyes, a deep blue surrounding rings of gold, a blue as bright as the summer sky when struck by light, a blue as deep as the sea when cast into shadow.