Giles sets down the charcoal pencil.
His shoulders hunched beneath a brown sweater as he looks up his work. He hadn't forgotten her, or her monster, and their absence evidently haunted him. Sometimes he swore he could hear Glen Miller on the other side of his wall where Elisa'd lived. He heard it in his sleep,
mixed with clacking heels and the purrs of a certain supposed god.
Now it was quiet. Since his laying off by Klein & Saunders, Giles's been a bit of a free bird. In the hole that record players, signs, and saltwater stains used to be, Giles puts art. It lines his windows, fills his shelves, canopies his roof. Whether he had been a god, a creature, or just a figment of his imagination, doesn't matter. Wherever Giles looks, he sees him. Whether she's dead, alive, or never existed at all, doesn't matter either. Where Giles sees the creature, Elisa is with him. They're like magnets. Plural, but singular. One and the same.
Except in the piece he has just finished.
Here, they are joined. Here they are muffled, abstract and ambiguous. The lines he shaded of them are soft, so that the shapes of them could be anyone. On the ocean floor they dance turning it into a briny ballroom that they alone traverse. In his world, they are a mother and father (in metaphorical framing. He'd pondered the idea of the creature being able to viably impregnate Elisa. The notion was quickly banished. She could screw him all she wanted, but Giles preferred not to think about what kind of brood they'd birth.). Around them in a slow tornado swirl a thousand different creatures and beasts from the sea, their children. Whale sharks and bluefin tuna and swordfish and octopi and sperm whales, crabs and manta rays and a million more little things.
They're in the midst of a twirl, the little curves of their hands close together. What detail the creatures does have is all scales and muscles and light. He's what he was at his best. Elisa's in a coat. It's oddly familiar to the red one she had owned, the heavy one she had disappeared into the canal with . . .
Nope. Time for bed.
Giles retrieves a pen from his easel. It's a deep black, as deep and pitch as the ocean floor he's just sketched. He uncaps it, and black blood immediately wets the tip. It floats to the pad, hovering a few inches above the dry surface. His signature was a must, but . . . what to accompany it? He didn't have the energy for an original anecdote. Giles was gazing around the room, looking for some buzzword, some trigger to jog his tired mind into inspiration, when one of them caught his eye.
It was one of his first, from back when Elisa and her creature impacted his life byond ghosts in his dreams and on his walls. He was turned away from view, his powerful and shimmering back on full display. Her arms were around him with her fingers elegant on his shoulders. Her skin is like snow and her hair swirls about her, about him, as if they were already underwater. If he remembered the model correctly, the two of them in each other's grasp and freshly drenched, it was accurate enough. More importantly, there was something scribbled in the corner. Something that certainly wasn't Giles's handwriting. Something that had gone unnoticed for a long while.
She must have left it there, one night as her monster lay in her tub and she and Giles spoke of the endless mystery he was until the morning.
He squints, reads it, calms the rumbling in his hand and the gushing behind his eyes, and begins to write.
Unable to perceive the shape of You,
I find You all around me.
Your prescence fills my eyes with Your love
It humbles my heart,
For You are everywhere.
G.D.
He retires to bed then. Thor and the other cats curl up next to him under his blankets, and he tries to quiet his mind. Thoughts of them swirl in his brain like sand in the tide, and Giles lays awake for hours. His ears play tricks on him, blending the tune of I Know Why (And So Do You) with the unending push and ebb of the waves.
Finally, his eyes creak shut, and he is asleep.
The cyclone floats unending, and somewhere under the sea, they dance and dance and dance.