Nautilus

Aruna Joy Bhakta

In this dream, I don’t leave for months. Time is the same, a silvered, ever-present light that filters through our house, through the windows, through the glass doors. I trace the corridors of this house in a memory. Cherry-wood floors, white-washed walls, linen curtains that breathe in and out with the breeze. The house is rich in warmth, it cocoons and slumbers; at night we are rocked, as if by a mother. For some time, everything is as it is meant to be. The days pass in sweetness. We smoke cigarettes on the lawn; I spray my perfume and the dream is scented with lemon, hibiscus, violet. He takes long walks along the seashore and returns to me, salted and windswept, a treasure in his hand. Once, he brings a tiny ship in a glass bottle, the sails tangled and torn. I spent days extracting it, untangling and stitching the sails. Another time, he finds a ring, thin and gold-banded: too big for me, I slip it over my thumb. His cheeks and nose are blushed pink from the sea breeze. I kiss them, and my lips glow coral. 

We cook together and everything tastes of salt. The sea is in everything, we joke. Soft music plays from the radio on the counter. I sing along. He touches my waist as he walks past. Silver light streams through the windows; sometimes, I see my shadow move without me, her hand a second behind mine, her hair stirring in the still air. Reflections are deceitful, here, blurred and slippery. Tricks of light, he reassures me, raising his hand, his fingers delicately fracturing the beams of light as they fall. We spend each evening in easy silence, book pages turning, hands combing through hair. He reads to me, a hushed, dream-like lilt to his voice. I mouth the words as he says them, as if they were my own.

The treasure of our house is the shell, the shell that rests on the bookshelf in the living room – nautilus, tiger-striped, iridescent. It has always been here; it is, in fact, held between us, that the house was built around it in the same way a shell itself forms: spiralling outward, curling and coiling around its dweller, worn, weathered by the wind off the sea. It is the same silver of the dream, pearl-lit, a spoonful of moonlight. Curved, coiled, caressed, it whorls inwards. I hold it to his ear, and he closes his eyes. What do you hear? I ask.

He swallows, avoids my eyes, answers: A secret. 

Not long after this, the shell goes missing. I am making coffee, my skin drenched in light, hair whispering against my neck, cigarette in hand, when I sense the shift. I look at the bookshelf. Gone. Empty. Dread lodging itself against my breastbone, I pull the room apart in disarray. In the end, he is the one to find it, on the windowsill of the living room, hidden behind the curtain. He places it, gingerly, back on the bookshelf. It glints in the light; winks at me. That was the beginning. 

Over the next few weeks, the shell continued to disappear at night, only to be discovered sometime the next day. Inside the piano, balanced on the strings. Perched between two branches of a tree. Half-buried in the garden. Waiting at the front door. In the mailbox, the carrier flag raised up. Once, we wake to find it pressed between us in the bed, like a fevered, nightmare-stricken child.

Irrevocably, I lose my mind. I hold the shell to my ear and hear nothing but silence: it holds its secrets from the one who believes in it the most. I sit beneath the bookshelf all night, fighting against the pull of sleep, only to succumb in the witching hour and wake, moments later, to an empty bookshelf, fear weighted against my chest once more. A few times, just as I fall asleep, I see a woman, shadowed, ghost-like, drifting through the house, the shell in her cradled arms. In dreams I wander, seeking her muted light. She evades me, hiding behind the known world, stepping between strands of time. 

My hair falls out in the shower, dark strands threaded beneath his fingers. I pull his hands beneath my dress; I kneel at his feet. Please, I beg. Tell me what you heard.

I can’t describe it. His eyes are black, unseeing. Something ancient. 

The light of the dream has become oppressive, it is the exact pearl-white of the shell. The sea is in everything. Something within me shatters. He is afraid; he leaves for hours, his walks taking him from one end of the shore to the other. He no longer touches the ocean and comes back dry as a bone. His hands, once abundant, are barren ships. Who are you telling your secrets to? I snarl.

Unencumbered. Unhinged. I record sightings of the woman in a green notebook, writing of her reflection in the glass windows, rippling and subaqueous; her silent footsteps, remembered only by the tiny pools of water she leaves in her wake. He claims never to see her. He speaks of fishermen’s wives lost to madness, their blood poisoned by the sea air. Yet, on nights that I take him into me, my teeth ache and burn from the salt he leaves upon my tongue. I think of the fisherman slipping across the rocks to meet his siren in a cavernous pool, the moonlight dripping from her skin, lips as curved and satined as a bow. His wife, sleeping beside his skeletons. No matter how deep I take him, his secret remains buried. This knowledge is older than him: he is weathered, aged, from it. I spit him out. 

It is in the later months of the dream that I have clear eyes. I wait for the evening, for him to retreat to the bedroom, slip into a dreamless stupor. I sit under the bookshelf, the shell gleaming above me. Haloed, I wait, sewing needle in hand. Hours later, when sleep brushes against me, I work the needle into my thigh, gasping at the ache. A dewdrop of blood blossoms across my nightgown. Deeper, I push. Sleep rushes in, and retreats. Ebbs, and flows. And then.

I feel her before I see her. A halt in the air, a harsh intake of breath. The world tilts, the silver light dims. She walks following the curve of the wall, long nails scraping against the wallpaper, the glass of the window panes. Sanded hair, taut, sharp mouth. A long white dress, wet, sucked tight against her bare breasts. I inhale and breathe her in: warmth, sunlight stretched against the rocks; decay, the rotting boards of a sunken ship; salt of a biblical sea. I am enraptured. She kneels in front of me; her eyes are clouded, dark, a small pale moon delicately hanging behind each iris. I see her journey, drifting across currents and time. Manipulator, explorer, seafarer, ghost, thief, oracle. She sheds her different skins at my feet. Water fills my lungs. The shell hums, reverberates along the ridges of its spine. Everything goes silent, the curtains still, the house breathes in. She holds a finger to her lips, another to her ear. The house breathes out. Surrender.

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Aruna Joy Bhakta (she/her) grew up in Taranaki, and now lives and works in Wellington. She graduated from Te Herenga Waka in 2022 with an Honours Degree in Classical Studies, where she completed a thesis on the ancient iterations of the mythical nymph. Her previous work can be found in Issues 16 and 18 of Starling, and her upcoming work can be found in Issue 11 of Sweet Mammalian. @arunajoybhakta

Featured image: Nautilus Shell by Edward Weston. Via Pinterest, 1947.