text: I cast my line into the endless ocean on a boiling June day. Within seconds I felt a giant pull, and I hauled harder than I ever had. I thought my line would snap--but then the water parted, and out of its deep blue curtain came the most beautiful man I had ever seen, dangling and bleeding from my hook through his lip. I dragged him onto the plywood dock, extracted the hook from him, and wiped away the blood. He stared at me with the eyes of a child, such innocence and grace and beauty, and gave me the faintest smile. He had dark hair and black eyes and soft cheeks. His translucently-pale skin bulged from his perfect musculature, and he looked at me in a way that no one ever had. I tried to ask him what his name was, where he had come from, how he hadn’t drowned, where his family was--he had no answer. All he could do was smile and look at me. I told him my name was John, although I wasn’t sure he understood, and after a few minutes I decided that I had to take care of him until he was healed from whatever had happened to him under the ocean’s surface. I took him to my tiny apartment, tucked him into my bed, and made him a bowl of soup from the only food I had in the fridge. I sat down gently with the soup and tried to give it to him, but he seemed to not know what to do with it. I would have to feed him--I dipped the spoon into the steaming soup. He opened his mouth as I brought the spoon to it, but instead of accepting it, he spoke one word, and one word only, in a raspy voice like cat’s claws on sandpaper: “Puke.” Then he closed his mouth tight, and would accept no food or drink, or say anything but the word puke, again and again, until the word started to turn my stomach and I asked him to stop. In response, the man from the depths reached out and held my arm, firmly, with a tenderness that changed the temperature of my entire body, and he looked me in my eyes with a stare that communicated all things. He took me in his arms and kissed me so deeply that I thought I was going to go insane. I was annoyed that I was so easy to win over and upset that a man could make me melt without speaking a single word to me aside from one I hated. It had just been so *long*. I made love for the first time in four years, and then I asked the undersea man what his name was as we lay tangled together in the billowing clouds of my ivory sheets. He turned to me, smiling that innocent, soft smile, and said to me, “Puke, John.” I asked him, trying to be playful, if Puke was his name, but he shook his head forcefully and pointed to me. Before I knew it he gently slipped his fingers into my mouth and down my throat. I don’t know why I did, but I did what he asked all over my ivory sheets, and in the middle of the contents of my stomach sat a lump of pure, polished gold, glistening in the afternoon sun that streamed in through my window. He picked it up, handed it to me, and smiled again. My eyes grew as wide as dinner plates and I stared at the fortune I had just coughed up, and without even thinking I kissed him again. I couldn’t help myself. There was no explaining it. He had just known. He had known everything I needed and everything I wanted without me saying anything. He was sent by God. I went to the bathroom to clean myself up and to cry a little bit, happily, over my life *finally* improving. I looked at myself in the mirror, at my blonde hair, my olive skin, my green eyes-- and for the first time in a long time I told myself that I was beautiful and meant it. When I came back all of my vomit was gone from the sheets. I thanked him for cleaning up, and he smiled at me from the bed and beckoned me to come to him. The next few days were nothing but happiness in my one-bedroom, 500 square foot apartment. The underwater man and I made love every chance we could get, and he helped me vomit up so much gold that it filled my tiny apartment with glimmering piles of wealth. I felt like a king. He always cleaned up while I went to the bathroom to wipe my mouth, so thoroughly that everything was spotless. We slept together in my single bed every night and he held me like a treasure. He still never ate, but I took this as some sort of sea-sickness that would go away in time. I asked him his name hundreds of times and never received a response, but as the days went on he became more and more lively and strong-looking, and he began speaking to me--first in singular words, then in full sentences. His voice was low and smooth and it rolled from him like thunder across the plains. He spoke of things he loved--sunsets, and houses, and children’s laughter. He thanked me for rescuing him from the sea. He told me he didn’t remember how he got there, under the water that it was gone from his mind. All it took was one look from his eyes that I now noticed were a bit green in the right light, and I believed him. I felt like my mind was becoming a little bit slower--but I guess that’s how you feel when you’re in love. One night as we laid together in the freshly-cleaned bed, he rolled over to me and looked at me and said-- “I love you.” I’m embarrassed to say that I began crying immediately. I said it back after my emotional outburst was over in my small, silly-sounding voice, and the next day I sold our gold and the dingy old apartment that had housed me for eight unhappy years. The undersea man and I bought a beautiful home across from the ocean together, and we moved in in the span of a day. It’s not like either of us had many possessions to relocate. He turned to me as we slept together in our new four-poster bed that night, and I turned to him, and he said again to me-- “Puke.” Even though I didn’t want to ruin the new bed, I knew better than to disregard his council on this particular matter. I opened my mouth, and into my throat went his fingers, and I let my stomach turn inside out for him. When I was finished and gasping I looked in the middle of my bile. There sat the most beautiful baby boy I had ever seen, with the undersea man’s eyes and his cheeks, and my smile and my tiny pointed ears. “Is he... ours?” “Yes.” “Did you put him there like the gold?” “No, John. He was there all along, just like the gold. He was always yours, and he was always mine.” I couldn’t respond, or question further how this had happened, or do anything but scoop up the baby and cradle him close and kiss his soft little forehead. It didn’t matter that I was a man, didn’t matter that this was impossible. My child was in my arms and my lover was at my side and the only thing in my mind, the only thing in my heart, was love. I was so overcome with love--for him, for my home, for this new baby, that coherent thoughts couldn’t penetrate the warmth and the affection that I felt for everything around me. I spent my next days in a haze, and when he asked me to puke again I did and I gained a beautiful baby girl. It had been two weeks since I pulled the undersea man from the ocean and now I spent my days in such a euphoria that I felt I could barely think. No matter the time of day, I was either making love, tending to my beautiful children, or looking out at my view of the ocean--I was never thinking. Only loving. One day I told him we were running out of money, and without another word he induced me to vomit up another massive chunk of gold. I looked at him, my face flushed, my mind struggling to express itself with words, and just told him, “You are my everything.” “No, John. You are.” He smiled, this time a little differently than normal--I couldn’t figure out why. Even just that four-word sentence had been mentally draining, so clouded was my mind with love and admiration for the man from the waves. I cleaned up quick, wanting to return to him as soon as I could. When I returned from the bathroom I saw him, bent over, his bumpy spine stretching the skin of his back. He made a sound like algae being fed through broken glass. I crept closer. His face was pressed deep into the sheets, and he sucked up my vomit with his mouth with frightening speed and desire. His eyes were animal and predatory, glassy and unthinking. His veins bulged through his olive skin as he fed, and I could see thousands of branching networks of deep-green, pumping and flowing and filling almost audibly, like the inner workings of a giant mosquito. He looked up at me, wiped his mouth, and smiled. I ran from him, went to the bathroom, locked the door, and looked at myself in the mirror for the first time in weeks. My blonde hair had turned black, my olive skin to a translucent white that every vein peeked through. My eyes were black and soulless and I realized that my brain was not sluggish because of love. I was being drained. Before I could blink the door flew open and he was behind me, and then his hand was down my throat, and he grabbed both my hands with one of his and held them behind my back with inhuman strength. He bent me over the bathtub with his fingers in my mouth, and then he pushed them all the way down and drained everything from me, vomit and children and gold and music and color, what I realized now was everything my body could or would ever make in my lifetime. I tried to resist at first, but I had so little fight. I was so far gone already. When it was all over I stared blankly at the squirming bathtub beneath me, filled with everything of value my body would have ever produced, squeezed from me like a wet sponge being twisted. I was nothing but a husk, my thoughts an impenetrable mist. Then his strong arms picked me up, still holding my hands behind my back. He carried me out the front door of the beautiful house we had once shared, across the wind-swept beach, and walked until the sea gently lapped his bare feet. I looked up at him. His hair was a beautiful burnished blonde now, and his eyes green as a cat’s. His once-translucent skin had become a beautiful olive. I had to admit he was beautiful, even more so than I had once been. He gave me that same little smile that I had loved so much, and for a second I thought he might apologize, or save me, or reverse everything he had taken. Instead he rocked me in his arms like a newborn, and at the peak of the third rock he released his grip and threw me. I flew high in the air, hung at the top of the arc for a fragile moment, and then plunged into the cold and salty water. The ocean inhaled me, and I knew I was home. I watched from underneath as he walked away, tanned and strong and beautiful, without any feeling at all. I searched my mind for thoughts, feelings, cares--there was nothing there, my mind a dark and empty ocean to mirror the one I had been thrown into. All I was was gone now, drained into the bathtub. I turned from the shore and swam away into the icy surf, my beady black eyes scanning the dark blue depths, forgetting everything I once was and ever could have been.