The Beauty in the Water

by Allison Ristaino

The second the incessant ringing of the alarm clock reached her ears, Kim put a stop to it, threw off the covers, and rushed into the bathroom. If she didn’t immediately splash her face with cold water, it would be another few hours before she’d awake fully. Kim shook her face like a dog upon exiting a pool and stared at her reflection in the mirror.

“Alright now, you fat cow,” she said to herself, “let’s see what we can do to whip you into shape.”

The stopper was raised in her sink, the cool water she had splashed on her face stuck pooled at the bottom of the basin. She splashed her fingers into it, as if playing a piano, and hummed a meditative tone. She did this almost every day, a cultural appropriation of a Buddhist ritual she used to magic herself into being beautiful. After the hum humming and the splash splashing, she took out a jar of Vaseline and covered her face entirely. Then, she used a facial cleanser, that’s a kind of soap, in circular motions to wash the Vaseline from her face. Here, she turned the faucet on cool again and rinsed off the cleanser. Again, the soapy creamy watery mess was stuck there at the bottom of the basin. Because of the stopper. You remember. After this, she’d glue fake hairs to her eyelids (they make a special glue for this) and underline the holes that her eyes peaked through. It might surprise you to hear that this was widely affective towards her goal of magicking herself into something beautiful.

Of course, Kim didn’t care whether or not she was considered beautiful, but she was smart enough to realize that without attempting this magic, she had less of a chance at succeeding in business, not to mention, it also gave her perks like quicker service at bars, folks holding doors open for her, and just kinder interactions with strangers in general.

Seeing that her magic had worked, Kim noticed the stopper, which she’d meant to push down earlier.

“Oh, Kim, you handsome devil,” she laughed to herself, and pushed the stopper down.

Once the valve raised, the cool, soapy water travelled down the drain through a series of pipes that eventually lead out to the Atlantic Ocean.

There, the water mixed with salt and seaweed and fish pee, which seemed to counteract the soap and Vaseline.

Kim’s water traveled so far that it eventually reached the middle of the ocean, halfway between the Americas and Africa. Out here, the waves and wind were strong, and the water sprayed into a mist upon another sort of beautiful woman.

It wasn’t magic, arrogance, or even confidence that allowed this woman to admit that she was beautiful; it was that she was designed to be that way by the best wood carver in all of Dublin. Her beauty was less something you could compliment her on than it was a fact of her existence. Subjective? Certainly. Generally agreed upon? Also certain.

She was a mast head, if that wasn’t abundantly obvious, and had the intelligence of one.

To call her thick was not an insult to her character, not in a way she had control over at least, for she was, quite literally, made of wood. Her head was wood, her hands were wood, her brain was wood, her clavicles were wood, her— well, you understand.

She didn’t have to be smart, she just had to be beautiful, sturdy, and try not to get gnawed on by sharks or the odd courageous seal.

Her name was Aoife, and she was named after the carver’s daughter. You remember, the best wood carver in Dublin? Well, his name was Billy, and he was something of a legend around those parts. (Those parts being Dublin and the surrounding areas.) After a near death drowning episode in her childhood, Aoife (the human, not the mast head) had developed a terrible fear of water. Well, not water water, not water that one drinks, but big bodies of water, ones large enough to drown in.

Billy tried everything to rid his daughter of this fear. He even carved her likeness onto a mast head for a ship set to sail to South America. Surely, upon seeing her wooden counterpart sail across the Atlantic she would get over her fear of water. Well, not all water. You remember. Big waters. But, alas, this did nothing but cause poor Aoife to faint upon seeing the ship leave port.

Aoife herself was naturally beautiful, like her wooden counterpart, naturally meaning she didn’t have to use the Kim magic to fool folks into being charmed by her. But, unlike her wooden counterpart, she was expected to be smart as well.

She was lucky to have been born with such beauty, but it did her no good in the affairs of love. For anytime she walked hand in hand with a suitor and happened to stumble upon the ocean, she fainted. The suitor would often point and laugh, then carry her back to her father, you remember Billy, the wood carver? Well the suitor would laugh and tease Billy that his daughter was insane and that nobody would ever love her, male, female, or non-binary.

“Hee hee hardy har har!” They’d chortle, laying her unconscious body gently on the couch before giving ol’ Billy a punch in the arm. Billy would sigh and rub at his arm, for those suitors could pack quite a punch.

So you see, it didn’t matter that Aoife was smart or naturally beautiful. Because her fear of water erased all that. The big kind, not the faucet kind.

We know it’s her fear that makes her unlovable because her very likeness was lovable. I’m talking about her wooden counterpart. The mast head, you recall. Sailors from all over fell in love with that mast head, even though she couldn’t talk, or maybe because of that. Yeah, probably because of that.

Well, that spray of water hit wooden Aoife in the face but quickly evaporated in the heat of the sun, bringing it to a cloud over Boston, Massachusetts. And when that cloud got heavy, it dropped in the form of rain onto the windshield of Thomas “Sully” Sullivan’s ford explorer. Sully’s windshield wipers, of course, pushed that rain to the side as he made his way into the North End. His cousin Gina (mom’s side of the family) was having a baby shower, and unfortunately for him, all genders were invited. He hoped he’d at least get a cannoli or two out of the event. The raindrops, having been pushed to the side of the window, slowly rolled up until they reached the roof and flew off the car and onto a tree on Newbury street.

On the branch of that tree sat a cardinal (the bird, not the senior official of the clergy of the Catholic Church). She was a female, plain and brown, much like all female cardinals. She swiveled her little bird head around, then flapped her wings a little, very cutely, to dry her feathers. Across the street a male cardinal, red, black and ostentatious, much like all male cardinals, noticed how cute that female cardinal was being. He weathered the rain to fly across and land on a nearby branch on her tree. Then, he started to twist his body, flap his wings, and pretty much cut a rug on that branch in an elaborate dance performed to impress the lady cardinal. This seemed to be going smoothly, so he proceeded to the next step in their relationship: feeding seeds into her mouth. This lady cardinal wasn’t beautiful, like I said, she was very plain. Nor was she particularly intelligent, at least not for a cardinal. But, she was female, and she was there, and that was good enough for him.

A few blocks away from them, poor Gina was in the midst of her baby shower. All of her relatives described her as “glowing,” something she had never been called before forming life inside her body. Though grateful for the shower, she was tired, and all she wanted was a cannoli, but unfortunately didn’t get to the dessert table before the Sullivan cousins had eaten them all. Gina was the ugliest she’d ever felt in her life— everything was swollen, she was sweaty all the time, and she was exhausted from crafting a human baby out of just an egg and one of Joey’s sperm (Joey was her partner, you see). But that didn’t stop people from telling her how beautiful she was all the time. Which made her think— how bad did I look before I got pregnant?

“Time for the gender reveal!” Gina announced proudly.

“I wish they’d have done this before the shower,” sneered somebody’s waspy old aunt. “Then I’d have known what kind of baby clothes to buy!”

Then, much to the crowd’s surprise, something incredible happened. A fortune teller appeared, you know the type, swirling crystal ball, wild curly hair held back by a purple handkerchief, loose velvet gown, the whole works.

“Where’s the balloon with the colored confetti inside?” Asked that aunt. You know, the one who sneered?

“We said it’s going to be a gender reveal,” Gina smiled.

The fortune teller sat at a table with the crystal ball swirling under one hand and Gina’s belly under the other.

“Well?” Joey asked anxiously, “What are we having?”

The fortune teller looked from her crystal ball to Gina’s tummy and then back again. Finally, she had the gender.

“Transmasculine,” she said. Joey and Gina smiled and hugged each other.

By the time Sully drove home to Foxborough it wasn’t raining anymore. The cardinals were snuggled up in a nest, and the good ship Aoife made port in Bogota. Kim got a promotion to executive assistant to the CEO, and human Aoife discovered a love of beekeeping.

The end.