You are no longer mammalian. When he left for another woman, he took your warm blood. He took your skin that knows how to hug and cradle the children. You have turned to brass. You’re impatient with the children; don’t make their lunches or tuck them in anymore. Your body is a dead and rusty section. French-horn shoulders and cornet forearms, tuba torso, your head a trumpet that cannot sing of how you’ve come to be this funky metal. When you speak, it’s all screeching off-pitch. The children stare at you, empty, like dolls, or hiss, and stamp their feet at you. A fine patina crawls along your trombone gams.
On the nights when your ex has the kids, you go to the bars, where others who’ve lost their warm blood gather. Crocodile Girl plays Crocodile Rock five times in a row, a forceful coming to terms, shaking her tail like she’s totally fine. When it’s late and everyone is drunk and contemplative, it is said you can ride the back of a dolphin to the middle of the ocean and look a blue whale in the eye and her great glossy eye will reveal the quiet secret of mammals, which always sounds real, like a promise over the loudness of drunks and jukeboxes and the roving eyes of men, over the loudness of your fake orgasms, the fat emptiness of them, when you go home with the men. You slip out when they are spent and slumbering. You usually walk home with smeared mascara, crawl into bed without showering, and sleep it off. But tonight, you walk to the beach. You resolve to feel sand between human toes, to throw back your head and laugh like you did before he left you. To gently caress the fat cheeks of your children as you read them off to sleep. You want to find that soft, mythical creature.
And you finally know your heart is the dolphin. She’s been slippery, quick, and ambivalent, suited to the sea. When the sun rises vermilion, you stand on the shore and blast your brass—and she’ll hear you screeching, scoop you up and ride you out to the colossal beast’s eye, to reclaim the secret of your skin. You’ll be careful to hold tight. The ocean is as wild as a late-night bar, full of promise.
