Nancy's Diet

By Duru Gungor

“A what?”

“A Portuguese man o’ war,” she said.

“You mean like a ship?” I asked and noticed that my porcelain spoon was committing the cliché of being somewhat tremulously suspended over the ramen bowl, so I put it down. It wasn’t often I heard someone claim they turned into a ship every night.

“Not a ship, dear,” she beamed through the ginger-infused mist of her own bowl, cheeks flushed with the effort of eating the slippery hot noodles—she was a very pretty old lady.

“A type of fish,” she said, “Jellyfish. Well, no, a siphonophore to be exact. Not a single organism with multiple cells the way you, me and jellyfish are. Daytime me, I mean. It’s a colony made of four separate organisms. A bunch of people who get together and symbiotically have fun.” She sucked the air into her lungs as her eyes opened wider. “Ha! Can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. I am Legion, for we fucking are four!” and she banged on the table with a small, plump, speckled fist.

I was shocked, silly me, more by the swearing than the declaration itself. She really, I mean really, didn’t look the f-bomb-dropping type. She was blue eyed and platinum bobbed. She wore sheer silken hosiery. I didn’t look under the table to check, but she probably tended to cross her ankles and tilt her blue-veined legs sideways, the way favoured by British royalty. She had a strand of freshwater pearls, for heaven’s sake. One expected those papery lips to have been long sealed against such zestful, buoyant swearing surging straight out of her gut. I was reminded of that languorous Sinatra song, “Picture a tomboy in lace, that’s Nancy with a laughing face,” but in this case, picture also how that face came on and off whenever it pleased her.

Her name was Dianne, not Nancy, and I’d known her for the better part of two hours since she happened to take the chair beside mine at the hair salon. That was apparently long enough for us to have a few lively exchanges, sniffing an affinity with one another like beasts, and decide to have lunch together, why not, in a small Japanese joint nearby, where I, now glued to my seat, was waiting for the next big surprise to be borne by this chance encounter. I so loathe having to invent plots and arcs, and I already seemed to have in my hands a delicious little vignette that had the courtesy of writing itself. All it needed was another measured prod.

“So every night it’s the same?” I asked, “Every night you dream of becoming this thing, and then what?” and in response, Dianne opened up like a glistening, sticky, smiling flower. “I drift in the big blue for hours and hours, and I eat people, what else? But I really shouldn’t get ahead of myself, dear. There’s a lovely symmetry to all of this, you’ll see,” she said coaxingly. Gold, pure gold.

“See here. Let’s first establish how spectacular I truly am,” she began, shoving her battered phone in my face and pointing at some pictures and videos in rapid-fire succession. Spectacular was only fair. The creature I saw, this Portuguese man o’ war, barely seemed real; it looked more like the acid-fueled fantasy of a teenage artist with a lot of talent for troubling beauty. “As you can see,” she was saying, “I’m composed of different sections. The upper half is the ‘ship,’ my pneumatophore. In many varieties it looks like a fish-shaped balloon; it is translucent with a delicate—venomous—violet outline, and the majestic fin overtop serves the body literally like a large sail, carrying it effortlessly up and down the steep, ink-blue surges. Remember Nautilus? Something as bizarre as that. Contains my digestive and reproductive polyps as well. I can only imagine the awe of the first superstitious sailor who set eyes on a Portuguese man o’ war out in the open sea.

‘The lower half is a heap of my gauzy, frill-edged, unforgiving tentacles, some dangling as much as ninety feet into the deep; on the surface, you only see the smallish bubbly ship, but we are an iceberg underneath. All I have to do is drift on, letting my tentacles trail beneath me; hunting, you see, is not an effort for me. It just happens, like a sigh, during my endless wanderings in these perilous, wondrous seas,” she said with an ever-widening grin, waxing poetic for my sake.

“Sooner or later, a sweet silvery fish with a yellow stripe across its body or an extremely pronounced nose becomes too curious or too hungry for its own good and approaches my tentacles. I don’t reach out. They come and touch us on their own. Few can escape and there’s almost no struggle; all along I’m bursting with paralyzing venom. I slowly pull my motionless meal upward, folding and coiling the frills of the tentacle that made the catch; when it reaches the bottom of the ‘ship,’ my digestive polyps liquefy it. And if nothing else, there’s always loads of plankton to gorge on.

“The first time it happened, I was living my bitter years, having cleared all the last bites of my lost years. I find it helps to think of them this way—like chores that had to be done, or a plateful of steamed zucchini that’s good for your liver. The lost years gave me, in compensation for all their trespasses, three most beloved daughters, but it was one of them who broke my heart almost irreparably.

“She had a little boy of her own, and one day she pointed out with a casual shrug that I had nothing left to do in life other than attending to that grandson and any others who could be arriving later. Just like that. What a twat. Oh, don’t cringe like that, dear. I wasn’t even sixty yet. You’ll understand soon enough, not to worry.

“And it was the calm of her, the lack of malice that got to me the most. She would’ve been pretty shocked if she ever knew how those words affected me, but fortunately for her, she isn’t very observant—she’s an academic, poor thing—and I drank the poison quietly, to the dregs.

“For a few years I remained so bitter I thought that was the only flavor to be had in life. Didn’t know what else to be. Only my dreams, full of muted, bilious, all-consuming squabbles over nothing were trying to shake me awake. So I burst out of a door one night, barely knowing myself, rage still aglow in my throat for the royal botch-up of something terribly important—something, a thing vital to everything else and so fast receding that my fingers were clawing at thin air—till I suddenly, impossibly, decisively found myself sailing silently in the blue sea.

“I had no ears, of course. No brain, no heart. No muscles for propulsion. Couldn’t tell whether it was actually silent or not. I was just stretched thin, to the point of transparency, to the point of breaking into several pieces, and we just let the wind move us, the wind and the currents. There was no greater happiness. Salt-sprayed and glitter-crested, happiness billowed darkly and washed over us all. I woke up giggling the way I could when I was five and fifteen and thirty-five and fifty.

“The second time, I didn’t dream of physical sensations. I was pure consciousness, just a spark inside a ship with several chambers. I was just peering at the world above and beneath the surface while the ship went on operating as it was set to do. From time to time, I felt like there was another spark peering at me, but when I looked at it more closely, I could no longer tell us apart. From the third time onward, all of that metaphysical brouhaha was replaced by the plain fact that I am a Portuguese man o’ war by night. Which is a misnomer, naturally, for we are brujas of the seas, ha-ha!” Terribly pleased with her pun, she placed in her mouth a hefty coil of noodles deftly collected at the tip of her chopsticks and slurped the dangling ends until all disappeared with a succulent plop. Then she once again smiled.

“As for the eating of people,” she said, “I’m not sure what to tell you. They just come my way, all those conniving, annoying, bullying types. It must be that law of attraction they talk about. They cross my path as fish-folk, but I recognize them. I recognize the spark. You know how you could spend ten years with someone and end up strangers, but then you look someone else in the eye for ten minutes, and you know you could place your life in their hands, they wouldn’t drop it. You can always recognize the spark, when you care to. So I do have a balanced diet. I hate all kinds of people for reasons big and small, and I eat from many fish groups. Dear me, you should have seen what I had three days ago. This woman loves to send mass angry emails at one of the schools where I’m subbing; it’s either too much talking in the teachers’ lounge, or too many distracting mass emails sent by other teachers, or too little scent awareness and much too much offensive French perfume. I think she’d stopped being alive at least twenty years ago; so what else could I’ve done when she glumly rose from the deep like a transparent-headed barreleye, indecently displaying the tangle of her brains, and dared gnawing at one of my violet-trimmed, frilly beauties?

“I have no mercy at night. Nothing with which to have mercy. I wander and eat what comes my way. I hope not to encounter my predators, the loggerhead turtle, the blue sea slug, the violet snail, but they too are so lovely in their own ways, even their names. One day I’ll become them as well, I’m sure. I am in permanent bliss. I am transcendent. I am late,” she said, rising and mercifully breaking her own spell. “The old boyfriend awaits. I caught me a nice retired pilot last year.”

I was so mesmerized I hadn’t moved an inch in the last half hour, but I guess she found the world more interesting with me in it, and I was spared. For a good few hours after lunch, in the afterglow of her monologue, I believed every word she’d said.

Months later, however, when my dead-eyed hairstylist delivered with poorly concealed gusto the news of Dianne’s commitment to a locked psychiatric ward, I felt deeply guilty. Instead of seeing her illness as writing material, I should’ve tried to help the poor woman. I should’ve at least tried to contact her family, let them know she wasn’t alright. Then, a few days later, a brief story appeared on The London Free Press about a bizarre case of hoarding: following the recent institutionalization of London woman Dianne Ladouceur, the article read, her home was sold and vacated. It seemed a neat, orderly house until the movers discovered inside the mattress box a large number of fish skeletons, many, like macropinna microstoma, normally encountered at depths of two thousand feet and impossible to obtain commercially. Then I finally knew what happened to her.

A loggerhead. Or a blue sea slug. Or a violet snail.

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Duru Gungor is a professor of English at Fanshawe College in London, ON. Her short fiction and haiku have appeared in Spadina Literary Review, Fudoki Magazine (the U.K.), the Wild Word (Berlin), and The Temz Review; she also dabbles in a bit of ink painting and some questionable martial arts. You can keep in touch with her at https://www.instagram.com/gungorduru/ (Inky Pursuits) and https://durugungor15.wixsite.com/durugungor