Deep Sea Baby, I Follow You

Abstract

Deep Sea Baby, I Follow You Addie Tsai (bio) You cannot tell them. You cannot tell your five divine sisters, each as perfectly beautiful as the one before. You cannot tell your grandmother, whose heart would sink to the sea floor like a strange and unwanted anchor. You cannot tell your father, who has relied on you to be exactly as he has carved you to be, the image of his beloved who now resides in Heaven. You cannot tell any of them that who you are in your heart is not who stands before them in their eyes. If only you could throw away your singing voice, spun by the gold of angels. Or so they say. If only you could throw away the curve etched into the torso above your waist and the one submerged beneath, its own wave. But you know more than most the insistence of the waves of “nature.” So instead, you finger the shipwrecked statue of that fair, dark-haired prince—not out of a desire for him, but out of a desire of him. Okay, yes, maybe also a desire for him. You imagine your voice like the belly of a conch shell, your wavy middle like the straight line of the horizon, your hair the swollen bubble a human exhales to live. One day, you draw your fantasy in the sand, and then wipe it away with your tail. Just long enough to feel it become real. At the peak of longing, there she is, the one you should not trust, but the only one who can grant you the desire that burns in your chest like a bright orange fire that refuses to sink. She promises you everything you could ever want: a voice dark and deep as the underground, a face chiseled like stone, thighs as thick as the tree trunks above, a broad chest and a torso as straight as a windowpane, a neck free of the long hair that so many of your kind long for. But, you know the story. Each spell comes with a price. She will give you even your prince, and as it so happens, your prince will desire you in equal measure, but you will have no sex from which to enact your longing. Between your legs will be an emptiness. But who cares about that when you get to return to whom you were always meant to be? You drink the vile potion. Around your neck you wear a simple fish’s tail pendant. Your new love fingers it from time to [End Page 130] time, which sends a strange chill up your spine—both from desire and a memory that tingles to hold. Not always in a good way. Air is delicious above ground, between kisses. Your prince knows your story, and you both make do with the constraints. You keep the pendant as a reminder of your past life, your family, all you gave up. Of all you left behind in order to become. [End Page 131] Addie Tsai ADDIE TSAI is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color who teaches at the College of William & Mary. They have an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. They are the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin. Unwieldy Creatures is their newly released adult queer nonbinary biracial Asian retelling of Frankenstein. They are Founding Editor & Editor-in-Chief at just femme & dandy. I first encountered “The Little Mermaid” as I imagined many of us did—through the loosely inspired Disney animated adaptation. I was ten, the perfect age to come upon the buxom redhead with the voice of silk, alongside her crustacean companion. I came to understand my own childhood circumstances more clearly through that film, as a child of a dominant Asian father who didn’t understand my desire to be in the world. I, too, would have bartered almost anything of mine in order to be free. As I grew older, I studied Hans Christian Andersen’s original and Yayoi Kusama’s hauntingly illustrated edition. Even though I would learn that the...