‘Jellyfish’ by Molly Aitken

On the screen a heart pulses in black and white and grey. It’s peaceful and toxic, vibrating in its own little ocean.

The stenographer lifts the plastic wand from my belly.

‘Nothing unusual,’ he says.

His eyes are crinkled and tired. There is no need for him to lie to me and yet I fear.

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yup.’

He hands me a clump of tissue and I wipe the jelly off my skin.

He gets the giant needle then, inserts it into the placenta and suctions out a translucent pinkish goo. I watch as he presses it out into a clear petri dish and holds it up to the light.

‘Results in ten days,’ he says.

I sanitize my hands at the door and leave with the black and white snapshot he took in my pocket.

I step off the ferry and onto the island, looking out for the jellyfish. Sure enough, heaps litter the shore. Small transparent mounds of them. No, not transparent. They are definitely there. Translucent is what they are, still pulsing with life even though they’ve been thrown out of their liquid home. It will take days for them to shrivel and die. I feel almost sorry for them. But it is not safe to pick them up and fling them back in the ocean, my hands would be burned by electric pulses and anyway, there are too many. The reason the ocean spits them out is because it’s too full.

Eric’s parents used to swim here in the summer. It’s difficult to imagine the water clear and free of danger.

I walk slowly to our house on the other side of the island. Eric has made a scarecrow out of some of the plastic bottles and containers that wash up every day. There are no crows to scare away of course but he likes to make use of the waste.

Beer caps on strings above the door chink my arrival.

‘What was it like?’ Already Eric is rifling through my pack. He fishes out the twine, the twelve bags of rice, the dried kidney beans and chickpeas. He chuckles at the apricot jam. He waves the sundried figs at me, saying ‘You know they grow these outside, Dublin?’ He lines up the tins and counts them. Twice.

‘Was the market busy?’ he asks.

I shake my head.

He comes around the table and wraps me in his scrawny arms. Only yesterday he said he was happy I was gaining weight again, to see me finishing my meals even though he could tell I found it challenging.

He doesn’t know that I am ravenous. I eat everything. Dandelions. Grass. The dried salt in the rock pools.

I squeeze him back, kiss his ear, whisper that I love him.

He pulls away from me and, smiling, returns to the table while my hand trails to my pocket.

That night in the bath I imagine telling him and in my mind I hear the door slamming, the motor of his boat.

I stroke my belly and feel the flick of the jellyfish tail, electric against my skin.

Instead of telling, I think of ways to hide my body, to have sex outdoors so he won’t ask me to undress. Soon the weight gain will be obvious. It’s twelve weeks and I am beginning to bulge.

I met Eric in Dublin at a rally. I never mentioned to him that I was there by mistake. I wandered through the crowd to cross Grafton Street and reach Penneys. He shoved a sign into my hand and said, ‘You forgot yours. Don’t worry. We’re all in this together. I brought spares.’

After, at the pub, he told me his theories. ‘We are all the problem,’ he said.

‘Every last fleshy monkey,’ I said, and he laughed and kissed me right there and I remember thinking there was nothing radical in his ideas. Wasn’t that what we all knew?

‘Imagine,’ he said when he pulled away. ‘If it stopped right here with our generation, with us. Imagine it. The world would be free.’

I didn’t mean it to happen that first time. It was genuinely an accident. I had miscalculated, but from his reaction you’d think I’d burned down a forest and when I refused to get rid of it, he took off in his boat.

I was eight weeks when I began to bleed. I went to the hospital. They scanned me. They took my blood and said genetics would be back to me. While I waited at home, the tiny flickering life inside me popped out into my underwear. It was in a dark red sack like a tiny kidney. The genetics letter said ‘disorder’, ‘chromosomes’, ‘IVF’. I threw it in the recycling. I should’ve burned it.

‘Never again,’ Eric said.

I wept and he petted me and afterwards we watched the jellyfish wash up. He told me how they’d taken over the sea. They killed all the other fish. I wondered aloud if we could eat them, and he laughed and said of course not, they were poison.

We didn’t stay to count their bodies. If we had, we would have been there forever.

This time, I don’t tell him, but one morning after a thin seaweed soup breakfast he stares at me, jaw grinding, slams his fist into the table. I say nothing, just wait for him to leave.

I wait a while in the house then go down to the shore and with rubber gloves put one in a plastic bag. In the kitchen, I slice it into chunks like many small jelly fish. I fry them off with a little vegetable oil, kelp, and chilli. I place the first piece in my mouth, expecting it to burn but it is only delicate and surprisingly crunchy. I eat every last piece. I wait for it to poison me but I wake in the morning and I am still alive.

From issue #14: autumn/winter 2022

About the Author
Molly Aitken is the author of The Island Child, published by Canongate. Her short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in the Comma Press anthology Flights. She lives in Sheffield.