SeaMail

survivors I would be the only one who changed. By the time you get this I should be well on my way to building a workable raft. I had started before but thought it might prove useless and gave up. Write me back! Oh, and I loved the poem. You rock. Thank you so much.

  It was signed "With Love, Beatrice" and Maria found herself crying again. Her skin took on a pale green tint and she took the pen and paper and began to write. Her hand writing was sloppy but she didn't care. She told Beatrice what was going on in her life. She talked of the house she built and asked questions like, "Why didn't you just make the raft and let it take you where ever you would go?" and avoided the hermaphrodite situation completely. She sent the letter out without mentioning the large tribes of men who had become violent and sadistic, or how they would force women to be the mothers of their offspring. She wanted the letter to be positive because she longed to see Beatrice in person.

  By the end of May, Beatrice had received and replied again. The waiting time between each letter was torture but Maria found she lived for little else. The letter to Maria was mostly about the progress of the boat, how she was glad she had found a new friend and how comfortable she felt knowing that Maria had not rejected her genders. Maria replied in kind. Asking after the ship and when Beatrice thought they could meet. They exchanged a few letters like this over a period of about six months where little else seemed to matter but getting in touch with each other.

  The last message Maria would ever get changed their relationship. The letter contained a picture of Maria, based on her descriptions and not too far off either, and Beatrice, sitting together intimately. The letter read:

  Love, I am so glad that you are as eager to meet as I am. My heart hurts when I think that you are out there all alone. I want to lay with you in your hammock and count the stars in the sky. I've told you God is real, look how he has brought us together. I love you. See you soon.

  No signature or anything on the last letter. Maria didn't know if she should reply or if she should just wait for her... lover? Had they fallen in love? Has she led Beatrice on? Whatever. Should she wait for Beatrice or should she write her? Maria definitely had questions.

  Three weeks went by without anything out of the ordinary happening. Maria ate, swam, fished, and worked on her vegetable garden. On a particularly warm evening Maria was arranging her home and trying to figure out where Beatrice would sleep. She asked herself if she could share a bed with Beatrice and decided that if Beatrice preferred being a woman then maybe they could fall in love. She hadn't known this about herself but she thought women were far more attractive to men. Not just the savage men either but all men. She loved the idea of soft, smooth skin rubbing against her own.

  As she arranged the bedding again, for the fifth time that evening, she smelled something she hadn't been expecting. Meat was cooking somewhere and it was not on her fire pit. The smell of meat made her mouth water but she was terrified as to who might be out there. Men, she decided. A tribe of them. She knew that the drums would begin at sundown and her grey skin went black.

  Maria had been afraid her entire life but this was a new kind of fear. She covered herself as best she could and pulled her seaweed net over the impromptu home, hoping the men wouldn't see it. Once she was out of her home she saw smoke that had bled into the air from just beyond the next hill. It wasn't a far walk so Maria decided to see if she could find out what was going on. She might have been wrong. She thought that maybe it was Beatrice. Beatrice could have lit a fire and cooked some meat before trying to find the home of Maria, since she didn't know the beaches at all she really had no idea where to go and stopping to eat and maybe call attention to herself would have been a good idea... except... Maria never told Beatrice of the men or what they did.

  "What if she thinks the fire is me?" she said to herself. Maria ran over the hill and looked down, she spotted the bonfire and the men surrounding it. There was wreckage in the fire. Something huge and wooden was tossed into a hole that the men had dug into the ground.

  Purple with anger, Maria ran with her homemade spear. Blood thirsty and insane with grief she plunged the spear deep into one of the men's chest. His blood splattered all over the place, decorating her purple flesh with rubies. The other men had surrounded her and she screamed wordlessly with all that she had.

  "Woman?" asked one of the men. "Wife?"

  "No," said another. "Monster. Meat, too." He laughed, hideously.

  The men looked hungry and psychotic but they subdued Maria without much violence. She wept and she thought of Beatrice's body on the fire.

  "What are you cooking?" she asked.

  "Meat," said one of the men.

  "What kind of meat?" Her purple skin darkened. The man pushed her to the ground and bound her hands and feet.

  "From sea," he said as he untied her sarong. "Sea monster."

  "You lunatics think everything is a fucking monster!" The man did not reply. He simply tied the sarong around Maria's mouth to prevent her from speaking again. Six men formed a circle around the bonfire and began to beat their chests. The pounding was rhythmic and strong. The men grunted and hooted as they drove closed fists into their own body fat.

  The dead man's corpse popped and spat as the heat cooked his body. It hadn't been cleaned or gutted so an awful mix of smells found the air. Maria didn't know what was going to happen next, she was afraid of course, that they would eat the man and use her to bring children into the world and wondered if that would be worse than burning alive. After deciding that yes, it would, she began to scream through her muzzle frantically until one of the men knocked her unconscious.

  When Maria woke, she found that she had been hoisted high above the sands. Her clothing had been ripped from her body. She hadn't been raped, her body wasn't sore in those places, but she was naked, it was her own clothing that was used to bind her to the splintery wood and from here Maria saw the swelling tides.

  The only reason Maria could see anything at all was the orange and yellow lights that danced below her. She wasn't on fire, not yet, but her body was hot and she could smell the wood below her burning from the heat.

  "Scream and die," said a man. Maria could not see him, he was standing behind her. The man held a piece of blackened meat above her face. She could reach it if she struggled but all she had done was wince away with tears.

  "Is that the sea monster or your friend?" asked Maria. She did not know if it would make a difference if he told her but she wanted to know.

  "Sea monster," he said. Maria kept her eyes closed tight.

  She refused to acknowledge Beatrice as food, and asked, "What was she like?" The man did not reply, he held the piece of meat firmly in place and stood in silence.

  "Sea monster," she said. "What was Sea Monster like?"

  "Black as night. Bark like dog. Lots of meat."

  Maria's skin turned white, pure as snow, white. She thanked God, verbally, sincerely and with a smile, for the first time in her life. She could smell the meat, its hot juices dripping on her face and she hated the man for holding it there. It was not Beatrice but surely it had been loved by some other creature.

  "Do not scream," the man said again. Maria realized, very suddenly, that the clothing that bound her to the wood had loosened. She could move, a few inches anyway. This might be enough to get away, she thought. The meat was moved away from her face and Maria began to squirm as a second thought ran through her mind. What if he means to make me his involuntary bride while his gang is distracted?

  The grey flesh of her body struggled against her bonds and Maria opened her eyes. She thanked God, verbally, sincerely and with a smile for the second time in her life when she saw Beatrice's beautiful, strong face looking back at her.

  "Shhh," said Beatrice as she loosened another of Maria's bonds.

  "How?" mouthed Maria, hoping Beatrice would understand. Beatrice didn't answer, she just continued untying Maria. As soon as she was able to sit up, Maria looked around and saw the tribe of men, asleep and co
ntented. Maria reached down and untied one leg while Beatrice took care of the other, once she was free of her last bond, Beatrice helped Maria down from her wooden shrine and the two walked away in silence. When they reached Maria's home Beatrice looked around for a moment. She saw her drawings hung on the wall and the sleeping bag on a seaweed bed. Everything was perfect. Beatrice explained everything.

  "When my raft hit shore I went looking for you. I thought you were the only one over here so when I saw the fire I assumed it was you. As soon as I was close enough to see, I could tell it was a group made of men, mostly. I saw a few women who were bound together and kept in clusters without care. This horrified me. One of the men spotted me. I knew that if they saw me as a woman I would be raped and kept as a wife so I let myself become a man.

  "They found a sea lion near death and wanted to celebrate. I was afraid for my life so I accepted and mimicked their behavior so they wouldn't know I was different. So long as I did not challenge the leader I was fed and accepted as one of their own. I figured I could get away when they slept and decided I would look for you once I got away. When you appeared on the hilltop I did not recognize you. It wasn't until I saw your grey skin that I understood that you had found me.

  "They wanted to cook you tonight. I