Nobody believes me when I tell them how I became a jellyfish. It’s no mystery. It happened years ago, maybe centuries. I don’t remember. Time is measured differently for jellies. We are invertebrates. You’d be surprised how senseless a spine can make you.
There was a travelling science exhibit. Twice a year they rented a grey brick building on the north side of town. Once they displayed a unicorn tusk. Another year they promised a mermaid but really it was a large fish tail sewn together with a monkey suspended in formaldehyde. I saw it eleven times. The year I discovered the jellyfish the rumors were they would exhibit Albert Einstein’s brain. The picture on the flyer looked like pasta.
I arrived early. The paper wasp nests were sad and the bezoars and a thousand year old egg seemed fake. My father’s bookkeeper followed me room to room, whispering inane things until I lost him in the room with a floating light bulb. The Chinese acupuncture needles were boring and the pickled homunculus in the jar looked asleep. I didn’t expect to enjoy the jellyfish, but found myself watching them for hours.
The next morning I returned. The jellyfish exhibit was in a small room on the fourth floor. A black curtain hung in the doorway. Medusozoa, the plaque said. The only light behind the curtain came from the pinks and blues and lavenders radiating from the jellyfish bodies floating inside an enormous aquarium tank. Twelve in the bloom, I counted. Some were like disks of alien moons, while others fanned their tentacles in great swaths of golden hair like decapitated Rapunzels. They pulsed from one end of the tank to the other, lost in their aimlessness. I tapped on the glass but they ignored me. One was shaped like a church bell. It pulsed gently, a long bridal veil of tentacles in its wake. As it passed in its loop I thought I heard music.
In the hallway I leaned against a doorway. It hurt to breathe, like all the air had been sucked out of the sky. Such a waste, yes? a man said. It was my father’s friend, the bookkeeper. He was thin and boyish with hair that looked as if his mother had combed it.
We walked around the fountain. The bookkeeper talked about Einstein’s brain and assured me on the scale of marvelous things it was a zero. He was fond of zeroes. Zero is the happiest of numbers, he told me. At the end of the day, if a man can go home to a fat wife and fall asleep with a full stomach and zeroes in his ledger, well, that is a happy man, the bookkeeper smiled.
We slept together. There was nothing peculiar about this. After being in the presence of the jellyfish I needed to wrap myself around spine and ribs and feel the grating of my body against something warm and useless like a man.
In the morning, unable to think of anything else all night, I crept out of the room and bought a ticket to see the jellyfish again.
I was alone. Nobody else came to see the jellies, distracted by lesser wonders. I watched them, paralyzed and unblinking. One by one they circled the tank, these luminescent gorgons. They took no notice of me pressed close to the glass, and yet I knew they were aware of me. From the moment I saw them we were connected. Their only imperative was to float. Spinelessness had set them free. I was mesmerized by their translucent tentacles, oblivious to the world yet stretched blindly as if hoping to be embraced. Despite their blindness their tentacles only rarely tangled as they circled in their ballet and when they did twist together it was a kiss of sorts, their gelatinous bodies never twisting in awkward revulsion from one another the way people do on a crowded street. They always knew the distance between themselves in the bending of space. The more I watched the more I attuned to their secret desire to exist without memory, to exist outside of time, that is, to live sideways, which is why we jellies are seldom vertical or horizontal but always floating at an angle.
No sooner had I pressed my palm to the glass than one of them, isolating itself from the others, floated toward me. I tried to remove my hand from the glass but it was too late. The jellyfish’s protoplasmic body brushed against the glass and for a moment the world turned inside-out, like when you’re staring at your reflection in the spoon and one of your teeth aches but you’re not sure if it’s you or the reflection.
Come to devour them again, have we? the curator laughed as she swept the room of debris. She was old and spindly. Don’t forget to blink, she warned. No doubt she believed I was a bit looney.
I returned again and again to the exhibit, arriving early in the morning and staying until late at night. Like I no longer possessed that twinge of shame that prevents normal people from taking pleasure in monstrosity. There was an unspeakable sadness to the jellyfish tentacles that filled me with joy. I could only imagine what it must be like having a billion nerves coiled around something no thicker than a thread of silk. What a frenzy of feeling. So why did I pity them? Was it because of how fragile their bodies were? How easily they disintegrated, disappearing between blinks and leaving only a lavender glow in their wake. Before the jellies I had always believed things should be long or fragile but not both, but I began to wonder if I was mistaken and these ephemeral things had found a loophole in existence.
Then I would go home and crawl into bed with the bookkeeper who flowered me with kisses, always counting the number of kisses he doled out, as if he wished to own me in his mouth. But as the weeks turned into months I no longer felt him floating inside me late at night because as soon as the lights were out I sensed nothing except the jellyfish songs.
I am not ill. Jellyfish, I discovered in a book at the library, have an ancient, clandestine language. I was watching the curator feed the jellyfish one evening when I heard something deep within my ear. It was a Tuesday. I remember wearing my mother’s blue dress. The curator climbed a wobbly ladder and opened the tank. She scooped her hand into a bucket and spread almost invisible droplets into the water. The jellies danced. That’s when I heard it. A ripple, a murmur, a hum. Like when a spoon makes that tingling sound stirring a tea cup. In their song I felt the witness of some terrible arcane knowledge. I didn’t realize until then that the jellies had been singing all this time. It was an old song, one that was sung in the beginning, before there were earths or stars and all was protoplasmic soup.
One night I combed the tangles from my hair at the mirror. The bookkeeper was sleeping in the other room. As I combed I hummed the queer jellyfish melody, sometimes bringing the hair against my lips until they tingled with an odd burning sensation.
And then I knew. I was becoming a jellyfish.
After purchasing a ticket I went straight to the jellyfish exhibit. I undressed. Opening the hatch, I slipped effortlessly inside the aquarium tank.
There was nothing strange about it. For some time I had been becoming a jelly, and now I would be one of them. I floated unceremoniously. The bloom welcomed me into the elliptical rhythm, their bioluminescent pulses guiding me through a ballet whose music I knew like an old lullaby. The shapes of two girls materialized on the other side of the glass. I floated towards them. They wore prim dresses and shiny shoes. One look at me and they screamed. At that time I still thought like a human, but I could not understand such screams. All around me was music. Could they not hear it? I could see the trail of my hair in the water, glowing, but my skin was stubbornly opaque. I needed more time for the transformation to be complete. Once I was fully transformed into a jellyfish they would look at me with wonder in their throats.
But it did not happen the way I imagined.
Two burly men hooked me under the armpits and hoisted me out the tank. The other jellyfish shrieked. They cried. They lighted up the room with fluorescents. If only they had waited a few more seconds. Then nobody would have confused me for a girl. But out I came, nude as a moon, flopping on the ground. I coughed up water. A crowd huddled over me. Someone slapped me on the back trying to help me breathe. It felt as if I were still floating, my head spinning with music. I tried to talk but my voice was burnt. Before anyone said anything I fled down the stairs and into the night.
I spent hours by the docks. I studied my reflection in the water. I was still a girl, but not quite a girl. My skin was pale, my hair a beautiful tangle. And yet these limbs. This voice. Breathing this rancid air. What to do with myself? Nobody wants a not quite girl.
They found me the next morning in a fisherman’s boat. They said they had been looking for me all night and I was lucky the fisherman found me, almost mistaking me for seaweed.
At the hospital they wrapped me in blankets and tried to force warm soups down my throat which I vomited. Cold, I told them. Give me something cold. The nurse didn’t believe me when I told her I was a jellyfish and needed to get back to the water before I dried out.
My father was the only visitor. He was so small and shriveled, like a raisin left in the sun. He stopped in the doorway, startled, as if he’d stumbled into someone else’s dream. I could tell it pained him when I refused to hug him.
A jellyfish sting can be toxic, I said. You believe me, don’t you?
Oh poppet, my father mumbled. Then he ran his fingertips over the top of my head as if confused who I was.
I told him we had to hurry, that there was no time, that I needed to get back to the exhibit, back to my bloom, that I was almost a jellyfish and without water I would disintegrate into a gelatinous blob, but he kept whispering poppet, poppet, and kissed my forehead. It tingled.
Nobody else believed me either. Don’t be absurd, a man at the park said, pushing me aside with his cane when I asked if my hair looked like tentacles. Oh dear, a young father said, hurrying along with his child when I asked him to touch me to see if I would sting.
Nobody would tell me what I am. The more I thought about it, the more they told me it never happened. The less they believed me the more I knew what I was. I was a jellyfish. A half jellyfish, anyway. The more I believed this the more it made me ache. My skin wrinkled. My hair fell out. My skin was damp. Burning up one minute and freezing the next. I lost a tooth.
Why are you so anxious? the doctor asked during a routine check-up, as if that explained what was happening to me.
Wouldn’t you be anxious if you were a jellyfish? Wouldn’t you be anxious if you were shedding this wretched human skin for something immortal?
I see, he scribbled in his notebook.
To speak to a doctor of immortality is a foolish thing. Of course he wouldn’t understand that we jellyfish are immortal. I read about it in the library book. No, we don’t live forever. But we can, when necessary, turn back the clock. We mature backwards. Our tentacles retract, our bodies collapse, shrinking back into infantile shapes, we sink to the ocean floor and start life all over again as little polyps.
Before I was a jellyfish, when I had a spine and laughter and menstruation, I thought of living as a straight line with God waiting at the far end with a cudgel. But with the jellies I’ve come to realize we are not hurling relentlessly towards zero but this life is one among many, a web spun at many angles and when one strand breaks another spins unexpectedly to take its place.
One night I drew baths and turned off all the lights. In the water my skin paled slightly. I scratched and clawed and gnawed it away, but skin is a stubborn thing. Nobody knows this, but when you finally peel through enough human skin there is bioluminescence. Most people stop when they draw blood, before they get to the greens and blues. They’re afraid to see what is inside them. Yellow is the second skin. Then oranges. Purple is beneath it all. There are few who find it, few who can hear its ripples, murmurs, hums.
Soon my skin was as pale as lemons sucked free of their juices. What else could I do? The more I peeled away the more my skin burned with song.
Now I sit in my bathtub all day, waiting for this skin to shed. Soon I will no longer be this half-jellied thing suspended in a human cage. Soon I will disintegrate into polyps, sucked down the drain and flushed out to sea as I mature back into childhood. Like my sisters, I am immortal. I can only guess what my next life will be.
I am eaten by a sea turtle.
I am caught in a biologist’s net. He takes me to his laboratory where, after many experiments, he transdifferentiates my cells and I assume a human shape so I can join him at the marine biology gala. After midnight I turn back into a jellyfish and the scientist weeps.
I am put into a vat with a thousand other jellies and we are boiled into syrup and sold to elderly women who rub us all over their buttocks hoping to smooth away their wrinkles.
I am floating alone and free in restless ocean.
I am dissected in a high school laboratory. One boy steals a tentacle and later, with his friends, plays a game seeing who can keep my tentacle down their underwear the longest.
I am scooped out of a tide pool by a Neanderthal who draws pictures of me on the walls of caves.
I am pickled and sprinkled over a bed of jasmine rice in a restaurant.
I am the pet of a fisherman’s wife. She keeps me in a salt pool cave where we sing to each other and share dirty jokes. Our laughter surprises the stars.
I am swallowed up in a black hole with the rest of the universe. All is silent and dark until I start to pulse, to sing, to shine, and the cosmos are reborn.
I am floating in an aquarium, singing for a girl who presses her face close to the glass, as if she can hear our song.
I am washed ashore on an abandoned beach. A mustachioed man spears me with a stick. He laughs, tosses me into a clump of seaweed. A boy chases a girl across the sand. You are Rapunzel and I am the prince, he says. He tries to kiss her. The girl, skinny as a weed with frizzy hair, grabs me by the tentacles and swings my serpentine blob at him again and again, paralyzing the poor brute with her fearsomeness. Even after the boy sulks away the girl doesn’t let go of me. I am on fire. Every nerve singing. But the girl doesn’t let go. Her hand is purpled and numb and she can’t tell where she ends and I begin and yet she fists me, gently, her flesh singing, screaming, blooming, not some foolish little girl, just astonished nobody told her this is kissing.

Ryan Habermeyer's debut collection of short stories, The Science of Lost Futures, won the BoA Editions Short Fiction Prize (2018). He received his PhD from the University of Missouri and an MFA from UMass Amherst. His prize-winning stories and essays have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work most recently appeared in or forthcoming from Bat City Review, Hotel Amerika, and the Los Angeles Review, among others.