If We Were In Another Life
If we were three-spined sticklebacks, you would light up crimson to warn off other males and I would be honoured and not annoyed, safe instead of smothered, because I’d know you could protect our patch in the stream, and I would follow your proud zig-zag dance through the water as you tempted me with your show of masculinity, all the way to the nest you prepared for our young with scavenged cotton threads and water weeds tucked deep—a wish and a promise, if I would only trust you with our babies, please.
If we were lobsters, you would fight for my attention, dance perceived challengers across the ocean floor, curling your tail fin to scoot back from danger before making your move to win my heart, racing in anticipation, neurons firing as I imagine your feelers running over my carapace, and I’d catch the scent as you release your urine sacs to mark territory—mark me—as yours, and be invigorated knowing you ripped through his rostrum with your pincer claw, never distraught by the evidence of what you were capable of right there in front of me.
If we were seahorses I would deposit my eggs into your brood pouch and you would fertilize them and care for the embryos, your body nourishing theirs, regulating blood flow and temperature, and I would never once ask you what you did all day, or why you were always so tired, or how much longer did you think it would take and wouldn’t it be nice to be normal again when those adorable babies cleaved from your body, spilling away into the ocean, and I would understand when you spilled your salty tears into the vastness contemplating the enormity of what is and what would be.
If we were horseshoe crabs your claws would hook to the top of my larger shell, accepting a free ride as I crawled from ocean waves to lay eggs in the sand—but I’d have ten eyes, and would know that you were a satellite crab, hanging around during high tides and full moons to fertilize more and more eggs, and I would never believe excuses that contradicted what my ten eyes showed me to be true, because I’d be as old and wise as the dinosaurs.
If we were sea otters I would never expect you to stay because that is not the way of otters, and I would not be haunted by a community of fathers that frolicked with young ones while mothers rested, so my life would be content—swimming the depths of the ocean with my pup suckling milk, swaddled in a seaweed blanket, preparing to launch them into the world without any trauma from an absentee father because all fathers leave anyway, so why question if pups are a problem, a burden when this is never, ever true, and no father would hint at such things where a young pup might hear, and wonder.
But we are not three-spined sticklebacks or lobsters or seahorses or horseshoe crabs or sea otters. And I am tired.
Melanie Mulrooney
Melanie Mulrooney lives in Nova Scotia with her husband and a gaggle of kids. She’s a 2024 Writing Battle contest winner, and her work is published at Metastellar, Martian Magazine, Flash Point SF, and others.
When not writing stories or wrangling children, she can be found devouring books, volunteering in her community, or strolling through the woods.
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