We watch the jellyfish, side by side, our shoulders pressed together. We do not speak. We do not move. The jellyfish bob up and down in their tiny tank, so many of them squished together in such a small space. I do not comment on it, but the words sit painfully in the back of my throat.
He will hum if I speak, but he will not reply. I want him to. He brought me here after I mentioned wanting to see the jellyfish, but he will grow frustrated if I say something. So I don’t.
Children whoop and run around us, chased by exhausted parents. They seem happy. One pushes their face against the glass, leaving a smudge when their parent pulls them away. A jellyfish glides behind it, as if blurred by tears.
There are too many of them in such a small space, their tank dark and lit only with a single dull bulb that changes from pink to blue and back again. The jellyfish are pink now; a girl points and babbles about it. Her voice is loud and shrill and hurts my ears.
My hand brushes against his and he jerks away. He does not let me hold his hand in public, does not let me touch him around children. I don’t understand it, but I respect his boundaries, even though it makes me ache. My hand sits in the empty air between us, fingers clenched around nothing.
I want to leave. I love the jellyfish, the way they move so peacefully through the water, their strange biology and their ability to kill so quickly. Watching them is usually soothing, like visual white noise, but I want to leave. The muscles in my calves spasm with the effort it takes to stay still.
“This is nice,” I say because I can’t help myself. The words feel wrong, like they’re for another place, another time.
He hums. Our shoulders brush again, but I don’t think he realizes it.
“We can go look at something else,” I suggest. I know I sound desperate; the jellyfish probably know too. He doesn’t. “I think there are turtles further in.”
“No,” he says.
Words linger in my mind, in my throat, on my tongue. They don’t spill into the air. The jellyfish turn a deep blue under their single bulb, and I cannot comment on it. A single word and I am choked.
The jellyfish are just as silent, peacefully blue. I wonder if I touch one, how long it would take me to turn the same color.
I think I hate jellyfish almost as much as I love them.
We stay. We watch the jellyfish. We do not speak. Our shoulders brush, hands jammed in our pockets, and I want to leave.
Matt Ivy Richardson is a queer fiction author and editor based in Naarm, whose stories experiment with points of view and the lives of queer characters. They are the current lead editor for Meridian Australis. His speculative fiction works can be found in Baffling Magazine, Apparition Literary Magazine, AUSTRAL and more.
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