And she changed then.
Her outstretched hand thinned and something moved beneath her skin. It was as if she were a living casing harboring something else. Her fingertips flowed together, joining into a fleshy mass that bent and twisted how a human hand never should. Her spine arched in pain and she tipped her head back, her mouth opening as if to cry out to the sky. And that was when it emerged.
The tips of something, of many somethings, poked and prodded into the open air past her teeth. Her jaw gaped wider to accommodate the tentacles. And as I watched, the water darkened around her waist and a thousand black appendages appeared from where her legs had been. She hadn’t been walking at all; she was being carried by what her lower half had become.
Her mouth split along the edges of her lips and the face that I had looked at a hundred thousand times—kissed, caressed—broke apart as her true form was revealed. It was a blackened carapace of shiny flesh that emerged. Many folds rimmed with red fluttered in the soaking air. Gills, I thought wildly as the borders of my sanity began to fray. Her skin continued to slough off in the water like an insubstantial sheet peeling away, and more of her body was exposed. A gelatinous substance, mucousy and gray, covered her back between spiny fins that looked poisonous in the stormy light. The tendrils rising from the water around her pricked and preened the fins until they stood out like smoky sails. Del’s chest and belly were now flat and I realized that there had never been a child. It was only her, the true her, becoming what I saw now.
A low bellow that I felt more than heard, rippled through the air and Del’s mouth opened in a gash of needled teeth, their rows too many to count lining her cavernous throat.
And her eyes. Her beautiful gray eyes that had captivated me were now the pools of darkness that I’d witnessed that day looking out at the sea with longing. They held none of the softness and love of before.
I screamed then. I know I did, though I don’t remember it. I do know I raked trails of flesh from my face with my fingernails because to this day I bear the scars, and fell to my knees in the surf that roiled around me. I knew then that there was nothing left to do but scream and die in the sea because what I had seen wasn’t something a human mind or heart could ever accept. There was no swallowing the immensity of it. I sobbed something then, surely her name, and that was when the sea moved.
It began to rise a hundred yards out from the cove. It bulged, something surging beneath it so vast and powerful that the ocean itself seemed to be giving it precedence to the tide. The water rushed away from me, receding with the thing’s birth, and I watched, dumbstruck, as it emerged.