Clear Blue

by Elamimax

At the Shore

Break, O waves, at the shore 

When the sun has gone down

And lay them to rest

Those pitiful drowned

In my half-awake brain, I noted that it was strange for someone to bring me a glass of water, supposedly to splash it on me, only for them to start with my feet. Like, obviously it would make more sense for them to throw it in my face, right? It’s only when that water quickly rushed up my body and into my nose that I realized more might be going on. My eyes didn’t want to function, so I relied on my other senses for a bit as I sat upright. 

There was sand. There was the noise of crashing waves. A few excited gulls in the distance. However I’d gotten here, I was on a beach. I tried my eyes again, to limited success this time. 

It wasn’t actually a problem with my eyes, the doctor had said. It was neurological. Psychosomatic, was the word he’d actually used. Under periods of high stress, my vision would swim, and combined with a migraine, the whole thing would shut down until further notice, sometimes. “Your eyes are calling but your brain has its phone turned off,” he had said. Very hip. Very cool. 

I was glad that part wasn’t happening this time at least, although vision was still mostly just colors and vague shapes at the moment. I could work with that. It might at least keep me from falling down a hole in the sand. 

Why was I on a beach? Where was I? How did I get here? I had passed out at the gallery… had the campaign manager scooped me up and… what, tried to drown me? That was unlikely. There would’ve been witnesses. And also people don’t just murder people for mild inconvenience. Even in politics. 

I sat upright, putting my hands on my knees. Everything was blue. It was relaxing. My heart was slowly starting to pick up steam, like an engine of anxiety ready to pull a train across some very long tracks, but I wanted to enjoy this for a few seconds more, before I got up and real life came crashing down on me again.

When I left this beach and figured out where I was, I’d have to get home, figure out a way to contact the campaign manager. With a bit of luck, the fact that I’d fainted would be a good enough medical reason so that my being let go wasn’t going to be my fault, at least. Then contact my supervisor at university and explain why I wasn’t going to be finishing my internship and begging him to let me try again. 

After that rejection, I’d take a shower and start doing research for the job that would be the rest of my life. Maybe a local place needed a waterlogged idiot to stock shelves forever, provided they were okay with me fainting from time to time for some unspecified reason. I didn’t look forward to my grandmother telling me that her husband worked two jobs for most of his life that paid for their two houses and their two cars. Grandpa was an asshole, Gam-Gam. Stop defending him just because…

Just because he provided for you and gave you a home and worked and was a contributing member of both the family and society as a whole, something I had never done and presumably would never be able to, because I was a disappointment through and through. I groaned and ran a hand through my hair, realizing after the fact that it would now be full of sand. Whatever. I was going to be taking a weeklong shower after this anyway. Wash the disappointing off of me. 

“Are you alright?” A voice like a silk scarf in the wind, so wispy I was worried its owner would be carried off into the air. I looked over. The shape was wearing a white dress. I blinked a few more times and came to the startling conclusion that they probably had a face. A shock, truly. I thought for a second, then nodded.

“Alive,” I said, “which I think makes me lucky.” My voice was quiet and muffled, like I had water in my ears, reminding me of trying to talk to people after Uncle had set off fireworks in his yard and one of them had blown the windows off of the shed.

“I should say.” The person sat down next to me in the wet sand while the waves lapped at our feet, seemingly not caring about the thin cloth of the dress getting wet. “My name is Aria,” she said. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you washed up here.”

“Why do you know better?” I asked, looking at her closer. She looked like something out of a dream, the wind playing with her hair as she smiled at the horizon, the sun on her dark skin. “Did you see who put me here?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “But if you’d ended up in the water, I can’t imagine you would’ve made it past the Marina, you know?” I looked around, and saw some docks down the beach. The people there were pretty watchful, I guess. Coast guard technology was pretty advanced nowadays, even if the pier I could see was clearly just made out of wood. My vision was coming back.

Without much conviction, I shrugged. “Sure. I guess beautiful art just does things to you.” The woman looked at me and smiled as a blush crept up on her cheeks. 

“I’ve never been called that before,” she said. “You’re not too bad yourself.” If I hadn’t clearly almost died by aneurysm (and/or drowning?) I would have died on the spot. There was a genuine quality to the way she smiled at me that was completely disarming. She had meant every word she said, which was absurd because I was nobody. It took me staring into bathroom mirrors for minutes on end to even convince myself I existed in the morning, before going through my daily argument with myself as to whether or not I should. And then shave, of course. 

“Whuh?” I said. Not only had she — deliberately or otherwise — completely missed the point of what I’d been trying to say, assuming that I’d been hitting on her, but she had also managed to not run away screaming at the thought of that. Flirting with a woman who was clearly helping a guy who was in trouble was the last thing I wanted to do. The best thing for me to do was to get up and walk away from her to save her from my own incompetent and predatory presence (that I hadn’t intended to flirt was no excuse) but I was too stunned to move. 

She stood up. For a brief moment I half-hoped she’d sneer and walk away, because that would make sense, but instead she smiled at me again and held out her hand. “It’s not every day a woman like you ends up on my beach,” Aria said. 

“A what.” I frowned. There was no universe in which I could be mistaken for a woman. Sure, I kept clean-shaven, but I had a jaw so square you could use it to straighten a ruler, and my hair was kept buzzed for Professionalism Reasons. Maybe it had something to do with the replacement shirt I was wearing—

I looked down and felt the blood rush to my head so quickly I thought I was going to pop like a balloon. I was stark naked. Stark naked and fully a whole-ass other person. My brain kept bouncing between these two thoughts, like a weighted metronome. I felt like I was losing my mind.

Had I been naked this whole time? There was no way I hadn’t been, right? 

When had I become someone else? Brain transplants weren’t real, right?

Oh my god, why hadn’t Aria said something about me being naked?! 

Oh my god, I had a pair of breasts now! My voice sounded quiet because the bass had been stripped out of it!

“Is something wrong?” She asked. “You look like you’re panicking.”

“I am panicking,” I said, and giggled the most insane giggle I’d giggled in a good, long while. “I don’t know why I’m naked and I’m suddenly not sure of who I am.”

“And you don’t know where you are or how you got here?” Aria said. It wasn’t really a question, but just in case it was, she could read the answer in my eyes. “Come on, get up. We’ll get you some clothes. When was the last time you ate?”

“I don’t—“

“Yes, I figured,” she said with a smirk. “Come on. Up.” I took her hand. Her palm was coarse and calloused. Despite all the flirting smiles being gone, the softness hadn’t. She seemed worried for me, which was even stranger. People didn’t worry about me, not unless my wellbeing (or lack thereof) directly impacted their day through sheer inconvenience.

“Do you work here?” I asked. “Or are you some kind of mental health professional?”

“No?” She said as she pulled me on my feet. I felt even more exposed, even if it was warm enough not to bother me. “I just enjoy coming here.”

“Oh,” I mumbled. She hadn’t let go of my hand yet. “I can go somewhere else. I don’t want to be a bother.”

“What? No, we’re getting you inside and safe. And maybe soup, if you haven’t eaten.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but let her lead me. There was too much going on, too much strangeness, too much for my brain to process, to really object to her walking me up the beach. As we crested the dune, I saw it. 

Its houses made of white clay, basking in the afternoon sun, the town from the painting was nestled against a hill in a sheltered bay by the sea. There was a harbor with a market which, even from here, was audibly busy. Children’s laughter echoed across cobblestone streets. No cars. No electric lights. “What… this is… that’s not…”

“Welcome to Azuro,” she said. “Come on.” She pulled me along to a house close to the beach and practically shoved me through the door. It was cool inside, the thick walls keeping the heat out. Her house was decorated with shells and colorful fabrics, and wavelike patterns were painted on every available wall. All that said, though, it didn’t look very lived in. It was too… neat. Like something out of a catalog. Despite everything else bouncing around in my head, I couldn’t shake the thought that it looked like an IKEA showroom. 

“Nice place,” I said meekly. 

“Thank you. Sit.” My legs obeyed before my brain had processed the words. The lady said sit. I sat. Good boy. “I’m going to grab you some clothes, then some food. Then we’re going to see what we can do about that memory of yours. Do you have a name, beautiful stranger?”

“I… My name…” I started, and then stopped. She thought I was a woman. If I just told her my name, she would probably not understand. But I couldn’t let her think I was one, that was… worse. I didn’t know how, but a feeling in my stomach, a knot that twisted tighter with every second I was naked, told me that I was committing some kind of horrible crime. 

“Take your time, sweetheart,” she said as she rummaged through a closet that seemed to be mostly empty, finally producing a dark blue dress. “If you force something like this, you’re just as likely to hurt yourself.”

“I’m not a woman,” I said, pushing the words out of my mouth, and immediately had to close it to keep from retching. Saying that had been more painful than I’d anticipated. I took a deep breath. “I’m a man, even if I don’t… Something’s gone wrong, I…”

“Oh,” she said as she looked at me and put the dress down, then rushed over to me. “I am so deeply sorry.” She cradled my face, and then took my hands in her own. “I don’t know where you’re from, stranger,” she said, “but you’ll find that we understand a great many things here.” She gave me a reassuring smile. “You can be a man if you want to.”