By Sav Mann

*Encounters between two anglerfish are so rare in the deep ocean that they have evolved an unusual mating strategy called sexual parasitism.*

You remember existing in time, an aberration of light then dark then light then dark, when your body moved too freely in a world too exposed. Almost everyone born with you is dead now. Swallowed up in mouthfuls or drifting alone to their doom. You survived, though. You shuddered free from the soft skin of your egg, and the tiny bodies of plankton fed the tiny body that was you until you grew and grew heavier and descended to a place beneath time. 

You are relieved to be in the nothingness of the dark. The light up top was an assault, and you could never be safe while you were seen. Here, you are sometimes aware of bodies slipping past you, but the dark is a place of ambush and accident. To know something is nearby is to know you can escape it. Sometimes you see light ahead of you, flashing or bursting or trailing in the water. It might be food, but probably is not. It might be danger, and probably is. You follow anyway. You are not fast or strong enough to chase anything, but you swim with all the focus you can muster. In the crushing pressure of your world, there is room for only one thing, and that thing is desire. It would be easy to be grabbed by a tentacle or crushed between pincers. During long stretches of dark nothing, you can’t be sure that hasn’t happened, but you hope not. It is not so much that you care about self-preservation, but that all your desires coalesce on a point so powerful, and so painfully keen that it drives your every movement, down to your tail, propelling you away from a set of gaping jaws. You don’t need to live, but you know how you hope to die. 

The lights go away. They always go away, and you carry on. A missed chance is no chance at all. Your mouth is fixed half-open, and things slip inside. Motes of stuff, the much-too-muchness of above, snow down and you suck them in. Sometimes they are grains of sand or shreds of plastic, but sometimes they are food, and so you are sustained. Your mouth cannot bite or chew. It has only one purpose, and that purpose is not to eat. 

Your world is too dark and too quiet for the futile regret of *was* or the empty promise of *will be.* There is only a single, endless, now. You know you are in it, and you know that somewhere, always, so is she. In a world without time, this hardly even feels like waiting. 

There is another light ahead, and you follow it as deep as deep goes. You follow the light, a long and steady beacon, to the corpse of a whale that has become a world of its own. The very last scraps of flesh cling to a cage of bones, and fish scrape away at them while mollusks begin to colonize the scaffolding of the skeleton, and she is there, in the middle of it all. 

She is dazzling in her own light. Her lure, hanging like a halo above her gaping mouth, illuminates her small and sightless eyes, her resplendent, bulging flesh. She was the first and only thing you ever wanted. The anchor that has tethered you to the bottom of the sea. She is a tide, beautiful and terrible and irresistible to the small, frail heart that beats only for her.

The current has carried you this far, but you cannot risk being dragged any farther. You are a weak and cold thing, every movement sluggish, every thought a feeble flicker. You understand that she needs you to be something more than yourself. You make the effort of your life, the last effort you will ever make. Your plodding heart picks up, your blood sings through you as you thrust towards her in the dark, your mouth splayed open. She shifts, just slightly, presenting her broad and swollen flank to you, your generous darling, and when your teeth breach her flesh, they sink deep into her with all the blind and reckless certainty of love. 

You taste her blood in your mouth, feel the pulse of it pumping against you, a steady thrust and retreat. She is strong and vital. Not like you. You understand the plunge towards her is the beginning of your end. 

For now, you are whole, and you are you, but this kiss, your mouth against her body, has sealed your fate. If you could close your eyes, you would. Eagerly, impatiently, you wish yourself blind. You wish your insides would dissolve into each other, and then melt into her. You would fade away, and everything inside you would flow to where it has always belonged, to where it has always, always been going. Your life will be her life. It will all happen soon. 

Already, you have stopped moving, and she carries you away. You do not feel the cold, and you do not see the dark. You can only see her.