today i am thinking about merpeople inducing. taking a fish fin left over from their most recent meal, or a long, slithery piece of kelp, or a snapped piece of old, frayed rope, and pulling open the plates over their gills to carefully tease the filaments, slipping the tool further and further in until it reaches the rakers-
or needing to clear their gills stat, no time to find a tool, so they slide their fingers in and thumb along the ridges like the pages of a book-
or delibrately stirring up sand at the bottom and swimming through, gulping down the dusty water to push through their gills until they're helpless in the midst of a fit-
or hauling themselves up onto dry land and marvelling at how different a gull feather feels when dry as to when wet, and becoming desperately curious as how it feels on their gills, and in their nose-
or dragging themself further inland, into the forest or jungle that come right to the beach, or to the edge of the garden bordering the cottage on the shore, and meeting plants they've never encountered living under the water, some of which are heavy with a fine yellow dust that smells so sweet-
