There is nothing I can point at to prove my body’s insurrection. It is worse during the day, when the sun is at its height, beating the back of my neck as I bend away from it, and eyes follow every twitch of my fingers as they resist the urge to attack my skin. They are staring so hard, there’s no way they don’t see the way my bones snag against my skin as I walk, the seams between my body and the background, the clumsy sutures from when I was sewn into this body, into this life. 

The itching is worst in all the parts of my body that fold. My armpits, the insides of my knees, the wrinkles of my brain. That is where the discomfort pools. I wish there were a rash spreading or a rising bump from a bite or flakes falling off my skin…some evidence of the tumult beneath.

I clutch the black nylon bag holding the loaf of bread I came out to buy for lunch. It’s small enough for one person’s breakfast. This time last year it would have cost a fifth of what I paid today. In the bag, there’s also a sachet of pure water, a sachet of milk, a sachet of Milo and three cubes of sugar pried from a full pack because I can no longer afford a full pack of sugar.

I am living in pinches and bites. 

I feel a cold breeze lick my spine and straighten. A pregnant cloud has muffled the sun. I stare up at it. People are scrambling down the street and finding shelter. I stand still and look up, so that when the first drop of rain hits me, it falls into my left eye and rolls down my cheek.

The water is a balm. I hear the rain hit concrete and sand and skin. The rain is falling on the earth like a palm upon a drum. It is playing a song for my ears alone. Follow the water, it sings. 

I rush home and dump my breakfast on the bed. I grab the sachet of pure water and rip it, emptying it into an orange plastic bowl. I place my pillow on the floor and sit. This is not something I should climb a bed to do. 

I remember the rhythm of the rain, then open my mouth and let the song pour out.

The song starts heavy, words thudding to the ground thick with intention. I am looking myself in the eye in the bowl of water. As I rock back and forth, lost in the rhythm of it, my tailbone grates on the ground through the thin pillow I am sitting on. I am not scared of the bone-deep ache morning will bring when I sit up in my bed with its watery yellow sheets. Morning will not find me here in this room with its dust-streaked green walls and its cracked window panes, rust and algae marrying at the corners. The sun will never again see me in this body with its rounded elbows straining against dust-brown skin, its right knee with its cross-shaped scar, its too-thick hair and its pimpled back. 

If I sing this song right, words rolling off my tongue, throat tight, arms drumming a steady beat against my chest, never stopping, not even a pause, not even for air…if I sing this song right, it will carry me.

The water ripples in the bowl, rings flowing over rings, until there is a whirlpool in the middle. Sweat is slipping down my forehead and crawling into my mouth, salting my tongue as I sing. I am one with the song now. I could not rip it off my tongue if I wanted to. I do not know where it ends and I begin.

I stick my index finger in the middle of the bowl, and the water licks at my finger, tasting for resolve. It rises to my wrist, and then all at once I am being sucked into the bowl, and then into deeper, darker water.

It is pitch black and cool. The burning of my lungs is a distant itch. The water is rocking me and I am only humming now, lulling myself to sleep. I slow my humming and let the water carry me. Maybe this is freedom, a soft winding down, and a body giving permission to be carried.

No. That is death, an unyielding dream. I am suspended, floating, as the water gives me a choice. I reject the dream. What I want is an awakening. My eyes burn as I open them, and water rushes into my mouth as I gasp. This is not a dance of death, it is one of metamorphosis.

I feel my thighs stick together like they’re being pressed between a thumb and forefinger. My knees follow, then my calves and feet. Scales sprout on my bottom half, sleek and silver. Immediately, I am moving, slicing through water, joy bubbling in my chest, laughter streaming from my mouth. My last body did not even know how to swim. I dart away from ferocious dolphins and commune with sage sharks, slurp seaweed and swim until my tail is heavy and aching.

When I am satisfied, I rest on white sand, eyes closed, and I begin to hum again. The song is seductive. It is stuck in my head, on my tongue. I cup my hands together and shoot my song into the water there. All at once, the water below me begins to worry the tip of my tail, ripping it into legs. There is pain this time, and a salting of wounds, the ocean’s rebuke for my dissatisfaction.

The ocean spits me out on a beach. I feel a sun less savage than the one I knew before drumming on naked my back. I stand up and dust the wet sand from my skin. Some of it sticks. I wonder how much of it is from the ocean and how much is from land. I do not look back at the water. I cannot. If I look back the past might catch my eye and then what will it catch next? My feet? My heart?

I walk forward down the beach. There are others lying naked on pink and blue and yellow towels. They are staring. Not at my chest or where my thighs meet. It feels like they are staring at my legs. Do they know my right knee once had a scar shaped like a cross? Do they know these legs were once a tail? Can they look at me and read all I have been from the single page of my skin? Or are they reading stories from the backs of their eyes?

After walking for a while, I sit in the sand. Their eyes are scratching at me. The itch must not latch onto me again. There is a red cup beside me, stuck in the sand at an angle. There is a little water in it. This time when I sing, I think of harmonies, of choruses. The next space I occupy, I want to belong.

I pick up the cup and start up my song. As I sing, I feel myself slowly begin to fall, the ground drawing me into its embrace. I realise only when I have reached it that I was not falling, but shrinking, sprouting four extra legs as I go. I cannot see anymore, but it doesn’t matter, I can discern the shift of every single boulder of sand with my legs, sense the softest breath of air with my antenna, and most importantly I can feel the colony all around me, thinking in one voice, Hers. Carry Carry Carry. Build Build Build. PROTECT. We are chanting as we work, a chorus of efficiency. We do not waste a single step. Every task is planned and broken down into bits small enough for each of us to carry in our mandibles. Every thought is moulded and transmitted to me so I don’t have to do the painful work of collating intention in my chest and pushing it out with the doomed hope that it lands with impact. 

I turn my head to the left and receive an egg in my mouth. I clamp my mandibles too hard and suddenly the soft new life is leaking into my mouth. The ant beside me, head bent to collect the egg I have just destroyed, pauses a second at the disruption of the line, then calls out Attack Attack Attack and then the call is all around me. My colony swarms me and holds me down, clamping their mandibles down my legs. I hear the echo in my own mind, Attack Attack Attack. I would bite myself if I could, tear myself apart the way my nestmates are doing now. One leg, two legs, three. I feel a drop of dew fall to the ground beside me. I do not even know what a song is now, but with the last of my draining strength, I chant towards the dewdrop. 

I feel myself burrow into the earth and settle there. It is a dark, encompassing embrace. I rest there, nestled in the darkness, forgetting what time is. Rain slips through the soil and touches me, refreshing me, awakening me. I am at peace, but not for long.

There is something humming in me, something like potential. It will not let me be. It is telling me to push up, to reach out. It is telling me stories of the sun, telling me to abandon the safety of darkness, so that I might feast on light. I believe its promise, allow myself to grow and peek through the soil. The sun drops sweet dollops of light on me and I drink rain to my fill, unfurl my leaves and breathe thick air. It is a good life, but unchanging. Life is movement. Maybe my restlessness is what summons the storm that washes me away. I remember the rhythm of the song and allow the water to take me where it wants.

I end up in a market, a light drizzle trailing its last few drops on my head. I am in a body like my first. No, this is not a body. I am not sure what shape it truly is but my eyes and mind have moulded two hands, two legs and a head, maybe even this market, as tools through which I can understand this form. This is a spirit, stripped of flesh.

I roam the market watching other spirits weave between the stalls. Some glide an inch above the ground, feet never grazing the floor. Others walk with their feet in the air and their heads facing downwards.

The traders sell everything a mind could fathom: bright white pepper, smoked rats tied in bunches by their tails, large heaps of black salt in bright blue metal basins, beautiful blunt knives with redwood handles. A skeleton is hawking body parts, holding up a delicate dark brown arm and calling out “This one will fit you!” to every passer-by.

A person shrouded head to toe in scentleaf is selling bronze rings with names carved into them. “Never mind,” the trader tells a man holding a ring in his palm, “the name will fade if you are determined.”

My eyes dart from stall to stall, collecting contradictions till they are full to bursting. In my last body, I forgot what colour was. It is too much to take in. My heart is beating as if it wants to run out of my chest and sweat begins to sprout on my skin. I am rushing through the stalls, looking for a quiet place, a dark place.

I am breathing heavily now, and still, there is no escape in sight. A woman hawking water passes by me, and I grip her arm. 

“Please,” I say, “Give me water.”

She extends her hand, “What will you use to pay me?”

“I have nothing,” I say, desperately patting myself down, looking for something of worth.

She brings down her basin from her head and hands me a sachet of pure water.

“Sing a song for me,” she demands, hands on her hips

I tear the sachet and drink, then drag my mouth away from the water and pour some in my palm. When I begin to sing, the lyrics are the same as always, but this time I launch them off my tongue with finality. As I sing, I think of cool darkness, of dreamless sleep, of endings. This is the last time I will sing this song.