In the beginning there was just me. I was lonely. You have no idea. I was lonely in a way even the most shunned of you have never known loneliness. And I was cold, which is not the same as cold-blooded, no matter what they say about me. It was not a philosophical, mountaintop sort of loneliness, the self-inflicted loneliness of a sage in his dark cave. It was a murkier sort of solitude, silent with the wet sleep of the unformed world.The materials of life still lay dormant, not yet understanding their profound relationship to one another. There was no order, nothing had a clear relationship to anything else. The land was not the land, the sea not the sea, the air not the air, the sky not the sky. The mountains were not yet mountains, nor the clouds clouds. 

But wait. Here comes the sound of a river, water rushing in to fill the gap.Here comes the river. Husssssssh. Shhhhhh. Finger pressed vertically against lips, didn’t I tell you? Of course I have lips, a woman’s lips, a woman’s mouth already muttering secrets under my breath. Look, I have a woman’s eyes, woman’s rope of smooth black hair extending past my waist. A woman’s torso.Your gaze slides over breasts and belly.The softest skin, warm and quivering.And below? Forget modesty. Here comes the tail, a thick cord of muscle undulating, silver slippery in the early morning light. Lean closer and you see the scales, translucent, glinting pinks and greens and oily cobalt blues. 

I know that eye, the eye that registers fear first, and then the desire to consume. What kind of soup would my flesh make? What would you dream after tasting?

Worried you, eh? Never mind, I was telling you about the river. Shhhhhh. Here it comes. Curve and slither, form and motion we both understand.

In the beginning there was me, the river and a rotten-egg smell. I don’t know where the smell came from, dank and sulphurous, but there it was, the stink of beginnings and endings, not for the faint of heart. I was lonely. I scooped up a clot of mud from the riverbank and rolled it cool and brown between my palms. It was slippery and hard to control. I poked and prodded it. I jabbed and jerked it. I laid it in the palm of one hand and I stroked and smoothed it with the fingers of the other until it began to look a little like me. I gave it a thick, smiling mouth. I gave it a stubby little tail so it wouldn’t get too arrogant and think itself better than me. The mouth contorted into a rude shape. I pinched it back into place. I gave the thing some eyes so it could see who it was dealing with. The eyes opened and gazed at me insolently and the mouth contorted again, then settled in an insipid smirk. I laid my thumb into a little indent beneath the waist, and, in a fury, pressed until the tail split in two. The mouth opened. . . oohhhh. The thing went limp. I smoothed the rough bits between the dangling flaps of bifurcated tail, trying to conceal the damage I had done, pretend it was part of the original design. Oooohhhh, sighed the thing. It began to breathe. 

Can you understand me? I asked it. Do you speak my language? I wanted to tell it about my loneliness and how delighted I was to have its company. I wanted to ask its forgiveness for my moment of wrath.

The thing stared at me. It pointed at my tail and started to laugh. Furious, I dashed it to the ground, where it crumpled and then lay still. I scooped up another clot of mud and rolled it between my palms. But as soon as I gave it a mouth and eyes, it too began to laugh at me. I split its tail. I dropped it unceremoniously into the river and began another. All day I worked, varying nose length and eye colour, shoe size and heart size, hoping to create one that would treat me with a little respect, but always with the same result. I worked until I was so exhausted I could not keep my eyes open a moment longer and then I slumped down beside the wreckage of my monstrous creations and fell asleep.

I woke to the sound of sighs and laughter. The things had survived my fury. The crushed ones had healed, the ones I dropped into the river had swum to shore. They were rolling two by two in the mud, moaning and giggling and stroking one another at the point of damage, the point at which I had split the tail. They’re a bit disgusting, I thought to myself, but I don’t feel lonely any more. I showed them how to build houses and plant rice and tried to get them to treat me a little better. When they saw that I could help them, they made an effort, but they weren’t very clever and so they relapsed, frequently, into rudeness and insolence.

I wondered how long they would last, with the few meagre agricultural skills I had taught them. In a few years, they discovered they could cultivate some riverside plants in their gardens and eat those along with rice. I brought them pigs and chickens and taught them how to fish.They were brutal creatures with no qualms about laying a knife against a pig’s throat when they were hungry.They roasted the pig whole in a deep pit. Later though, I found a neat plate of roasted pork sitting on a rock by the river, presumably meant for me. 

They made it into a habit. Every feast day they left me a plate of roasted pork. Later, they marked it for me by burning sticks of aromatic wood beside the plate. I began to grow fond of them and worried about their mortality.

As they aged they slowed down, grew pale and thin. Their glossy black hair lost its sheen and whitened. They developed sores in their mouths and infections in their ears. Their eyes glazed over and some of them went blind. They hobbled about in obvious pain, their sores running with pus and blood. I grew despondent and listless. I could not bear to watch. One day an old woman came to me, her clothes tattered, her hair streaked with ghostly white strands.“What is wrong with us?” she said. “You made us. Now help us.” My despondency grew into a full-blown depression. I slithered off into the hills and found myself a dark cave. 

In the dark I dreamt about their origins, searching for a key. I remembered their mischievous eyes, their rude smirks. I remembered my fury and how I had wished to destroy them. I remembered how I had split their tails, and how they had learned, awkwardly, to walk, rather than gliding along low to the earth as I did. I remembered the pleasure they derived from stroking one another between the legs. 

There was something to this if I could just . . .And then I had it! Suppose I gave this instinctive activity a dual purpose, suppose it were not just for pleasure, but also for procreation. Not that I have anything against pleasure myself, leave that to Confucius; he’ll be along soon enough. But why not give the behaviour a secondary function? Delighted, I slipped and slithered back to the little river settlement. I made the strong ones into women and the weak ones into men. I taught them how to kiss.

They were pleased with my latest invention. They kissed and stroked and stimulated one another until their hair resumed its original glossiness and their cheeks and eyes grew bright. They copulated in their little river shacks and I politely averted my eyes, not wanting to embarrass them. They became so absorbed with one another that they forgot about me altogether, except for those who could not have children. These built temples and burned incense for me. They laid out plates of pork and whole steamed chickens and sweet round oranges laced with tears of longing. I helped them when I could, but after a few thousand years there were so many of them, I could not help them all, though I revelled in the success of this latest project. 

But the more of them there were, the more preoccupied they became with their daily lives and the less time they had for me. They left food and burned incense for the gods of agriculture and war and only occasionally for me. Because their affection for me diminished so gradually,I didn’t realize how resentful I had grown, or how lonely. The first emotion I recognized in myself was envy. I longed to walk amongst them, experience the passion I had invented without having ever felt it.You might think it odd, to envy the beings one has created. I can’t explain it, except to say that it happened and that it consumed me with such a burning longing that I could think of nothing except how I might walk among them undetected and experience their joys and sorrows.

I returned to the riverbank, to the precise spot where in my loneliness I had scooped up that first handful of mud and prodded it into shape.The mud was cool against my belly. I glided down the slippery bank to a bend in the river where the water pooled. At the end of the pool, water flowed between two jagged rocks. I followed the bank. It dropped off sharply and I skidded down the drop. Beside me, the water gushed.The narrow stream had become a thin rope of waterfall.At the bottom was a cold green lake. I slithered to the far end and slipped into it. The water was very clear. I lay beneath the surface. It was still as glass, a veil above which the dryworld shone like a painting on the ceiling of a chapel, except that it moved. Storm clouds gathered furiously up there and it seemed amazing to me that things could be so still and quiet here below when there was so much violence up above.The surface held flat and unmoving until the boat approached. Its wake shot ripples through the stillness. Slowly, the boat glided across my transparent roof, a dark looming shape, dry and full of mystery. It shut out the troubled blue-grey light. A paddle dipped rhythmically in the water, first on one side then the other, a dark wing repeatedly breaking the surface. Suddenly, over the ledge, a face appeared. It was a young man’s face, all angles. The eyes were dark and contemplative. I couldn’t know then that it was not the kind of face young men usually wore in public. It was a private face, a lonely face, the kind of face men reserve only for reflective surfaces. I shivered and the shiver travelled down the full rope length of my body, making the underwater weeds in which I hid shudder also with an animal sort of motion. The young man noticed, and his eyes changed. He was no longer watching himself, but looking into the water. He had seen me. 

The boat passed overhead and its shadow moved slowly away into the distance.The sky opened up overhead again and light streamed down in long blue shafts. But I no longer felt content. I found myself longing for the shadow.A storm broke and it began to rain.The surface broke up so that what lay above became indecipherable. I swam along a steep ledge down one side of the lake, which went so deep it might have been bottomless. Light did not penetrate to this dark cold place and so I found my way by feel. My fingers brushed against the jagged edge of an opening. I reached down and groped in the dark. I peered over the ledge.There was a faint light in the cave, and at its bottom lay an enormous green fish with scales as big as my hands and eyes older than the world. Patiently, her gills gaped open and closed. 

“I saw a young man’s face,” I told her, “I want to go up into the world as a human being.”

She said, “I can give you legs, but the bifurcation of your tail will be very painful.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not afraid of pain.” 

“Open your mouth,” she said. 

I felt a stream of water flow into my mouth like a finger. It pressed something smooth and round into the back of my throat. I thought I would choke. I thought I would swallow the round thing, but it nestled firmly just where the water had nudged it, as though there were a small round gap in my mouth I had not noticed before. I felt no pain there, but in the tip of my tail I did. An unpleasant heat at first and then a terrible burning sensation. There was the sound of flesh ripping, and then I felt it, my body beginning to split in two. I screamed. She placed her hand over my mouth. “The pearl will keep you alive forever,” she said. “But you will never again be without pain.” The ripping continued up my long spine. The vertebrae cracked in two and the strands of the spinal cord were wrenched apart. The agony was unbearable. I opened my mouth again and clamped down on the hand that still covered it. She shrieked and let me go. Fast as I could I slithered away from her, up out of the cold dark depths to where there was still light and plant life, up to the far side of the lake, leaving a trail of blood in my wake.

I pulled myself onto a big flat rock to examine the damage. The separating continued and where my tail had torn in two the flesh dangled limp and useless. I reached down and tried to press the halves together again, but they didn’t quite fit. Already they were rounding a little. I watched in horror as my bright scales flaked off one by one to reveal vulnerable flesh beneath, greyish pink and much too soft. I picked the scales up off the cool surface of the rock and tried to press them back to my thin skin, but to no avail.The split tip of my tail opened and flattened and the ends separated in four places. My feet were translucent, pale and veined. I had no faith that I’d be able to stand on them. I stroked my new appendages with cold hands, trying to soothe away the burning pain. I turned on my rock. Behind me on a nearby rock sat another woman, also stroking her legs and marveling at their newness. Her face was remarkably like the face I had seen gazing down at me from the boat.