We are delighted to share an excerpt from “The Jellyfish” by Alisha Dukelow, which appears in issue 58.4. This is a story we read over and over again, discovering something new each time—and each time, it stayed with us long after we’d set it down. Read on for Alisha’s notes on writing, workshopping, and “irrealism,” and pick up a copy of the issue to read the story in full.
Initially, a small jellyfish in a bathtub was just a vague mental image: wispy, inexplicable, a diluted pink. Sometime in the fall of 2015, after I moved from Coast Salish territory (so-called Vancouver Island) to so-called Montreal, I half-attempted to write a poem about it, which I quickly abandoned. It seemed too silly; to mean too little. But the image stuck, and I drafted “The Jellyfish” in grad school at Concordia a couple of years ago. I had been doing a lot of academic reading and writing, which has the tendency to predetermine and/or constrict my thinking, so by then, I wanted to hold onto the fact that I didn’t really know what “The Jellyfish” meant. I wanted “The Jellyfish” to be outside of my intellectual and emotional control. Unsurprisingly, one of the main comments in my prose workshop was that people didn’t know what the jellyfish symbolized—what the metaphor’s vehicle was controlling.
Another, and not invalid, critique was that my bath-ridden protagonist lacked agency. In hindsight, I realize that, alongside being quite unwell, I was tired of the anthropomorphic, human-individual-centric narratives that are commonly theorized and diagnosed in classroom settings and doctor’s offices alike. I was frustrated by the way in which dominant psychological and psychoanalytic theories have insidiously shaped the majorly universalizing, pathologizing, and apolitically inward-looking explanations for why so many people are ill. I wanted to critique both the medical and wellness industries and the neoliberal notion of self-care. Yet I am also someone who has tried, wastefully, shamefully, a large assortment of products that are supposed to make me feel better. I’m not immune, nor innocent, and I wanted to tease and interrogate myself, as well.
Preceding this, I have always been drawn to “irreal” modes of description and literature, from Lewis Carroll and Madeleine L’Engell as a child, to authors like—but definitely not limited to—Octavia Butler, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Sabrina Orah Mark. Maybe my attraction to irrealism has to do with the fact that I already find “realism”—if it’s supposed to signify reality, meaning ecocidal realism, colonial realism, capitalist realism, white supremacist realism, and patriarchal realism—strange, unsettling, and illogical, as something which shouldn’t actually be the material and imaginative norm. As Dionne Brand asks (in her extremely poignant article “On narrative, reckoning and the calculus of living and dying”): “Was the homelessness growing on the streets normal? Were homophobia and transphobia normal? Were pervasive surveillance and policing of Black and Indigenous and people of colour normal? Yes, I suppose all of that was normal. But, I and many other people hate that normal.”
“The Jellyfish” doesn’t necessarily stand as a symbol or allegory for any one thing, but as I write towards a collection of fiction, I wonder if irrealism might defamiliarize, or emphasize the inherent absurdity and wrongness in, what we take for granted as real. I would like to attempt to, at least at a slant, grapple with what is ridiculous and dangerous about our everyday routines, as benign and mundane as they may seem. What is, or should be, abnormal about the exploitatively imbalanced relationships we subtly and not so subtly naturalize with ourselves, other humans, and the land, with its countless nonhuman inhabitants. What is abnormal about our anxious attempts to micromanage and interpret our lives and the earth’s life. At this time, collective, physical efforts to destabilize the status quo, beyond our default imaginations, written pages, and “best intentions”, have never been more urgent.
An excerpt from “The Jellyfish” (58.4)
A small jellyfish just floated to the surface of my bathwater. At first, I mistook it for the remaining skin of a Sea Lily essential oil bead, which I bulk order from H.D. & Co. I wonder if it originated from an unseen corner of my body, or if its appearance is a psychosomatic clot of lorazepam, sertraline, rosé: three milligrams, two hundred milligrams, nine hundred millilitres, and counting. But when I pluck it from the water and hold it in my palm, the pink incandescence of my antique lava lamp illumines the fragile umbrella of its bell, a wisp of algae-like arm.
I meet the venomous thread of tentacle when The Jellyfish stings my thumb. The sting is so quickly delicate, though, that I feel a sobering needle of shame for being this large. I put The Jellyfish back in the water. It undulates by my toes in tandem with the lava lamp’s boluses.
A few moments later, The Doctor enters my bathroom. They wear white suede platform sneakers with their oversized white coat. I admire their accessories: turquoise tinted safety glasses, a teardrop lapis lazuli pendant, nitrile gloves in Heavy Duty Blue. Their fingers are exceptionally long, and their short dark hair sprouts in clusters of elastic moulded waves. I count them: one, two, three, four, five, six. The hairstyle seems to tug their face toward the ceiling and sky, rippling their forehead with wrinkles and widening their already capacious eyes.
How did you feel when you first noticed it? The Doctor always wants to know how I’m feeling. They kneel at the edge of the bathtub and click on the LEDs attached to the temple hinges of their glasses. The Jellyfish gleams clearer in the cool light: coral in gelatinous transparency, a red splotch in its bell centre like a drop of Rorschach ink. Fine ruddy lines venously trace to the frilled circumference. It’s hard to believe that The Jellyfish, guided by ocelli only, is without blood, brain, and heart.
I’ve been depressed again. I can be honest with The Doctor. What should I do?
Relax. You don’t want to disrupt the habitat. Even though they haven’t touched anything, The Doctor stands and firmly wipes their blue hands on their coat. They undo the top two buttons and retrieve a thin silver stick from an inner pocket, which they shake and unfold to extend––like a wand––and immerse in the bathwater. The stick lights faintly in a diluted blue.
What’s that for? I ask.
Measuring repression, The Doctor says. After refolding and returning the flimsy-looking device to their coat, they pull out an amber vial from another inner pocket and squeeze its dropper lid full of an azure liquid. When they squirt the dosage into their mouth, their forehead lines briefly disappear. They refill and re-release.
What are you drinking?
My new brine. The Doctor half-closes their eyes as they answer.
Can I try? I realize I’m very thirsty.
No, The Doctor says, as they pull a circular screen from their pocket and take a seat on the toilet. They proceed to tap and scroll. It’s a type of Hydrozoa! they announce after a while. The smallest jellyfish are of this taxonomy, and there are genera that can survive beyond saltwater. But then they shake their head. The Jellyfish, a mobile medusa, is not sessile like freshwater polyps, nor a pink-hearted hydroid, nor Tubularia. It looks nothing like the Portuguese man o’ war, actually a colonial siphonophore, which grows up to thirty centimetres with a gas bladder of carbon monoxide. They continue to tap and scroll. It’s not a moon jelly. A long time ago, a bloom of these Aurelia aurita clogged the world’s largest nuclear power reactor in Oskarshamn, Sweden; but this jellyfish lacks the distinctively glowing tetrad of horseshoe shaped gonads. It must be a Pacific sea nettle!
I no longer live in that region, I say.
Alisha Dukelow grew up in the Cowichan Valley, on unceded Hul’qumi’num territory. She completed an MA in Creative Writing in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and is beginning a PhD in English Literature in so-called Los Angeles, on the traditional land of the Tongva people. Her writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Malahat Review, Room, and subTerrain. She is now drafting a collection of short stories, and has two small books on the way: A Modernist Affect Grid, a series of essay-poems about the Place Ville Marie building and the emotion theories of Silvan Tomkins and Magda Arnold, published by Anteism and the Centre for Expanded Poetics; and pareidolia, a debut chapbook of poetry through Anstruther Press.