The Selkie of the City Tells All

We meet at the Mermaid Parade on Coney Island three years in a row. We meet on a rooftop on the Fourth of July, the air smoky with bodega-bought salutes. We meet on a broken-down B3 bus on Avenue U. We meet in front of Macy’s between holidays, the arm of an animatronic elf waving in the window display. We meet over dollar pizza. We meet at a concert in an empty pool basin in McCarren Park. We meet in Marble Hill. We meet during intermission. We meet at a rent party. We meet over a rent boy. We meet at a LAN party in Fordham. We meet through the divorce. We meet over hotpot in Flushing, our hands gunning for the same ladle in a tub of sesame sauce. We meet through mutual friends. We meet when the body is discovered. We meet at a rave in an auto-something warehouse beneath the BQE. We meet on DMT. We meet at the Bowery Mission. We meet on the same ferry for forty years. We meet at the Diptyque sample sale: your nose down by a candle, its name spelled in elongated French. You are a classically trained painter who makes do drawing sidewalk signs. You are an electrician with nine fingers. You are on the lam. You are a Slavic Studies major at Columbia. You sell nutcrackers every July at Jacob Riis. You are a piragüero perched up in El Barrio. You make a 524 on your MCAT. You are half-retired, playing dice on the sidewalk in summer, playing a temporary snow laborer in winter. You are a deaf waiter at Tavern on the Green. You read tarot on Grand. You are an absentminded dog walker. You have a stutter. You have the cutest button dimples. You are fighting for your life on Rikers Island. You own a beautiful home in Astoria. You rent a basement beneath a bakery in Sunset Park and break in at night to steal cháng zǐ bāo. You make the best chicken mandi rice in Morris Park. You were born (and will die) in Queens. You are twins who don’t know how to share. I remind you of a dentist, of a doorman, of a brother. I remind you of a son, somebody’s ex-best friend. We make small talk. I play it shy. I play it tough. I get real sweet when we get close enough. Then I take my skin off. I am the city, and my skin is cigarette butts and piss-summer scent. It’s the same magazine sample of Santal 33 from Le Labo coated onto my pulse. My skin is neon and concrete and sakura blossoming at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden each May. My skin is high rise with all the lights on. It’s Times Square. It’s this is a Howard Beach bound A train, the next stop is Broadway Junction. It’s a warm cup of broth in a blizzard, a margarita in a Styrofoam to-go cup in June. My skin is sweat. My hair is kinky, slick, tight, loose, long, buzzed, gone. When you see me, you see the part you need. That’s when I stop being the city and become something you can perceive. That’s when I grow hands and knees. You see the twenty-three-minute affair at the Christopher Street’s westside piers. You see me for twenty-three years in your bedroom. When I take off my skin, you feel comforted. Most of you end up loving me. Sometimes I love you back. Always you see me until our end. Rarely do you see me until your end. It never gets easier, that part. I cannot give you eternity. I change for you, sure, but I change for myself, too. I compromise; I make amends. When I fold my skin like a coat in your closet, I become the only knowable part of me. When I give up my secret, it seldom goes well. Inevitably, you start plotting to keep me. You hide my skin away. You decide you can love me best if I cannot be free. You hide it by night. You hide it in the meat freezer. You hide it in a carved-out book. You hide it behind a pipe. You hide it in the only-for-storage oven, along with your birth certificate and tax forms. You hide it like a birthright. You hide it under a floorboard, in the medicine cabinet, inside the sock drawer. I don’t like being a kept man, but I’m used to the rhythm, the point where the human heart settles on custody. That’s when I get melancholy. I miss operas off-Broadway and lox on bialy. I miss the rats crawling for crumbs on the subway tracks. I miss ignoring celebrities. I miss dim sum and honey locust trees and the view from the top of the Wonder Wheel. I miss early morning surfers at Rockaway. I miss the siren song of the Mister Softee truck. I miss eight million hearts beating all at once. I miss it so hard it calls me back to form. I find my skin. Consider it chipped, GPS-tracked. I always know how to get my skin back. Then I’m a hand on the handle; then I’m no more hands. I’m the ex-boyfriend, the ex-partner, the ex-husband. I’m every diner plate of disco fries, every schmear of cream cheese. I’m every person who has ever felt lonely. I’m every evening commute. I’m every rent freeze. I am a manifestation of your incorporated municipality. I’ll be here as long as you are. I exist because you do. I live up in the smoke and the smog; then I come down. I descend. I introduce myself and give you that look. We make small talk and swap rehearsed pitches about jobs. Business cards. Rent hikes. Street guitars. Eventually you lean in. Then—and only then—do I take my skin off again.

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Originally Published in Fairy Tale Review.

© 2023 J.D. Scott