Page 16 of Never Nix Up

I cuddle her a little tighter, and wait for her to continue.

“Johnny is.. was… he was such a sweet kid. A bit boisterous, but full of life. And they drowned him. They drowned him and abandoned his bones to the deep.”

She looks at me and I don’t know what to say, how to help her process all the trauma that she’s had to relive, over and over.

I think she’s misinterpreting my silence though, because her head drops, and she whispers, “I know I’m a nix, but I’m not like them. I promise.”

“Baby girl, I know that you’renothinglike them.” I kiss her intensely and then lean back. “I just don’t always know how to respond. I don’t want to say the wrong thing and fuck it up, but you”–I kiss her again to punctuate my point–“you are nothing but perfection.”

It’s happened a couple of times now, where she’s assumed that I’m angry with her, or that she’s messed up, and that’s one thing that I definitely don’t know how to fix.

Hazel’s eyes well up again and I’m thrown into full-on panic mode.

“Shit, baby, I’m sorry. Please don’t cry.” She sniffs and I don’t know what to do. It’s as if everything is falling apart.

“You’re just so nice,” she says. “Why are you so nice to me?”

I could make a joke about how I’m sleeping with her, so I’d best be nice, but I can tell from the look on her face that she’s serious.

“Because you deserve to have people being nice to you, baby. You’re a nice person, and people should be nice back.”

“I’m a nix,” she says, and I notice that I can’t see her scales or her pointed ears. “I will always be somewhat of a monster. A river demon whose very purpose is to drown humans and serve the river.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” I say. “Not a massive fan of the whole murdering people idea, but I don’t think that you’re a monster. You are who you are; and no one else gets to decide that for you. Fuck fate–you get to decide your own purpose.”

“And if I decide that my purpose in life is to be fucked you?”

“Then I’ll endeavour to oblige.”

There’s a short silence that follows that, and then we both burst out laughing, which is good. It’s nice to see her laugh. Makes me realise how rarely I’ve seen her laugh before all of this.

“Finn, I usually…” Hazel takes a deep breath and tries again. “when I wake up from a nightmare like this, the way I usually cope with it is by painting. I have special inks at home that I usually use. Maybe I could have a pencil and some paper? That might work.”

I look at the clock. It’s still early enough that I don’t have to open the bakery for another hour or two. “How about we just go back to yours, so you can use your special inks. I don’t want to mess with your coping mechanisms. And maybe next time you could leave some spares here, just in case.”

Her face is thoughtful, and I realise that I’ve just invited myself over. I’m about to retract the suggestion when she nods. “We could do that. Just as long as you’re aware that some of the paintings in my flat are dark. Really dark.”

“I won’t say a word,” I promise.

But it’s a promise that’s hard to keep. Her flat is pretty similar to mine in terms of the bare bones of the place, but that’s where the similarity ends. Every spare corner is filled with canvases and they all mirror the dark subject matter that she warned me about. Death and drowning. Everywhere.

Hazel sneaks a look at me, and I smile reassuringly, but some of my concern must appear on my face because she looks a little bit uncomfortable.

“It’s okay,” I reassure her. “You’ve gotta cope how you can.”

She heads over to an easel that’s propped up in one corner, by the window, and starts sorting through her inks.

It’s not that the painting themselves are dark; they’re not. In fact they’re eerily beautiful. She’s captured water in a different way to how she does in her watercolours. Those paintings are for the public, they’re her bread and butter. I know if I walk downstairs to her shop there’ll be a myriad of beautiful peaceful countryside paintings.

These are far from peaceful. The water almost seems alive, and the colours are bold, vibrant, striking.

I can’t look away from them, just as I can’t look away from her. Her movements with the paintbrush are decisive, driven; so completely opposite to how I handle the brush when I was painting her.

There’s a scrap of paint behind her ear—we must have got it there when we were trying to wash all the body paint off the previous night, some orange, a remembrance hinting at what had been.

She feels far away from me now, lost in a world not of her making, and the brushstrokes become wilder until she’s panting, sweat pouring down her face. And when she finally finishes, there’s no orange left behind her ear at all.

15

---