The Ladle Pact

Okay, so let me back up and explain how I ended up standing outside a taxidermy shop at eight on a Thursday night, holding a bottle of wine like an idiot.

My aunt Kendra. That's how. Kendra volunteers at the wildlife rescue up the coast, and she has made it her personal mission in life to get me, Emmy Lansing, forty-two years old, dentist, permanently single, matched up with somebody. Anyone. She's been at it for three years. Usually her efforts die at the text message stage, but this time she left an actual note in my mailbox. A handwritten note, like we're in a movie.

The note said: "His name is Abe Easton, he's forty-seven, he does conservation work, he's funny, and he has a condition that isn't what you think. Be nice. Meet him Thursday at Stuffed & Stitched, after hours. Wear something you don't mind getting damp."

Damp! What kind of opening line is that? I read it four times on my porch. I do mind getting damp, I am a dentist, I spend all day dry and gloved and in control of the situation. But the "isn't what you think" part got me. I spent two days guessing. Is he married? Is he a werewolf? Is he, like, really into medieval reenactment? Kendra once set me up with a man who communicated exclusively in quotes from a movie I'd never seen, so my bar was on the floor.

Anyway. Thursday. I drove out to Stuffed & Stitched, which is a real place on the harbor road, and I want you to picture my face when I pulled up. A taxidermy shop. My date picked a taxidermy shop. Through the window I could see a fox posed like it was pouring tea, and an otter holding a tiny newspaper, and a whole family of ducks arranged around a card table. It was the creepiest and most charming thing I'd ever seen and I genuinely could not tell which.

"You came!"

He was already at the door. Tall guy, dark hair going gray at the temples, rain jacket over a decent shirt. He looked normal. Suspiciously normal.

"Of course I came," I said. "You know how hard it is to say no to my aunt? She's got the persistence of a terrier and the guilt tactics of a professional."

"That's exactly how she got me to do this, actually." He smiled, and then he got weird about it, like he was nervous, which didn't fit the rest of him at all. "Before we go any further. Emmy, right? Emmy Lansing?"

"That's me."

"I need to show you something tonight, and I need to explain the rules first, and I need you to not run screaming until at least the explanation is over. Can you do that?"

I looked past him at the tea-pouring fox. "Honestly, at this point I'm prepared for almost anything."

"That's what everyone says," he said, and he wasn't smiling anymore.

He stepped aside and let me in. The shop smelled like sawdust and old varnish, and the heating was up high, which struck me as odd for a closed shop in October. There was a lamp on in the back room. He led me past the glass cases, past a raccoon in what appeared to be a tiny detective coat, into a back room with a card table, two chairs, and a bucket.

A bucket of seawater. And a ladle.

"I brought wine," I said, holding up my bottle, because my brain needed to say something.

"Perfect, glasses are here. Sit down, please. Okay." He sat across from me, elbows on the table, and took a breath like a man about to give a deposition. "Here's the situation. Kendra knows about this, by the way. She's known for two years, she's known me longer than she's known you, so this isn't her being careless. She thought you'd be a good fit. I disagreed. I thought there was no possible way a dentist from town would want anything to do with me. She said, and I quote, 'let Emmy decide that herself, you great coward.'"

"That sounds like her."

"So. The condition that isn't what you think." He picked up the ladle. It was full, brimming, water dark and cold-looking, a little sand in the bottom. "I'm a kelpie."

I waited. "I'm sorry, a what?"

"A water-horse. A shapeshifter. I'm from the harbor, Emmy, I'm not from a town, I don't have a house, I've never paid taxes because I don't exist on paper. In my real shape I'm a horse, basically, if a horse were made out of seaweed and bad decisions and could drown you."

The room was very quiet. Somewhere out front, the fox poured its eternal tea.

"You're joking," I said.

"I have never been more serious about anything in my life." He set the ladle down on the table, dead center, like it was the winning piece in a chess match. "Here's how this works. My shape only holds near water. This is harbor water, real water, and this ladle is what keeps me human while I'm in here, away from the shore. It's borrowed shape, held together by salt water. I can show you what I really am for exactly one hour. After that, the ladle runs dry, and I go back to being whatever a ladle full of harbor water makes me, which is mostly man-shaped and very tired."

I stared at him. "Kendra's note said wear something I don't mind getting damp."

"Kendra knows," he said again, and he almost laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle, and I realized his hands were shaking around the ladle. Forty-seven years old and shaking. "Okay. Rules. There are three and they matter."

"Okay," I said slowly. "I'm listening."

"One. Nobody touches the ladle but me. Not you, not the cat that lives in the shop, nobody. If it tips over, I lose my hour and probably my shape in front of you, and that's humiliating for both of us. Two. You ask any question you want, about anything, and I answer honestly. That's the deal. Complete honesty for one hour, which is more honesty than I've given anyone in twenty-five years."

"And three?"

He looked at me for real then, and I saw how scared he was, and I felt bad for ever comparing him to the movie-quote guy.

"Three. After the hour, you get to decide. Second date or not. Whatever you decide, I walk you to your car and I say thank you and that's the end of it. No hard feelings, no follow-up texts, no guilt. Kendra doesn't even get to hear why." He turned the ladle a little, and the water inside caught the lamplight. "So that's it. That's my whole hand. Forty-seven years old, single my entire life on purpose, and my big pitch is a bucket of seawater and a schedule."

I'll be honest with you, dear reader, my first thought was that I should have brought better wine. My second thought was that this was the strangest thing anyone had ever asked me, and the third thought, the one that surprised me, was that he hadn't asked me for anything at all. He'd asked me to watch.

"Can I pour the wine first?" I said. "If I'm going to watch a man turn into a seaweed horse, I'm not doing it sober. No offense."

"None taken," he said, and grinned, and the grin was real this time. "Glasses are behind the bucket. And Emmy? It doesn't hurt. I want you to know that going in. It doesn't hurt, it's just strange."

"How strange?"

"Very strange," he said, and picked up the ladle, and tilted it over his own head.

* * *

The water came down over him like somebody dumping a fishtank on a business casual man, and I yelped, because it went everywhere, and there went my sleeves, thanks Abe. But I only got a little splash. The rest of it, all of it, went into him. That's the only way I can describe it. The water hit his head and just kept going, like pouring into a drain.

Then he stood up and shivered, all over, like a dog shaking off a bath, and I swear his outline just stopped agreeing with itself. His skin went dark from the edges in, hair sliding down his neck and along his spine, shoulders barreling out, and before I could even finish saying "oh my word" there was a horse standing in the back room of a taxidermy shop, knocking one of the chairs over with a hind hoof.

"Sorry!" he said, from the horse. His mouth didn't move right for it, but the voice was the same voice. That's the part that got me. Same voice, same guy, coming out of a face as wide as a barn entrance.

He was black, not gray-black, not brown-black, but the black of the harbor at night, and his mane hung full of actual seaweed, wet and shining. His eyes were silver. Real silver, like coins.

And I did something that I did not plan. I laughed! I laughed so hard I had to put my wine down on the card table so I didn't spill it. Not a scared laugh, not a nervous one, just a real laugh, because there was a horse standing where a lobbyist had been, and the horse looked mortified.

"What?" he said. "What's funny?"

"You knocked over the chair!" I got out. "You're a mythical creature of the deep and you knocked over the chair."

He looked at the chair, then at me, and his ears, and he had ears, floppy black ones, went back like he was embarrassed. "It was in my way."

"It was in your way," I said, wiping my eyes. "Abe. Abe. You're beautiful, by the way. I should have led with that. You look like something off a coin."

"Thank you," he said, and shifted his weight, and the floorboards creaked under him. "You're taking this better than Kendra did."

"Kendra didn't laugh?"

"Kendra threw a boot at me."

I laughed again. God, it was good to laugh. I'd spent the whole walk over rehearsing polite exit lines, and here I was in a heated room in October, sleeves damp, watching a kelpie try to stand politely between two folding chairs.

"Can I ask stuff?" I said. "Because rule two, you said."

"Rule two. Ask away."

So I did. I asked everything, and he answered, and that's where the hour went, mostly. I asked how long he'd been doing the office job, and he said four years, and I asked why a job at all, and that's when he got going, and honestly he could talk.

"Stay near the coast," he said, tossing his mane out of his eyes, and I mean it was a whole production, that mane. "That is the entire reason. My shape holds near water. The farther I get from the harbor, the thinner I feel, like a rumor about myself. The conservation group works the whole shore, so I'm never more than a morning's walk from the sea. And lobbying, if you can believe it, is the one job where nobody looks too hard at your paperwork. Because nobody has any. Half of them are rumors too."

"Are you comparing yourself to lobbyists?"

"I'm saying we have compatible lifestyles." He picked the chair up with his teeth, carefully, and set it right, and I applauded, because what else do you do.

I asked how the changing works, whether it hurt, whether he could do it halfway, whether he'd ever been a fish, and he said no to the fish, a little offended, like I'd asked if he'd ever been a chair.

"It's one shape. Horse, man. That is the entire repertoire. My mother could do a seal, but she was showing off."

"Your mother. There's a mother? Do kelpie mothers do birthdays?"

"There's a mother," he said, and his ears did a thing. "She's in the harbor. She's not big on birthdays. Or conversation. Or me, particularly. That's a kelpie thing, we're not, we don't do family the way you'd understand it."

I wanted to ask more about that, but his ears went so far back I let it go, and that felt right. You can ask anything and still not push.

Instead I asked the dumb ones, the fun ones, and those were the best. Did he like oats? He said oats were a scam. Did he watch horse racing and did it weird him out? He said it weirded him out enormously and he had thoughts about the track at Sackville that went on four minutes. Did the shop's animals bother him? He glanced at the door