The Oracle’s Endangered Species Holiday Special

Annie Hartnett

originally published in Unstuck Magazine, 2014. RIP.

We called in to The Oracle hotline every morning to listen to our daily horoscopes. We watched her two-hour talk show every afternoon, and we subscribed to the monthly magazine. We owned all her cookbooks and her deluxe cake mixer and her donut fryer and we wanted her three-tier fondue cheese fountain but it was on backorder until next year. We went to her book signing in Long Beach after The Oracle: A Life came out and we shook hands with her ghostwriter.

But we never, and I mean never, expected The Oracle to write us back. We had attached a family photo, one that showed off our fishtails, but we still didn’t think she’d pick us out of the pile. And then it took her two years to return our email, so we’d just about forgotten we’d written her at all.

The email was sent to Neptune’s account, so he saw it first, even though Neptune was the one who hadn’t really wanted to write the letter at all. Nep hadn’t gotten into The Oracle until later, until after the accident. He’d only been humoring us when we wrote in. Nep could be a good sport.

Still, the email was addressed to all of us and Neptune had grown into a true fan. He printed it and we read it over and over to each other at breakfast. We practiced reading it with her Tennessee accent.

Re: PLEASE READ DON’T STOP NOW KEEP READING

Lucy, Neptune, & Ellie,

            Thank you for your letter. My oh my! Everyone’s special in their own way, but you three are the peach-crisp of my day. Your family photo made my heart tear up in joy.  

Honestly, you don’t know how lucky you are! I’d trade half my eyeballs for a sibling. Y’all get to grow up together, be each other’s best friends, and you’re still in the thick of it! You’re just guppies at this point! The world is your oyster, as they say.

Well, what I mean is, my little honeys, is that I’d love to have you three on The Oracle Show.

Please call this number—888-888-8888 extension 4675—to confirm your appearance. We’ll film in L.A. July 12th.

With majestic motion,

The Oracle

We were completely beside ourselves. We called the hotline and were put on hold. The show’s theme song played on loop.

“Do you think she really wrote it?” I asked. “It really sounds like her.”

“Dictated,” Neptune said. “I bet it was dictated.”

But there was also the postscript, the part of the letter both Neptune and I were trying to ignore: P.S., it said, We’ll be taping the Endangered Species Holiday Special. You three wear Christmas sweaters and warm slipper-socks. There will be a snow machine and I don’t want my little sweeties to freeze!

The letter had said “you three” three times, and what’s more, it was the Endangered Species Special. There weren’t three of us anymore, and only our sister Eleanor was truly endangered. Ellie had been half manatee, and she had been beheaded in a jet ski accident the previous summer.

 “Several species of seahorses are endangered,” Neptune reminded me, though I had heard it before. He curled his tail toward his tummy.

But things were bad for me. Just days before, the New York Times had run an article titled “The Scourge of the Lion Fish: From Beautiful Novelty to Alien Invader.”

I was half invasive species—not even just common, but invasive. What could be worse! I ran a finger along one of my fin rays, and felt my tongue swell almost immediately. I had killed my mother during childbirth; she’d had a severe reaction to the venom in my fins. Most people get a bad rash and a headache, sometimes they vomit, and even I get hives and swollen lips if I touch my fins, but death is very, very rare. Dad always has to explain this to the school nurse when she calls home because someone in my class bumped their leg against my tail and now they have a closed-up throat and puffy eyelids.

“Aren’t mermaids endangered?” Neptune said. “Wouldn’t you say?”

We came from a long line of mermaids. It came from my mother’s side, but it had skipped her and she’d been legged. Our dad was legged too, a completely ordinary man for most of our lives. We lived out of water because of this, and we could walk fine on our tails, waddling along the ground the way you’ve seen a seal move along. We just had to stay hydrated.

The only other mermaid we knew was our grandma, who was half blowfish. She’d also killed her mother before her, our great-grand. Nana liked me best because of that. “I took a puffer breath when I shouldn’t have,” Nana explained to me once, showing off a black-and-white snapshot of her bluefish mother.

I shook my head at Nep. “We’re not endangered, because it’s not a species. It’s a hereditary oddity. Like people who are born with an extra limb or without thumbs.”

“How’d you get to be the smart one?” Neptune asked, blowing bubbles into his orange juice. Nep had gotten nicer since Ellie died.

“Do you think she’ll still want us without Ellie?” I asked. “Since we’re not really endangered?”

“We’re not gonna tell her!” Neptune said. “Not until we get there. And besides,” he paused, gulping the last of the Minute Maid. “We can bring the jar.”

Dad kept our sister’s head in a jar on his bedside table. Her blond hair had become knotted from the formaldehyde and acquired a greenish tinge, like strips of rockweed.

            “Medusa,” Dad would joke, rapping on the jar with his one good hand.

Dad had a disease where his muscles and tissue turned one-by-one to rock. He was mostly limestone, although parts of him were sandstone and one toe was granite. No rhyme or reason, the doctors said, and then asked to take photographs for a manual on bone disease. The textbook was now in its sixth edition, and Dad had his own chapter.

By that summer, Dad could only move his left arm and his face, and he had to be hooked up to a ventilator. His limestone chest was crushing his lungs. Our nurse, Delia, pulled the tubes in and out of Dad’s nose twice a day so he could eat, but the rest of the time the ventilator had to be going. It sounded like a wolf, and I could hear it panting outside my bedroom while I tried to sleep.

It was because of Ellie’s jet ski settlement that we could afford a nurse. There was no way my brother and I could remember to feed him, and we weren’t about to give sponge baths either. Those had been our sister’s chores. Ellie had even brushed Dad’s teeth for him, although that was something he could still do himself.

            Nurse Delia was seventeen, and not a medical professional, as far as I knew. We found her on Craigslist; she said she’d do anything for six dollars an hour. After a weeklong trial, Delia moved her two suitcases and her shopping cart upstairs into Ellie’s old room. She slept in our sister’s trundle bed with the pink coral sheets, next to the soft glow of the manatee nightlight.

Our sister had been afraid of the dark all her life, so we had nightlights in every room. She was dumb about other things too, like motorboat propellers and spelling tests and drinking too much grape soda before a swim. Ellie was two years older, but we were in the same grade. Even in the jar, she still had this dopey look on her face.

But I’m not saying her death was her fault—that one’s on me and Nep. We were supposed to be swimming with her, but Neptune and I liked to swim far out, while Ellie preferred the shallow water. The day of the accident, Neptune and I had filled our scuba tanks and left Ellie outside the gates of the Santa Monica marina, underneath the dockside snow cone stand. But we left her there all the time. She loved the beach-goers. She’d build sandcastles with their kids, give out underwater piggyback rides for free. She’d wear herself out and then fall asleep floating in the shallows, a seagull resting on her chest.

When we found her head on the beach later that day, Ellie’s teeth were stained bright blue from the snow cones, which meant she must have had several; the dye didn’t really stain your teeth until the third cone. They never did find her tail, or even her torso, but the police department said it was case closed anyways.

Neptune and I voted, and we decided not to tell Dad about The Oracle. We thought the show could be like a Christmas surprise, and we’d keep it secret until then. We’d tell Dad we wanted to take Ellie to the beach for the day, catch the early surf. We’d done that before, held her glass jar out in the froth of the waves.

            So, on the morning of filming, we paid Nurse Delia to drive us downtown at four a.m. Dad’s Volkswagen Beetle was pretty much hers now, the dashboard littered with cigarette butts. A basket of wilted plastic flowers sat on the front seat.

            “Why do they sell dead fake flowers?” Neptune asked.

             “A Memento mori.” Delia put her pointer finger in the air, which she did when she was teaching us something.  

“You speak Spanish?” Neptune asked.

“That’s Latin,” she said. “It means a reminder that we’ll all die someday, so appreciate life now. Are seat belts buckled?”

“We don’t need reminding,” Neptune snorted. I didn’t know whether he meant reminding about buckling seat belts or about death. I never forgot about either.

Even when he was rude to her, I thought Nep must want to kiss Nurse Delia, because she was seventeen and had tattoos, plus her hair color changed each week. She bought three boxes of Manic Panic hair dye with her first paycheck. She had purple hair that day—the dye was all over the shower curtain—and I thought the color made her look particularly kissable. Still, Neptune only looked at her twice during the whole drive. Nurse Delia dropped us off at the back lot, and gave us two thumbs up as we climbed out of the car.

“Break a leg,” she cheered.

As soon as we were on the lot, a short fat woman hustled out of the building and grabbed us by the shoulders, throwing guest badges around our neck. She had face paint on, a monarch butterfly, the wings spread across her round cheeks.

            “The mermaid siblings are here,” she said into her walkie-talkie radio and then looked around. “Where’s the third?”

            Neptune pointed to the jar. Ellie bobbed in the formaldehyde.

            “Ah,” the lady gulped, and lifted the walkie to her mouth again. “Code Purple at Lot #3.”

            “Dead guest?” the walkie-talkie asked. “The mermaids? Which sibling?”

            “Eleanor,” Neptune said. “Manatee-tailed.”

“Middle sister, the manatee,” the butterfly said into the radio. “Her head’s here, in a big jar.” She wiped her brow, smearing the butterfly’s fuzzy black antennae. We waited in silence for a few minutes, just staring at one another.

            “The Oracle loves it,” the walkie said, finally. “We can use the head.”

            The butterfly woman heaved a sigh, then pushed us into the makeup trailer and slammed the door.

A whole tray of breakfast food lay out on the table: bagels in all different colors, a vat of oatmeal, a tower of mini-cereal boxes, several jars of cream cheese and marmalade, and a plate of fried pickles on sticks.

            “Eat whatever,” said a woman dressed in a starfish costume. I grabbed a pinkish-tinged bagel.

            Another woman, dressed as a ferret, hoisted me up into a makeup chair while I clutched the bagel. She started gluing orange and black rhinestones to my eyelids. A man in an orca suit plugged in a curling iron, and the starfish unscrewed a bottle of gold nail polish. Someone had wrapped a bow around Ellie’s jar, like she was a present.

            “This is going to be a show!” the orca man yelled over the whir of the blow-dryer. “Hold on to your bells and whistles, kids.”

The Oracle is a self-made woman. That’s what it says on the back cover of her autobiography. I’ve read it three times.

The Oracle, née Susanne Nebbins, was raised by a single mother in a trailer park and was a mediocre student throughout elementary school. Her mother died when she was twelve. Susanne Nebbin’s inheritance amounted to $227 and all of her mother’s organs. She put the money into a saving account and the organs on ice.

As a teenager, Susanne dropped out of school and got a receptionist job at a dermatologist’s office. She scheduled appointments and filed pictures of birthmarks and moles, the ones that needed to be monitored for skin cancer.

            She was twenty-two by the time she had enough money for the surgery. Susanne defrosted her mother’s organs, and six hours in the operating room left her with four lungs, two hearts, and four eyes.

            She stopped with the internal organs there, but became an eye collector after that. She’d save up for one at a time, and buy it from the eye bank. It wasn’t until the fourteenth eye—the one installed right over her heart—that she could see the future. She moved to L.A. to build her media empire shortly after that, and became The Oracle for good. She says she sees the future with all her eyes now—all 86 of them—that she sees the way a blackfly views the world, in grids and multiples, but her sight is still strongest in her heart-eye.

Neptune and I sat on the talk show couch for an hour before the show started.  Neptune wore a purple wig, exactly the same color as Nurse Delia’s Manic Panic dye. He kept itching at it with his long green press-on nails. We both had on our Christmas sweaters, like The Oracle had asked.

The stage was divided into four: a parlor/kitchen area where The Oracle delivered her opening monologue and recorded her daily cooking lesson, and then there was one section for each featured guest. Our part of the stage was decorated with an underwater theme, with blue balloons and cardboard seaweed cutouts and a giant net draped over our heads. Every few minutes, a little boy dressed as a scorpion spritzed my fins with a water bottle.

There weren’t walls between the sections, just a line of green tape across the floor. Next to us was the Rainforest, where tree frogs hopped around a sheet of synthetic grass. The animal handlers couldn’t get the frogs to stay on the loveseat, where the guests were supposed to sit. One of the larger frogs leapt over into the Under the Sea set and perched for a moment on our coral coffee table. Huge eyes bulged from his head, like two shiny orange marbles. I wondered if The Oracle wanted a frog eye for her collection. She already had a set of giraffe eyes and one albino alligator eye, although most of hers were of human origin.

            On the far side of the stage, in the Arctic, a polar bear named Santa squatted on an ice-sculpture, one carved to look like a couch. Santa’s handler was feeding candy canes to the bear, box after box.  

            “Sugar keeps him calm,” the handler explained, when someone from the studio audience asked.

            The audience was separated from The Oracle stage by a panel of bulletproof glass, which was installed after an assassination attempt by a crazed fan. I’d read that The Oracle Show ticket-holders often complain about the glass, that it muffles sounds and it cheapens the talk-show experience. But at least no one out in the auditorium looked too nervous about the polar bear, who wasn’t even on a leash. Santa drooled as he ate the candies so that most of his yellow-white fur was now stained with red dye #40.

            Neptune nudged me. “Looks like blood,” he said.

            “Santa won’t hurt us. The Oracle wouldn’t let him.”

            It started to snow from the rafters then, and I remembered the snow machine. The snowflakes glistened like diamonds in Neptune’s nylon wig.

            “It’s really cold,” Neptune whispered. “I hope the frogs will be okay.”

            But I felt good. My sweater was warm. Nep worried too much.

            At half-past nine, the ground rumbled, and a cloud of steam filled the room. Neptune coughed.

            When the smoke cleared, The Oracle was seated cross-legged in her beanbag chair, her whole body winking. The Oracle was the only person allowed to appear naked on daytime television, since all her eyes needed to see. Her body was shiny, slimy-looking, from eye mucus. Her long evergreen-dyed hair was piled high on her head and wrapped in tiny white Christmas lights, as if she were a tree.

            “HELLO, MY DARLINGS,” The Oracle screamed to the live audience, throwing her arms in the air. Everyone in the audience went wild, and one girl in the front row fainted.

            The Oracle ignored us for the first segment, where she showed the audience how to make a vegan chocolate rum pie with a coconut-crisp crust. There were cue cards, but she didn’t read them. The cue cards were for a different recipe entirely.

I couldn’t believe how close I was to The Oracle. Her eyes all looked in different directions, none of them blinked at the same time. You don’t notice that so much on TV, the constant tiny movements going on all over her body. I tried to pick out the two eyes on her face that were her originals, but I couldn’t do it. No two looked the same.

            While the pie baked, The Oracle cradled one of the tree frogs like a baby as she explained about rainforest habitat destruction. A man dressed as a tapir held up the number to The Oracle’s Rainforest Charity hotline in case viewers at home wanted to donate.

            “Mention the tree frog when you call,” The Oracle said, “and we’ll send you a free pencil case!” 

            The Oracle put on a fake-fur parka before she filmed her segment with Santa. “Believe it or not, y’all—bears are omnivores,” she told the cameras, as she spooned peppermint stick ice cream into Santa’s open jaws.

“Did you know bears liked sweets?” I turned to ask Neptune, but my brother wasn’t next to me anymore. He was sitting on the floor, at the edge of Under the Sea and the Rainforest. He was trying to keep the frogs out of the snow by tucking them underneath his sweater. I looked back to the Oracle.

When the ice cream carton was empty, Santa licked the Oracle’s face with his blue-black tongue, and everyone laughed. The Oracle announced then that everyone in the studio audience would be going home with a bag of eco-friendly goodies.

            “So what does our polar bear friend, the world’s largest land mammal, have in common with our next deep-sea guests?” the Oracle asked, as she held up a Don’t Drill Me Baby ANWR t-shirt from the gift-bag.

            “Oil!” she declared, after a dramatic pause. “Each year, countless sea animals die from oil spills, which messes up the whole food chain. After a break, we’ll talk to the critter-creatures of the ocean and find out what we can do to help.”

            We went to commercial break, and a team of people swarmed on stage to touch up makeup, rearrange furniture, shovel the snow off camera equipment.

            “Hey, sweet-cheeks,” The Oracle said, pulling off her fur parka and looking directly at me with most of her eyes. “Y’all ready for this?”

            “Ready,” I said. “Definitely ready.”

When we came back from commercial, The Oracle was holding Ellie’s jar. She spoke right into the camera.

            “Today we’ll be talking to two real live mermaids, who can tell us what it’s like down there in the deep, if it’s really that dire. So, Lucille and Neptune, my little dears, what’s your corner of the coral reef like?”

            “We live with our father,” Neptune said. He was annoyed because they had taken the tree frogs away from him.

            “Right, in the ocean.” The Oracle furrowed her brows. A photograph of an underwater landfill appeared on the big screen next to us. They had Photoshopped a small brick ranch house next to the ocean garbage pile. We looked up at it before we noticed the producer frantically pointing at the cue card next to the camera. It read: This is your home!

            “We live at 392 Valentine Terrace, Santa Monica,” Neptune flapped his arms, frustrated. “White house, blue shutters.”

            The Oracle ignored Nep. “Since you live out in the Pacific, do you consider yourselves American or Japanese?”

            “American, definitely.” I said. The live studio audience applauded.

            “We’re Californians,” Neptune groaned. “We can’t even breathe underwater.”

            “And the garbage out there? Is it American or Japanese garbage? Who is to blame?”

            Neptune snarled. “Can’t you see?” he asked. He was upset about lying on television. “Can’t you see with your pow-ers?”

            “I can see the future,” The Oracle said, her hand over her heart-eye. “Not the right-this-minute.”

            “The garbage patch is no one’s fault,” I said. “It’s everyone’s garbage.”

The Oracle had requested an individual interview with me, a one-on-one. Neptune was taken offstage, the crew had gathered up all the tree frogs, and even Santa had gone back to the green room. It was just me, The Oracle, and the glassed-in audience. The Oracle suggested we play pin-the-tail on the donkey-fish, which isn’t a real kind of fish, just a drawing of a regular donkey with a trout tail.

            “My sweetie Lucille,” The Oracle said, as she tied a blindfold over my eyes. “So, your mother died during your birth.”

            “Yes.” I could see white spots floating around inside my eyelids as she tightened the knot. “An allergic reaction to my fins. Lionfish are mildly venomous.”

“Oh, my little lion cub. What a tough start. And then your sister died last year. How heartbreaking.”

“It was partly her fault, partly the driver of the watercraft’s fault, but it was not the fault of Ski Deep USA Incorporated, who always remind you to drive your watercraft responsibly, and to avoid wildlife.” The settlement required I said exactly that to any media.

“Was your sister a mermaid too?”

I nodded, the blindfold pressing against my eyes. “Lower half manatee.” The white spots swam to the corners of my head.

“And you found her?”

“We found her head washed ashore,” I said. “We never found the rest of her.”

“At least you have the head,” the Oracle sniffed. “That’s no small favor, sweetie. I have my mother’s eyes, I’ll always have those.” She pointed to two blue eyes, above her clavicles. “But I wish I could see her face again, gosh, I wish I could squeeze her. I thought I was keeping her alive with those surgeries, but she’s good and gone now.”

I nodded.

“If I could do it over,” The Oracle said. “I’d taxidermy her, have her body stuffed and preserved. I don’t even use the extra lungs she gave me, I’m not a smoker.”

I considered it for a moment. Would I want Ellie’s body stuffed, if the coast guard called tomorrow and said they found her? Someone would surely want to display her in a museum exhibit, but maybe Ellie would like that. She liked to be around new people every day.

 “So has that been the hardest part? Not finding your sister’s body?”

I shook my head. “That hardest part is her being dead.”

“I know, honey. You must have more chores around the house now.”

“We hired someone,” I explained, wishing I’d brought a photo of Nurse Delia to project onto the back screen. “And our dad can brush his own teeth.”

“Of course he can, you poor child,” The Oracle clucked, hugging me. I could feel her many eyelashes against my skin. “It’s all right to cry. You’re so real.”

            I pulled the blindfold down so that it encircled my neck. “Don’t touch my tail,” I warned.

            “I know what kind of fish you are,” The Oracle said. “Don’t worry, I took six Loratadine before the show.”

            “The venom’s not that strong,” I said, embarrassed.

            “Venom can be a good thing, honey,” she said. “Your brother has that figured out.”

            “He’s a seahorse,” I said. “He’s not venomous.”

“Well, if looks could kill.” The Oracle winked.

Neptune had just marched back onstage, scowling, his arms crossed. The producers had probably yelled at him for his outburst. The Oracle Show contract said we were obligated to go along with whatever The Oracle said. We were meant to follow her lead.

But The Oracle didn’t seem mad at Nep anymore. “Cheer up buttercups!” she said. “Do we ever have a surprise for you!”

The stage lit up, like it did whenever The Oracle had a surprise. Everyone in the studio audience leaned forward, hoping for more free gift bags. Two men in janitor suits carried something heavy out on a stretcher.

“This is Ronald Reagan,” The Oracle smiled. “A wild manatee, flown in from Florida just this morning! Isn’t he the cutest?”

            The manatee seemed calm, as is their nature. They aren’t afraid of humans, or cameras, or live studio audiences, or motorboats, or getting a bellyache from eating too many snow cones. But the manatee was wheezing, gulping up air. I thought of Dad at home with all that rock on top of his lungs, the electric wolf sound of the ventilator.

            “He’s suffocating.” I panicked. “His body is crushing him.”

            “Ronald’s a mammal,” The Oracle said. “He breathes air just like you and me. Or do you have gills? Oh! Show us your gills!”

That afternoon marked The Oracle’s first on-camera death. Neptune and I tried to save Ronald, putting him on his side and splashing him with water, like a Greenpeace rescue squad, but his own weight squashed his lungs. They brought out a defibrillator after he stopped breathing, but that did nothing but make for good television.

The two men removed Ronald from the stage, and then I had what The Oracle called a full-blown anxiety attack. I thought my heart was going to burst like a hand grenade. I was numb all over, my teeth were chattering so hard it was like I was outside in a snowstorm, even though the snow machine had stopped. The Oracle wrapped me in a blanket and held me to her chest. The audience awwed.

“Did you know that was going to happen?” Neptune demanded. “You see the future. You knew he’d die.”

“Everyone dies,” The Oracle said, as she stroked my hair.

“But you killed the manatee.” Neptune pulled off his wig, his seahorse tail curled tightly into a ball.

“Or he would have been sliced up by a Ski-Do in Miami Beach tomorrow, just like your sister.” The Oracle seemed angry again. “It’s all in the plan, honey-bun. I can only interfere so much, give or take a day. I do my best.”

I remembered the wilted plastic flowers in the car, and thought of the skull-and-crossbones tattoo that Delia had on her ankle. I didn’t know why anyone needed to be reminded about death, when there were reminders all the time, wherever we looked.

The Oracle announced that we’d be right back after a word from our sponsors, and I realized I could feel my limbs again. I wiggled away from The Oracle’s embrace, poking her in an eye as I got up. She assured me it didn’t hurt but a bit, and I scooted towards Neptune. Some of my scales flaked off on the carpet; I had gotten too dried out.

I had just lifted myself onto the guest’s couch when the countdown started and we went back on camera. The stage lit up again, a disco ball dropped from the ceiling. I thought that must mean someone in the studio audience was getting a new car, but a hush fell over the crowd, not the usual whoops and whistles they gave when The Oracle gave away a Pontiac.

I looked behind our couch, and saw that the grey-suited men were lugging the rubber sea stretcher back out. They lowered the dead manatee in front of the main camera. My big sister’s head was crudely sewn to its back, right between the shoulder blades. Ronald’s own whiskered head was still attached.

The audience gasped. Ellie’s eyes were open, and looked as though she was gazing out on the auditorium. Her mouth had been rearranged into a smile. Someone had put eyeshadow on her, a smear of lipstick. Ronald’s flippers lay sprawled across the stage, like large grey mittens. Most people don’t know that manatees have fingernails, three on each flipper.

 “You can properly grieve for her now,” The Oracle cried, her eyes rolling back into her body like she might faint. “Your sister’s body is completed.”

Neptune gagged, then vomited right there on stage.

I jumped over Neptune’s orange upchuck and ran to the stretcher, bent beside it.  Ronald’s body was still warm, and his blood dribbled out underneath my sister’s neck from where she’d been needled on. They both had the same dazed expression on their faces, like two big dumb golden retrievers. They still didn’t know any better but to love everyone.

After the show, we found Nurse Delia asleep in the front seat of the Volkswagen, the engine running.

“Your father is going to kill me,” she said after we shook her awake. “We’ll have to get a pizza on the way home, and I’ll put it in the blender. Solid food is getting harder for him.”

But she didn’t say anything about Ellie. I was holding our sister’s head by the hair and Neptune had the empty jar tucked under his arm. I sat in the backseat and used tweezers to pluck out the threads still hanging from Ellie’s neck. Stringy pieces of her skin came off too. I piled them in the ashtray on the door.

“That was depressing,” Neptune reported.

“What was depressing about it?” Delia asked. I could feel her watching me in the rear view mirror. I put another strip of neck flesh in the tray.

“The Oracle said the sea is going to be erased of all fish in the next twenty years.”

“Oh,” Delia sighed. “Well, at least we don’t live there. Plain or pepperoni slices?”

“Ellie lives there,” Neptune insisted. “Most of Ellie.”

“Your sister lives in heaven,” Delia said.

“But maybe Ellie can’t be in heaven until we find the rest of her,” Nep cried.

Delia pulled the car into the parking lot of Bill’s Pizza, and flicked her cigarette butt out the window. “Don’t be hysterical. Why does heaven have to be split between the sky and the graveyard? It can just as well be split between the ocean and a pickle jar.”

“Okay,” Neptune sniffed.

 “And besides,” Delia said. “That Oracle has got to be full of shit.”

I leaned forward in my seat and kissed the back of Delia’s neck, right above her star tattoo where her purple hair ended.

“That tickles,” she said, as if she wasn’t sure what I had done.

By the time the show aired, the week before Christmas, Dad had turned completely to stone. We played the whole thing for Dad, but we’re not sure if he watched it, his eyes unblinking. Nurse Delia says he’s still alive in there, but I think she just wants to keep her job. She feeds him every day, spreads applesauce and pureed peas across his limestone lips. She changes his unsoiled diapers and gives him daily sponge baths. She hasn’t dyed her hair again since his last finger hardened.

At night, the house is quiet. The ventilator no longer huffs and puffs, the wolf no longer waits for me outside my room. But the hallway to the bathroom is still lit with one of Ellie’s manatee nightlights, and everyone’s toothbrush remains neatly arranged in the vanity cabinet, in case anyone ever decides to come back.