Sally Geiger

Island Lake is an unincorporated community located 18 miles north of Duluth in northeastern Minnesota. Populated by just forty people, the small lake has recently been the site of a number of mysterious attacks on swimmers. The articles describing the various incidents all confirm what I’d always feared: that in the turgid waters of the north lurks a monstrous fish. And more: that it has a taste for women.


The muskellunge is an opportunistic ambush predator, whose diet, I relearn today, consists mainly of fish, insects, frogs, rodents, and ducks. Another more pointed search on the internet, however, dredges up my childhood fears: a poodle in Wisconsin, dragged soundlessly to the bottom of a river; a massive presence in the water accelerating toward the soft jangling of a charm bracelet on a pale, slender ankle; a bleeding woman, I read on one forum (to raucous virtual laughter), who could not disentangle the leviathan from her crotch until they both lay writhing on the shore. It is a cliche to question the veracity of so-called “fish tales,” and so I try to entertain what truth might be there. Some fisherman in rural Russia leave offerings to the Vodyanoy, a jealous water spirit who takes the form of a great, green fish man with a long beard made of algae that drags behind him as he putzes lazily down waterways on a large floating stick. Most often, he is a drowner of men, and a conjurer of floods. But if he catches a woman bathing in his river, he takes her, and drags her to his underwater dwelling, where she is to serve him for the rest of her life.


Some days I want to believe that this is what happened to me.























One of the victims attacked at Island Lake was a girl of eleven, who felt her whole foot in the fish’s mouth before being dragged under. She was rescued after the fish let go, but required stitches for lacerations that cut down to her bone. Another was an older woman, an experienced swimmer, who saw the leviathan emerge from the water’s surface after she clocked it in the eye. The more I research, the more I come to believe in my long held horrors. In the water, the flicker of a silver bracelet is the thrash of a dying minnow; the gloss of a painted toe awakens an ancient hunger I have no way of fighting.


While I was growing up, my mom kept her ponytail in a ziplock bag in the bathroom, second drawer down on the right, next to the metal box where she kept her wisdom teeth. I must have desired it for some while, though I can’t recall; nor can I find the kinetic memory of myself at six or seven years old, removing it from its plastic sheath, passing a brush over it who-knows-how-many times until the hairs all skewed out of place, its silken beauty ruined; neither finally do I remember the shame at having destroyed such a pretty thing, replacing it in the drawer with a prayer that no one would find out what I’d done. I only remember my mom found it a few nights later when she came home from work, and knew immediately who was to blame. I remember I provided some explanation that was definitely a lie, even though I probably believed it at the time, and how she took the mangled thing from the bathroom, and hid it somewhere no one would ever think to look.


It was sometime shortly after that that I began to grow my own hair, and in this chain of events, one might identify from a psychoanalytical perspective an existential quest to alleviate undiagnosed gender dysphoria. My behavior displayed a clear desire for a feminine aesthetic that if not given, I would take. This is, after all, the imagined value all of the doctors are looking for. It’s what my therapist wants me to believe, and it’s the story I’m required to tell if I want any kind of social respectability, much less medical validation. Indeed, that would be a much easier-to-follow kind of story, one where I, as a child, a girl, was fully conscious of the ways my body was killing me. But the truth remains: there were too many possibilities. I just didn’t know. I can only build the story in retrospect, and in the case of indeterminacy, offer some imagined value. There will be something in the water. Something will live beneath the surface.

















Zalika Dolenc is a 19th century Slovenian woman. She lives with her family in Lubljana, the region’s capital. There they operate an inn, and her physical charms are well known, the shape of her breasts in clean linen tunics, her wrists the color of milk. One day, she is approached by one of the tenants, a penniless part-time legal clerk and student who doesn’t have much going for him at the time but his shifty eyes and talent with a pen. For whatever reason, she decides it an unfit match, and rebuffs his advances. The legal clerk has found himself rather unlucky in love throughout his young life, and while typically he’d drown his sorrows in plum wine and purchased caresses, on the day he sees himself humiliated at the hands of this most treacherous of beauties, he is especially destitute. He pays for his room on credit: a straw bed, a small desk where he writes in darkness through the night as he cannot afford a candle, his shame sharpened all the while by his indigent sobriety. He would not marry Zalika Dolenc, and so while she sleeps in the room beneath him that night, he gazes out to the water. He writes a poem where the slut finally gets what she deserves.


































The origin of the name muskellunge is in the Ojibwa words maashkinoozhe meaning great, ugly fish. After the French began their conquest, the word for this big fish morphed in their mouths: masque elongee, long face, as in, ‘Why the long face?’ From them, the English learned to say muskellunge, and the Americans muskie. Like many species of predatory fish, they lack a similar biological mechanism that allows other animals to know when their stomachs are full, and will eat until they explode. The creature is a tragic behemoth, squaring off with its own appetite in the turgid waters.


I was never told exactly how ugliness was translated into sorrow; I feared the great fish. I did. But history is as easily falsified as it is created.


In the summer of 2007, I met a girl a few years younger than me, Cara, while visiting some cousins’ absurdly wealthy family friends at their lake house in Minocqua. The family owned acres of forested land there, where they’d built a hideous, log-cabin style mansion with enough room for five families that they only used on vacations in the summer. She was their daughter, and had been coming up to the lake house every June since she was a baby, growing into a graceful and lithe swimmer. My hair then was a defilement. At 11, it had grown down past my elbows, hung in greasy sheets over my face, and in the back, it had knotted itself into three dimensionality. I wouldn’t let anyone get even close with a brush, especially not my mother. This is the only reason I can imagine that for five whole days, Cara thought I was a girl. I burned when it finally came out, sitting in the room with both of my male cousins and Cara’s older brother Paulie, whose body I remembered feeling against my chest, in my hands, when it was my turn for a ride around the property on his atv. “I’m not a girl!” I yelled. She thought I was hilarious. “Then how come you don’t take your shirt off in the water?” The only two times I had dared to enter the shallows, I’d jumped in suddenly, still wearing my t shirt and cargo shirts, so that instead of facing my temerity of showing my naked torso to these rich strangers, I’d seem like a force of nature, pulled into the water on the slightest whim. My cousins and Paulie were all looking at me then, wondering what kind of thing might cast such a shadow on the surface. I responded, “Cause I’m afraid the muskie will bite my dick off!” The boys laughed, but I watched Cara’s face twist in disgust. “Gross!” she said, “That doesn’t make any sense!” She was right, but that didn’t stop me from believing it.















Zalika Dolenc eventually has her name changed. Or rather, her name is changed for her; first to Urska, then to simply “the flirt”. It turns out the man whose affections she refuses is France Preseren, a man who’d later become known as the national poet of Slovenia, and the incel icon of the early 1800s. I find a blog that provides a translation of Zalika’s story, published first as “The Water Man”. The blogger (also likely an incel) names Zalika as the “Paris Hilton of the Ljubljana”. He extrapolates her gestures to those of “poses, preens, and down the nose looks,” before referring to her as a “snooty pin-up”. In the poem, she finds herself outdoors on the edges of a mass of dancing people, the chill dappled with the aromas of fermenting fruit; she meets the eyes of a handsome stranger Preseren has placed similarly on the edges of the town square just so, a stranger whose strange looks brand him outsider, capable of who-knows-what.


Though the translation he (I must conclude it’s a he) provides doesn’t specifically mark the stranger as such, the blogger intuits that this man is a foreigner, an intuition that is likely consistent with Preseren’s Slovenian nationalist intent. Nationalist ideology is secured by the retention of a genetic legacy. For Preseren, who would later go on to write the national anthem of Slovenia, Zalika’s refusal embodied a femme freedom that not only negated what he believed his natural right, but moreover imperiled the destiny of the nation. Indeed, the choice to live femme and free questions the very logic at the foundations of nationalist projects; the easiest solution is to drown the choice altogether. Preseren knew this as well as proud boys founder Gavin McInnes, as well as Fraternal Order of Police president Patrick Yoes, who endorsed Donald Trump’s re-election in September 2020, as well as my mom, who to this day still mourns I won’t be a father.
























A rainy evening a few years ago, my little brother was packing to move out of the house, the last of my mom’s three kids to go. I remember it painfully, marked by shouting, my little brother wanting to do nothing but all of it by himself, and my mom, indomitable as always, unsure of what to do with herself knowing it was the last night she’d sleep in a house with someone she could call her baby.  There was a blues band playing at a bar down the road that night, and I volunteered to take her to the show to try to help diffuse some tension. We got high with the dog standing in the light rain on the side of the house, her wearing the reflective vest she always wore to walk in the dark. On the street, water had collected and flowed in the ditch through the easements lining the front yards; I could smell someone’s septic tank. She stopped abruptly in front of the neighbor’s house, the rain ferrying fallen leaves through the ditch, and pulled a plastic ziplock bag from her pocket. It was the tangled mess of her old ponytail from 1987. I could only imagine what that moment symbolized for her. She didn’t feel the need to explain herself, and I don’t have the right to take that from her. She said very simply, “I guess I won’t be needing this anymore,” and tossed the hair into the water where it fell apart and went eventually away.


Would it be easier to believe if I said that each time I shaved my head in my adult life, I was consciously recommitting myself to the performance of masculinity? That I always knew what I wanted, and it was only a matter of convincing myself that it was possible? Because I didn’t most of the time. I told everyone I believed my ugliness to be my choice virtue.


And without an explanation, can I construct the narrative? I made the aesthetic decision to grow long hair; it was my decision to cut it all off at 12, but it was a decision I know I didn’t make freely. Shame does this strange thing where it makes self destruction look like sacrifice. Holy, as though hating oneself stoically enough might make one a martyr.





















In the first publication of The Water Man, the “flirt from Ljubljana” is indeed named as Zalika Dolenc. After suffering her rejection, the childish Preseren publishes a poem that, explicitly including her name and likeness, lays out the consequences for her daring: inescapable death, at the hands of a great and terrible fish. In later printings of the poem, however, the flirt is renamed Urska Sefer. In so doing, Preseren disconnects his own psychic wounds from the myth he creates, while simultaneously affirming a national patriarchal ideology which will always find new forms of femininity to punish, new women to police.


When I text my mom to tell her I’m writing about her old ponytail, she responds with heart emojis, followed by a short message: I think I got rid of it recently.


It takes everything in me to not rewrite this, to resist the urge to make it a poem and call it a day. When language fails, it’s sometimes best to believe in nonsense. Let the fish mean something else. A fish that grants wishes to those willing to do small favors, a fish that comes out at night and tucks your hair into cute little pig tails. Or another story: a hero who kills a river fish the size of a horse, dries its intestines, hones its bones and builds a zither that sings so sweetly it puts the whole world to sleep. The urge to close the circuit is overwhelming; I want to produce a narrative that allows me to go back, to find the girls lost in the water. But there is no going back, and we are still drowning.



























To reorient myself, I search the internet for videos of the muskie. I troll through so many, almost all of them showing white men on boats. After I am lost in the swarm of them, passing who knows how many hours, my attention is reclaimed by a fisherman I instantly develop a crush on, his burnt red biceps reeling against the fish on his line. I pause the video as it jumps glistening from the lake, so large and beautiful, the sleek water rolling down its scales like a ponytail, and then I see another shape beneath it, a massive shadow like a moving cloud of silt under the muskie, under the whole boat. I play the video again and the sexy man on the boat is helped by the cameraman to hoist the fish onboard, drunk and laughing. He croons over the 53 incher, calling it baby while gently dislodging the hook from its throat, totally oblivious to the monstrous thing coming up from below. But when my disbelief finally wanes, I see that it’s disappeared, and now I’m not sure if I even saw it myself. For a second, I am overcome with a combination of suspicion and nostalgia. The video ends; I am tempted to roll it back, to confirm or deny I saw what I remember seeing, but I don’t. A feeling’s come and I love it too much.

































When we stop dancing, the stranger and I are suspended over the middle of a great body of water, fogs and dense clouds still whirling in the wake of our tumult. I understand that we were never meant to be together as well as that there might be something sinister afoot. My long hair and silver fineries float as weightless as I for an instant, a whirl of silk and brocade hopelessly tangled with the web of algae and dead minnows that surrounds the strange fish enchantress I’d inadvertently chosen. Then a splash, and we slip below the river’s surface.