From the dark above, curling summer wind pulled the gulf to the shore and brought on the afternoon. On her day off, Nia went to the gulf on the edge of the island. It is a realm divided by trees and clear water: a north Florida vacation town. She floated in this hot water and caught silvered forms in the clouds following her until they were lost beneath the sun spreading like a slick into the horizon. When she emerged, her sunglasses were lost, her shoulders and cheeks were tight with sun, and there were several messages from the Doctor—the Organ Doctor— requesting her to meet with him that evening. Nia looked at the texts, at the waves sparkling like gems, at the bent pines ensconcing the beach and then down both planes of desolate coast. She trudged up the sand and got into her car with her shadow trailing in smudge behind her. There were some worries, but easily subdued in the recesses and closets of her mind. They were a half-punctured raft, left adrift. Soon enough, they would disappear behind the wall of slow sloshing waves.

Two nights before, Nia was swiftly escorted from a department store exit to the endless gray hallways that encircled the store’s walls like its skeleton. And she watched herself pointed out on several different monitors. It was not an unfamiliar scene.

“See?” prompted the store’s security, tracing the path of a figure moving through the store. “That’s you.”  Nia watched herself, a self that felt like her sometimes, but oftentimes not, more like something she put on from time to time.  Like now, that person didn’t feel much like herself, though she was her. There she was, moving around the store and putting shit in her bag, her waistband, whatever, watched by these men unseen, like Gods, or those shapes moving between clouds. Next, she looked into the eyes of the bodycams worn by the two cops who came to escort her to jail as she produced lip-balms, rollerball perfumes, boxes of tea with blooming flowers, melting mochi ice-cream balls, underwear, knotted bikinis, eye shadow palettes, all tucked away on her person.

“Never, ever come back here,” warned the cops.

Then, the cement boredom stench of jail, paperwork, and a hard chair for her to sleep, nothing new, until...her name, echoing from somewhere high above. Sleep fought the voice, despite the hard discomfort of the chair, the cold of the jail.

“Nia-a-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” called the tinny voice. “Niiiiiiaaaaaaaaaaaa.”

She swam to the surface to answer.

Nia was free. Someone posted her bail. Eyes dragged along until she hit the sidewalk. There was misty moonlight, and the palms crowded the parted gate, but Nia could see the dark outline of a man just out of the yellow lot lights, like a floating suit in shadow.

“Hello, Nia. I am the Organ Doctor.”

“Do I know you?” asked Nia. Then, the whirring darkness so black it was like a vision of death, only darkness, with no dreams. The cold she’d never known, and then the Organ Doctor sliding over, consuming her vision.

 Now, she showered off the sand in her apartment. Through the shower curtain she watched muted television reports of weird lights above the gulf and nightly recaps of the sightings of shapes in the sky. Nia watched but she listened to the garbled voices of her anonymous neighbors, screams, and deeper still, the crash and hiss of the waves, not far off.

o       

The Organ Doctor lived in a tawny McMansion with maintained shrubbery and clipped sagos in a deserted neighborhood of model homes. His home was sparsely furnished, overwhelmingly beige, and chilly. It was a place devoid of snacks or blankets. Huge palms and emerald ferns interlaced and pushed against the dark screen enclosing the pool. They moved in the breeze like a shining, undulating sea. Nia stood on her toes to look for the tiled pool’s bottom, a dark ripple of sunlight.

The television was set at a low volume to a program about pets with talent. A rottweiler in construction boots maneuvered on his hind legs with impressive dexterity between rows of zagging cones. Nia zoned out on the feat. Unmuddled herbs floated in her drink. The Organ Doctor placed a cool hand on her shoulder.

          “So…,” she said. They faced each other, the feeling of his hand damp from the air conditioning. As usual, the Organ Doctor exuded a cloudy mist that now collected at the ceiling.

          The Organ Doctor waited for Nia to continue. His eyes scanned her up, down, down, up.

          “So, you ever swim?” Nia shivered in the high-running air-conditioning.

          “I spend most of my time in my laboratory,” the Organ Doctor stood with his arms at his sides, a straight line.

          She nodded.

They stared. He bounced, as if he grazed a live wire.

          “Hold,” he disappeared into the hallway and Nia heard a door open, echoey, a metallic scrape, the door close.

          He returned with a foldable beach lounger and a passable imitation of a smile. Nia noted that his cardigan appeared to be designed for a young woman and his hair was combed askew. Now, like other occasions, his eyes were the eyes of others she recognized, this time an uncle. Previously, they were the eyes of the shifty cashier at the grocery store, girls at the club she danced with, a childhood dog.

          Nia eased back flat onto the lounge-chair and looked up at the Organ Doctor, and he down at her.

          “This can be your chair,” said the Organ Doctor.

They remained like this until her stomach started to growl. The sound startled them both.

          “Our meeting was fortuitus,” the Organ Doctor explained to Nia as he backed out of the dark garage into the sunset. He was taking her to get a milkshake, and they cruised through the loops of empty houses divided by sloping and densely grassed golf greens and shallow, dark lagoons until they reached the main drag, beached on both sides.

“We’ve become acquainted at exactly the perfect moment.”

Nia nodded and accepted the sticky cup. “Um,” she started. “…and… now?” she tried to sound casual. Licked at the overflow dripping down the side and held his eye.

“Do not worry,” the Organ Doctor said watching her and then out at the flourishing and abandoned pastures across from where he’d parked. “What is planned for us has already been set in motion. You are a life-carrying and unconquered territory. There is nothing for you to do but accept.”

Nia sucked her milkshake.

          “What do you remember?” The Organ Doctor said.

          “Huh? About what?”

          “Remember,” he whispered, and stared out at the swooning pink sky leaking over the hills. The late sun carved seas of spilling gold between the deep dark of the trees.

o               

          Nia liked to shower in total darkness. In her cave, she massaged her legs, stretched her arms, flitted her fingers over sore places that would bear regions of purpled bruises from work, and she pretended the wet and humming darkness was a womb. Worries were there, but they were not now. They were not in this moment. In the dark, she might fit them in her palm. A blink in her life. Life is long. Life is longggggggggg she said to herself.

Nia found it difficult to recall how she and the Organ Doctor spent their time. She might get home and look at the clock unbelieving in the amount of time that passed with no memory of how the hours were stretched between, like two poles affixed to opposite ends of the sea or sky. And then, there were these little things, Twice, his pinky nail was backward—of this Nia was certain. And she stared at his finger until he tucked it into his palm. The other thing she noticed: how she’d never seen him eat or drink and he left sticky trails like sea beast wherever he went. She noted that the Organ Doctor drove without watching the road. Instead, he faced her and nodded to whatever she said. Or he just looked at her. And yet he maneuvered turns cleanly, never sped, never drifted into another lane.

The Organ Doctor informed Nia he was able to see inside of her, all the way inside and in ways she will never know and in ways she could not know. That night when they became acquainted, the Organ Doctor saw her insides and decided to take them out so he might know her better.

          She shut off the shower.

          And here she was again back at the club. Her life gauzed by weed, traded and bought pills, endlessly replenished pitchers of sangria in the changing room, and interspliced with blocks of sleep. She made herself shiny to catch light and eyes and laced up a triangled top only to drop it behind her. Nia leaned on her heels and stretched. So easy to grow hypnotized on women spinning to music like one, glistening and gyrating limbs, the lingerie colored and frilled like candy, neon-outlined palm trees, and so much glittering beauty it was almost hard to take. Nia like a planet or a star in this tinseled universe. She saw glasses of water and of the sea, dropping off at the horizon when she thought of herself.

The queer configurations in the sky had the girls buzzing. There were droning complaints of alien invaders and lovers creeping into dreams and leaving suck marks and slimy caresses to be uncovered in morning.

Penelope wanted to go over Nia’s star charts. Penelope was a reader of the skies, birthdays and the planets. She was about a decade younger, fidgety and dreamy-eyed, sexy in a nervous way. Tonight, she was wearing yellow and had a single earbud dangling from her head, as if something was beaming her secret messages. Atop the wall of lockers was a small television and on the screen was what appeared to be a livestream of a popcorn machine.

“Well, you were born on a Sunday,” Penelope said and tapped numbers with a French tip. “And so many water stelliums. Placements at harsh degrees. You dream too much and hate waiting in lines.” Penelope shrugged ambiguously and continued.

“But what I’m, like, the most excited about for you is, like, this,” Penelope pointed to an angle on the west end of Nia’s chart. Penelope had written “haunted house,” and “man?” underlined several times. “With the new moon this week and the sun’s passage into the hallways of Cancer...let’s just say things are getting...weird.”

“Care to be more specific?” Nia pointed at “man,” thought of the Organ Doctor.

“All I know is it’s in the stars…or…something else. But it’s deep. Get ready for Nia’s Hall of Mirrors,” giggled Penelope with her friend and Nia got the notion this was something of a joke between them.

“Mmm. Sounds pretty vague,” Nia said. “Like, how do I know you’re not fucking around? I mean, what do I know?”

Penelope was chewing gum and seemed genuinely distressed by the implication.

“It’s in the stars,” she said finally and pushed the natal chart at Nia. “I’m not some liar. Some…fabulist. I had no say in how distant we’ve grown from the skies. That may be your thing, but it’s not mine,” Penelope did not hide her contempt and swiveled back round to her reflection. She lit a candle and began a loud conversation with her friend. Nia stared and remembered Penelope knew a man who paid her for tubes of her blood which he drew himself with a baby butterfly needle. This thought and the bizarre process in which this must unfold occupied her until the blur of red lights, and then the club darkened like a galaxy and eyes shining like planets opened and caught themselves in her. Naked, with unfamiliar eyes all over her, the dark, lost to everything else; that’s the part she never minded.

After, she sat in her car and puffed a blunt. She scrolled on her phone with the sounds and the smell of the mist rising off the sea through cracked windows. Ghost crabs shimmied in the neon glow and shimmering shadow. Out of the pines and palms, carpeted by fan palms and laden with shadows and crabs emerged the Organ Doctor. He stood at her car door.

“I am thinking of you, Nia,” he said. “Rest. All is coming together.”

Everything was bathed in a shadowy light and there was a dreamy panic unfurling over her, and it was not exactly unpleasant. The sky, weighed down by stars, hung between the billowing fronds. 

Few nights later, the Organ Doctor invited her out to dinner to discuss what he termed “the procedure.” The sun hung at the horizon like a slice of fruit. Nia let herself in through his front door and was greeted by sharp and wet sounds echoing from the back of the house. Red sun shadows sparkled on the barren walls and ceiling. Her teeth chattered in the cold.

“I must complete my readying,” said the Organ Doctor, sounding faraway.

But she was feeling suspicious, and when he materialized at the end of the hallway, dripping, she asked:

“Do you swim before I come? Or something? You’re…damp.”

          “Bathing.” The Organ Doctor produced several folded bills from his shirt pocket. He handed them to Nia. 

          “Don’t forget about him.” She pointed to a slimy twenty poking from the pocket.

“Depart?” He handed her the bill and pointed to the garage.

The Organ Doctor’s car was so cold that shards of wet ice formed in drips at the vents. Ghost crabs scuttled across the road and the moon spilled in latticed patterns through the sea grass. Nia and the Organ Doctor found a beachfront place with a deck that sat nestled in the dunes with black umbrellas covering the tables like big bats.

“Once, a young man was brought to me suffering from a shark’s bite. Completely bitten in half.  He was brought in on two gurneys. I, of course, stitched him back together.”

Nia must have looked skeptical because the Organ Doctor continued:

          “He was completely conscious the entire procedure. A state of shock, I presume. I sewed him with a needle and thread, and he looked to the lights and spoke of universe and of the ancient language inscribed behind the waves and in the clouds.”

          “How interesting,” Nia offered.

“I have a fascination with bisections, dissections, and connections,” he said. “Bone saws and medical pumps bring me great comfort. The smell of blood under the hot lights. Which brings me to us. To you,” The Organ Doctor looked at Nia, and then to the sea, crashing and cresting over the hushed dunes.

          “There are no coincidences,” Nia said.

          “What I saw inside of you…,” said the Organ Doctor, widening his weird eyes. “A dark space of perfect possibility…a vast territory…a faultless closet.”         

          Nia glanced at her phone.

All a dream whispered her mind.

          “Symmetry, darkness, a place swelling with nutrient. Immediately I knew within you I had glimpsed the…attic.”

          “So, a surrogacy thing? Are you, like, married?”

          “I am not. You may think of the procedure to be alike whatever you desire. Agreeable?”

          “Fine.” Nia reached for her wine. She had worked through more than half the bottle that sweated on the table.

          “I can see inside of you, Nia. All the way inside. If you agree to the procedure, I will take your organs out so I may know you even better. I will place them in metal chalices and keep you alive with machines. I will hold your treasures so you keep no secrets from me.”

          She finished her glass and nodded, refilling.

          “So, what’s in it for me?”

          “A respite from worry.”

Nia took herself to the bathroom and an existential vertigo washed over her as she stared at her reflection. The idea that there was an entire world that she had never seen hit at once with disbelief and total horror. Outside this barely lit bathroom was the dark and empty restaurant and beyond were couples hand-in-hand and the moon grazing the tops of trees and concaves carved into the coast, and babies born in cold hospitals at every minute, and highways upon highways that led to all night parties with blow so good it would melt her face off, innumerable cities where nobody knew her at all. Elephants crossing the entrances of misty green jungles, red velvet lined movie theaters, the shocking dark blue of the sea caught in the sandstone frame of the endless strip malls, purple skies fringed by snow she’d never known, the psychedelic swirl of washing machines at the laundry mat, the witching hour and seven in the morning, bushels of tropical flowers, peaks and valleys and sun oranged canyons. That all existed in the same world as hers.

          But she had never known any of that. Instead, she was in this bathroom with her reflection who sometimes felt like her and sometimes not at all. 

She finished his glass and the bottle, and he caught her elbow as she stumbled in the sand and tried to hide that she was drunk. Nia’s vision was blurred and mind slurry, but she kept freaking herself out thinking the Organ Doctor had eight eyes. He guided her to his car, and then to his bed. In the dark, they watched a local station’s exposé on snuff films.

“I’d like to get the soundtracks,” an anchor said as the camera returned to him. “Lotta synthesizer.” He looked down, flipped a page, and proceeded with the next story. 

She waited for arms to reach across the vast expanse of cool sheets. It did not happen. Lights blossomed in the sky and moved through the stars, through the bare bedroom window. Behind closed eyelids, they danced there too.

“Sleep and remember,” whispered the Organ Doctor in her head, though he was right next to her in the bed. “Sleep, Nia.”

Nia slept. She dreamed and remembered none of it in the morning.   

o               

Next night, she caught Penelope watching her in the fogged mirror scape. 

          “You. We need to talk,” Nia appeared beside her. Penelope’s eyes slid across the mirror to hers.

          “Is this what you saw?” Nia held out her phone to Penelope. “In my chart? Him?”

 Penelope glanced at the screen and made a face. That morning, Nia snapped a photo of the Organ Doctor from where she was supine on her lounge chair. It was almost pleasant, reclining there, the pool glimmering and the palm leaves swaying and pressing against the dark screen. There was so much flora just outside the porch screen that it was like a veil descended from somewhere above, everything greenish and soft-hued.

          Just a quick photo of the Organ Doctor’s profile as he stared down at the charts spread across his counter. There was no way he could have known she had done this, but he’d turned his face sharply to her and looked at her a long time. She played it as if she was scrolling and she kept her expression bored, neutral, but the pounding of her heart made the blood ring in her ears.

          Now, with the thrum of trap beats reverberating the walls and the slight rattling of the lockers and mirrors the clouds of perfume, voices, all of that was very distant. 

          “Look, Nia, I feel sorry you’re going, like, through… it, but like. The sky is a mirror of our lives, right? Think about that. A celestial mirror. Carved with your fate. You get what I’m saying? Nothing ever happens that wasn’t meant to happen. That’s why you have a chart. If it’s happening, it’s because it’s supposed to.”

          “Pen, I need to ask you something. It’s really serious, okay?” Nia looked at herself to see Penelope, projected in the reflection. She inhaled: “Do you know anything about…aliens?”

          Penelope frowned at Nia. She raised an eyebrow. And she opened her mouth wide and began to laugh at her, long and hard.

o       

A little after 4 in the morning, Nia was watching a documentary about the year 1521 on her own couch. “No good work happens as the result of one’s own wisdom; but everything must happen in a stupor,” an actor providing the voice for Martin Luther droned. “Reason must be left behind for it is the enemy…” She was consumed by sleep. But then, in porous early morning blue, she had an idea that was startling in its simplicity: the closer she got, the better she’d see. 

          All she thought of was the Organ Doctor and his fingers, with upside down nails and no fingerprints or lines, seamless hands like white gloves. Her apartment was cool and dim, and from her kitchen her refrigerator made a gruesome, whirring sound. She peered over the counter at the appliance and wondered if it was her name she heard. The immediate fear was colossal, and she raced to her bedroom and slammed the door. She stared at her palm in flashlit darkness. There lay the lines that alleged future, but she recognized nothing. Fate caught forever, made permanent in the palm, but in a language alien to her. She watched a television program about artisanal Easter Eggs and chain-smoked joints.

o       

          When the Organ Doctor picked her up the evening before the procedure was to commence, he asked her again to remember.

          Nia could no longer comprehend any stretch of years before the Organ Doctor. But the Organ Doctor wanted her to go even deeper. Beyond her life.

There was inescapable nausea at once and her vision tilted as the Organ Doctor drove very fast, until he drove through memories of dark trees, freshwater springs, and glowing hot air suspended in his perpetual chill. And she remembered the voice of the Organ Doctor, who was really the voice inside of her, whose face slid over hers and said things to her without moving his mouth, images and ideas from his mind drifting to hers.

          “And what else,” probed the Organ Doctor.

Even in this far past, a world of purpled space and jungle tangle before any notions of humankind, the Organ Doctor was there between the leaves and crossed branches. Nia asked how much longer and the Organ Doctor promising it was already over. Because when there is an ending, there is also a beginning, and therefore another ending and a new beginning. And when things are given limits and lines of finitude, it implies that elsewhere exists infinitude. That this could all really go on... The Organ Doctor didn’t have to tell her this in so many words, but she intuited all the same.

The Organ Doctor paused to order her a cup of water and a fried pear from a drive-thru. The employee screamed when she saw the Organ Doctor pull round to the window, and she did not want to slide the partition open. Finally, she thrust the cup and the pear through the window with a trembling hand and did not bother to accept the slimy payment.

They parked near the bay. Roped boats knocked lazily together in the water, pulled taut and bending with light, like a mirror. Nia caught reflections of nearby sister planets, like drops of ruby blood on the surface. Everything seemed low and tangible.

“See space,” said the Organ Doctor, gesturing. All the windows were down and damp air billowed in. “See space and touch space. I am space. We are space. You are space. I offer you dreams.”

To Nia that sounded like how she lived. She drifted like a dream through moments that became hours, another night, a new week, and eventually something else.

o       

          Near dawn: Nia was on the beach where she was to meet the Organ Doctor. The procedure wasn’t far off; the sky going reverse purple and red in the corners. The Organ Doctor was not a shark, Nia thought. Nor was she some guileless wader facing the waves. She was swimming in a straight line, right to the procedure and it was a short while and then back again to the club and dances and the men and her life. But it would be a life of dreams and without worry.

 Nia looked over the contents of the gulf, dredged up by the morning tide. She walked tiptoe with sandpipers among rotting crab skeletons, bunches of seaweed, and remnants of night waves like foamy dream matter. The morning gave the beach a planetary look with these strange offerings from the depth, the lunar dunes, and the alien skies. She sat down at the mouth of the shallows and thought about the last thing she watched on TV, an old movie about a mysterious flood of blood, never clotting.

The moon dipped away, lower and lower, until it was half-submerged in waves. Beyond those infinite depths, lights folded into the sky, split, reflected in the water. Getting closer. There was a shadow hanging over the gulf, darkening and rendering the water the color of quartz incomprehensible. A storied sky she saw herself, as the lights warped, and their glow made shapes of forever in the water. Nia groped at the sand. Something soft touched at her feet, caressed them, and she half-screamed, but it was only a ghost crab, so translucent, she could see each of his organs and what kept him alive. Bug-eyed, he snapped at the sheet of sand, seeking his holed home.

“I thought it was you,” Nia called to the Organ Doctor, laughing. “Oh, fuck, I thought that was you!” She shooed the crab, rubbed at her feet and tried to catch her breath. Above, the shadow opened.

by Robin Wyatt Dunn, with Perchance                             

Taylor Melia Elyse Mahone is a fiction writer from Central Florida. She writes about the sublime, the supernatural, Floridian landscapes, astrology & reptiles. Her story “Summerland” won the 2026 Pen America/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize.