Phebe Kirkham
Harm was never our intention.
How could it have been? We only knew what we were told. We floated in our tank, bathed in nutrients. In the dark or when we wished to, we glowed.
The gardeners who tended us were always chatting, but their words were muffled and distorted by the water. At first we grasped no more than one word in three. Had it not been for the sameness of many of those conversations–all the reiterations of nutrient calculations and water quality results–we would probably have understood even less. Certainly we were slow to understand why they argued so often over the history of dresses.
Why were the gardeners so fascinated by the many eras, the many types? Why did they have so many questions? They all agreed it was better that the long ages of hide and fur were over, but what about the era of magic? Could it be brought back? What might be learned from the long centuries of linen? Had rayon really triumphed over cotton?
And then, one morning, someone new came with the taller of the day gardeners. Together they paused before our tank and the new one told the gardener that we, we were to be the beginning of a new age.
We would be the age of the living dress.
Now that we understood this was our history, we began to pay more attention. When the gardeners talked, we floated close to the edge to catch all those rich, complicated names: crinoline and Fortuny; peplum and Dior. We too began to wonder what might be learned from the brief, failed age of paper, or whether silk might make a return.
At night, our favorite gardener came. Unlike the day gardeners, she never tangled us in her net or speared us with the tines of her rake when she turned us. To show our gratitude for her gentleness, we swelled turquoise.
She too knew something of the history of dresses, though the parts of it she told were darker. She spoke of beautiful dresses, of powerful dresses, even of dangerous dresses. We crowded the surface, squeezed together so we could her soft voice.
Long ago, in the era of magic, she told us, there had been a sorceress whose lover had cast her off. Hearing of his engagement to a young princess, the sorceress made an irresistibly beautiful dress and sent it to her ex’s new fiancée. It was so glorious that the fiancée pushed her maid aside so she could unwrap it more quickly herself. At once she slipped her arms into the sleeves and cinched the long folds around her narrow waist.
But the sorceress had enchanted the dress. No sooner had its fabric touched the young fiancée than it lapped her with flame. She attempted to pull it away, but it had melted, fused with her flesh. In mere moments, she was completely consumed.
Had the dress burned too? We asked the gardener. She did not understand our question, even when we flashed it out in chartreuse. Instead she looked worried. She called the taller gardener, apologized for waking him, but there was something wrong with the algae in the right tank? It was a funny color?
We swayed with aqua then darkened to our more usual sapphire to reassure her that we were well.
Another night she spoke of how difficult it had been until this era, our era, to dye fabrics in the full range of color. There had been no magenta until the middle of the 19th century and greens were hardest of all. It had taken centuries to discover a way to produce a green as brilliant as an emerald. We blinked our own brightest green to show we understood.
She paused and seemed to look at us, before shaking her head. The dyes were brilliant, yes, but it was arsenic, a poison, that made them so bright. Those who dyed the fabric sometimes got sick. The seamstresses who sewed the cloth got blisters on their hands. Even the ladies who wore the green gowns might find sores on their shoulders and forearms.
A dress, she said, rests on the body’s greatest, largest organ: the skin. And the skin breathes in what surrounds it.
The next day we got our own skin, a membrane, the taller gardener told the others as he siphoned us out of the tank through a long spiral of tubing and into something narrow but translucent. Was this the dress, we wondered? We sank and rose inside the membrane, stared out through it.
“It’s such a beautiful dress,” the night gardener said. She had come to help with the transfer.
The taller gardener laughed. “Way too long for you, though–you’d be swallowed up in that thing, you’re such a shrimp.”
The night gardener turned away until he called her back. He needed her help lowering us into the new tank. This was tall and narrow, but clear, so we could see as they moved us from our garden and out into the street. We were joggled, wobbled for what seemed like a very long time.
At last we were pulled into a brightly lit room. It was crowded with people and with racks of bright hanging things that we knew at once were dresses, even though this was the first time we had ever seen them.
It was clear too that they were not like us: these were the dresses of earlier eras.
We were thrilled, sure they must have histories of their own to share. But we could not understand their languages, only their moods. The silks shivered with discontent. The wools drowsed, warm and dreaming of hillsides. The cottons snapped at the poplins.
That night the small gardener came back and stood in front of the tank, staring at us. She’d wanted to make sure we were settled, she said, and besides, she had one last history for us.
This one was different. The others she’d read or learned but this one she’d heard directly from the friend of the friend whose sister it had happened to. This sister had been invited to her boss’s wedding. She was very excited, but too broke to buy a fancy new dress. She had gone to thrift stores, sorted through the bins at the Goodwill, but still couldn’t find a thing to wear. And then the morning of the party, she’d walked by a yard sale and there, draped over the fence, was the perfect dress. It fit her so well it might have been tailored for her. The girl selling it swore she’d never worn it and so the sister decided not to worry that there was no time to get it dry cleaned.
She’d gotten lot of compliments during the reception. She was starting to feel a little dizzy, but she assumed it was just the cocktails. By the end of dinner, though, she felt so sick she couldn’t get up from her chair. Her boss’s father had to call for an ambulance. It had taken the doctors a day to work out that she was suffering from pesticide exposure–the dress had been saturated with it–and another day on top of that to determine which kind of pesticide it was so they could get her the right antidote. She’d been all right in the end; the case had even been written in a medical journal.
We were a little disappointed by this story: it seemed to have turned out differently than the others. Still, we beamed aqua from the straps through the bodice, then waved ultramarine in a great tiered splash down the front of the skirt.
All the next day the room was full of models being fitted. The other dresses were pulled and pinned and cut and hemmed and the air swished with their sighs. We swayed in our medium, waiting for our turn.
One of the models complained to her fitter that the room was too warm. Then another said she couldn’t stand the way the wool was sticking to her arms and her legs.
Then we too began to feel it. Those of us in the straps flushed with it first, and then it seemed to drip, to ooze down to those of us in the bodice. We felt our bodies tightening, parching. Some in the skirt flashed up to those in the bodice, but there was no reply. More and more of us began to wink out.
By the time the fitter had sent for the gardeners, all of us in the straps and bodice had gone dark.
The taller gardener squeezed our membrane, noted where we could still flash and where we could muster only the dimmest of light.
He said it would be all right. “We’ve got a spare tank going—we’ll just draw more from there.”
He and the night gardener disagreed over how or whether to remove those of us who had gone dark. The day gardener was for pulling the plug entirely. The night gardener thought that was too drastic.
“It’s still such a beautiful dress,” the night gardener said. “Even if it isn’t all lighting up.”
The taller gardener shook his head. “She wants the bioluminescence. It’s the whole point.”
The new arrivals they siphoned in were giddy and excited. They flashed back and forth at each other, jockeying for space. They had heard nothing of the challenges of wool, the mastery of silk. They weren’t interested in taking a place in the great history of notable dresses. They were hungry; they needed to grow, they said, as they sucked in more and more of the nutrient gel.
The next morning our own model came for her fitting, along with the woman we had seen all those days ago, the woman who had said we would be the new era of dresses. She was the designer, the first fitter whispered to the second fitter. The second fitter made a face that only we could see.
Together the fitters raised us from the tank and the model reached up her arms so they could slide us down over her. The model bent her head down, sniffed at our bodice. “It doesn’t smell! I was afraid it would smell.”
The designer laughed. “Of course it doesn’t smell.”
The model turned, admired our ripples of teal and cerulean. Then she raised her shoulders, dropped them, complained that the straps were too tight.
The second fitter suggested they try one strap up and the other down, like in that famous painting by—what was his name? Didn’t it cause a scandal?
The designer shrugged. In the end, he’d re-painted it. “He gave in to the gossips.”
The model tugged at the left strap. All at once, we felt a sudden lightness, a sudden looseness. Some of us began to slip free.
“It’s leaking,” she said. Then she cried out, rubbed at her shoulder, as if she were in pain from the strap snapping against her skin.
“Let’s lift it off her,” the first fitter said. “We have to get that fixed.”
“I thought this stuff was non-toxic!” The model said.
The designer shrugged. “It’s not like that red tide stuff, for sure. But in these concentrations, you have to be careful. Anyway, lots of things can cause some irritation—the gel or the seawater itself could do it.”
The first fitter said they’d get her a sheer bodystocking—that would help if there were any more leaks.
Back in our tank, a few of us were still trickling from the strap, sparking in aqua. The second fitter asked if it would be like that after the show—would it all come loose? How long would the dress stay alive?
The designer said no one knew. That was what was so cool about this whole experiment! “No one knows how it will turn out!”
The newer arrivals from the spare tank wanted to know if we had been aware of this. But we were more interested in hearing that we might be toxic. Some of us were excited to be potentially dangerous. A few of us even argued this made us powerful.
Given how many of us there were, how could we ever have agreed on anything? Sure, some of us felt betrayed by what we had heard. We had looked forward to being part of the great history of dresses, to being seen, to being moved, if not by our own motion, then through the model’s motion. We would float and spin with her.
But we had not considered what would happen when we had consumed all of our light.
Above us, the fitters discussed how to fix the strap: should it be re-made or mended? Could it be wrapped to reinforce it? Maybe they should just call the gardeners? The second fitter said she wouldn’t mind calling that tall one. Never mind the gardeners, the first fitter said. They’d try wrapping and see if it would hold. She wanted to finish; tomorrow would be a long day.
Some argued we must live freely even if just for a day, not suspended between strap and bodice, but able to float as far as we could. There were those of us who claimed to remember another place, a summer shore hot with brine, the light shattering into a thousand glorious yellow rays in the water.
Some of us pointed out we wouldn’t be here at all if we hadn’t been cultivated. Maybe we owed something to the gardeners who had brought us into being. But others did not wish to be trapped in what was no better than a plastic river. Still others were envious, especially those in the straps. They were pulled and plucked while life in the skirt remained easy and pleasant.
What were we asking for anyway? What exactly did we want? Such a question had never been asked before, not once in our history. How fast we were changing! How quickly we were catching up in our thinking.
By midnight, when the small gardener came to check our temperature gauge, we had resolved nothing. She dragged a stool over to our tank and climbed upon it to read the gauge. She stood there for so long we thought she might be worried, so we offered a quick, reassuring burst of emerald.
We were shocked when she slipped her hands under our straps and raised us up out of the tank, carefully sweeping our skirt up in one arm. She gathered our waist snugly against her body, fluffed out the skirt. We shimmered aqua and celadon. Turning, she faced the trifold of mirrors and nodded to her reflection. Then she held the straps up against her shoulders.
Her touch was still so light, still so gentle. But by then it was already too late. Already some of us had escaped through that not-quite mended strap, already some of us were sliding down her shoulders, her forearms.
Remembering her kindness, some of us tried to hold back, but we were caught in the stream, over 100 million of us rafting down her skin, leaving our trail of toxins behind.
But we glowed. We blinked turquoise and shimmered to blue. We sparkled in rays of violet and indigo, our most powerful colors, our most intense colors, the ones we kept for ourselves, the ones we showed to no one. That was the least we could do.
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A graduate of the Brooklyn College MFA program, Phebe Kirkham lives in Queens and teaches literature and creative writing at York College/CUNY. Her work has appeared in Pangyrus, The Newtown Literary Review, Toasted Cheese, and Mystery Tribune.