Hannah Hindley is a wilderness guide with an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona. Her writing explores bodies, landscapes, and love. Find her at hannahhindley.com and folow her @hannah_the_bold.
Nonfiction winner of the 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Julietta Singh.
Indoors on the padded table, I grip one hand with the other, squeezing my thumb, trying not to fidget or to yelp aloud. I’m stretched out on my belly across one of those long strips of medical parchment—the kind that sticks to skin, the kind that punches through in the thin places where your body presses. “Let me know if you need a break,” the laser technician says, but “I’m tough,” I tell her, and I grip my thumb tighter. The air smells like a poorly wired hairdryer: warm cloud of scorch, the sizzle of burning carbon. My legs sting where the technician works her rod across my shaved skin. Red bumps prickle open like starbursts. She tells me that’s where the laser is most effective—the reactive spots, the places where heat scorches the follicle all the way down to the dark and jellylike root.
I hold tight. Vanity dragged me here in the first place, and now it keeps me from squirming. I imagine my hairless legs. Clear water streaming across bare body as I take my weekly shower on the hill above the glacier where I spend my summers—not needing to reach for a razor, not loitering among the mosquitos any longer than necessary. Smooth skin on smooth ankles, as I lace my boots and duck under the zip entrance of my wall tent. The ease of nakedness. And the purifying burn of it, too. As if the hair is an inessential layer to be shed, in search of something true and whole beneath it. It is an unmaking of sorts—scorching away the mammalian parts of myself, imagining what vital core might remain. On the table, the laser whines and a stream of cool air whirs across the singe.
. . .
Before I ever thought much about what makes my body a warm and dark-furred mammal’s body, I learned what makes a fish a fish. In a fabric-bound turquoise notebook, I sketched bodies with fine-tipped pens, watching my professor draw them on a board at the front of the room and doing my best to copy what I saw: snaggly sets of pharyngeal jaws deep inside throats, longitudinal blocks of red muscle, facial canals laced with electromagnetic receptors. It was my first introduction to taxonomy—the discipline of defining and dividing groups of living things based on physical features. Odd and wondrous bodily diversity bloomed across my pages. My own flat molars and dull senses seemed boring in comparison.
But I also began to apprehend our similarities, bone-deep. Kingdom: animalia; phylum: chordata. In my notebook, I sketched structures that could have been human if I weren’t carving them into fish-shaped spaces. Cranial cavities, spines threaded through with nerves, eyes to see, hearts to pump. In that classroom, I saw that the clothes tree of life is draped heavily with shared and overlapping fabrics, traits that fold distant relatives together.
. . .
Getting naked didn’t always burn. It used to be easy. Summers in my late teens, living at a national seashore, I’d join the other counselors in the woods on weekend nights after campers had left. We’d peel away our clothes and go wandering in the salt fog, under the buckeyes. Nettle would brush our ankles and mud would cool the sting. Young women, all of us, we were still learning our curves. We walked one after another along thin trails. Pennyroyal and ceanothus blooms spiced the night air. Grasses slipped like silk against dark hips. Starlight caught our clavicles, the knot of fur where our legs met. Our nudity was uncomplicated and sensuous.
At what point, in the years that came after, did nakedness get difficult? Maybe the aversion was physical, first: letting a new man look at my body after I left an engagement. The kissing was easy, eyes closed, brick wall rough against nape, cigarette smoke pluming through New York’s winter air. The seeing was harder. I wondered if my body, if seen too clearly, could ever be loved again: its small constellations of moles, its green-veined mapwork. I dreaded it couldn’t be. Or maybe it was another species of nakedness altogether that got me edgy—the kind that necessitates opening like a book, showing what’s written inside. Losses shelved like onionskins—unfaithful fiancé, unloving kisses from uncaring lovers, unbreathing dad gone lifeless in the cool drift of kelp a hundred feet below the surface. I didn’t like talking about it. I tucked my tender self where it couldn’t be touched—not all at once, but in pieces, like turtling deep under a wooly collar, like gloving up—one hand, the next—to keep stiff fingers warm. At what point did I lose the shape of myself, beneath my baggy histories?
. . .
Taxonomy is the science of naming, and also the science of separating. All that semester in my ichthyology class, I circled the systematics of identity. What makes a fish a fish and not a human? Beyond muscle and rib, what differences make an animal one thing and not another? In order to arrive at the essence of “fish,” we needed to winnow away the shared things. Fish have scales, sure, but so do reptiles. Fish have a beating heart, yeah, but so do we. Taxonomically, a thing is identified by its unshared characteristics—the traits that it possesses that nothing else does, or at least in combinations that other animals don’t share. Like us, a fish has a brain housed in a protective skull. But unlike us, cool blood circulates through its muscles, matching the temperature of the water around it. Instead of legs, a fish’s limbs are shaped like fins, either embedded with dense bone or fanned through with delicate rays. These aren’t attached to the rest of its skeleton but instead they connect by muscle to the body of the animal, each a free-floating bony inflorescence like a corsage clipped to the outside of a garment. A fish gulps water through its mouth and funnels it through its pharynx and out through a series of fringy gills. Blood passing through tiny capillaries in the gills absorbs oxygen from the current and flushes the fish’s body with red and pulsing life. Just as a mammal is known by its warmth, its milk, its hair, its lungs, a fish is known by its cool blood, its gills, its limbs in the form of flowery fins. Each of these identifiers, I drew in my notebook. It was tidy and pleasant and mathematical, to lay life out like this: black gill filaments in a flat white sea.
. . .
My mother and I strip away our towels and wade, steaming, into the hot springs. Mist lifts and settles on us in warm beads. We set ourselves on the stony benches, arms floating, breasts rising underwater. Her body is thinner than mine, and silverer in the places where hair lifts like kelp in the sloshing pool. I can see my body in hers, though. Torso long like a tree, veins stitched across belly like a diaphanous green net. Our bodies bend, too, under the same weights. One loved one drowned, another one trapped inside an addiction that leaves us wondering each morning if today will be the day that his neighbors find his body, alone and cool to the touch, in the duplex where he lives. Father, husband, brother, son. Our robes are woven out of the same heavy material.
Though my skin touches hers sometimes when the water rocks us, I know that we aren’t fully naked. What would it take to strip away the leaden layers? Sometimes we shout at one another. Sometimes we call each other names, and sometimes we cry, and sometimes we read stories aloud to one another like girls in a blanket fort. “I’m sorry,” I tell her today, and, “I love you.”
Beyond us, in the river below the hot springs, fat catfish gather in the warm outflow. Their whiskers waft backward in the current; their bodies slide against each other.
. . .
Taxonomically, fish are tricky. There are basic things that make a fish fishy, but those can be peeled away. One by one, the identifiers that I illustrated so cleanly in my notebook proved fallible. Not all fish live in water. Mudskippers with their sky-blue freckles and their froggy eyes and their long elbowed fins only duck underwater occasionally to moisten their gills. They spend the rest of their lives on land. They can drown if submerged for too long. They waddle across mudflats like pudgy little salamanders and climb trees and don’t worry too much about taxonomic propriety. Not all fish have scales. Some are gelatinous and smooth. Tiny tidepool sculpins—with bodies the color of barnacle, of mud, of mottled stone—move through the world with no armor. Their skin is slippery and naked against the edges of the world. Some fish breathe air. Since the Triassic, lungfish have slid through swampy shallows and small creeks, rising to the surface to pull air into their lungs. If their home dries out, they’ll burrow into the mud, leaving a hole for air to enter. Tail over head, they’ll wait out the drought, sometimes for years. Some fish have warm blood instead of cold. The opah, with golden eyes and a body flat and round as the moon, flaps its fins to keep warm. It is endothermic—heated from within—and though it swims in deep cold currents, its body stays warmer than the dark water around it.
So many essential things can be stripped away and a fish still remains, more or less, a fish. Despite the exceptions and anomalies, I suppose at the end of that semester we must have arrived at some overarching definition for “fish.” I do not recall what it was.
. . .
I have tried, of late, to get naked more often, and more bravely. I burn away my hair. I dance on Go-Go boxes, where older women tuck wet bills into my boots. I let reality TV producers fly me to LA, where they try to convince me to spend twenty days in the wilderness without clothes.
I’m not sure what I’m stripping toward. I’m don’t know what, or whom, I’ll find beneath all the layers. I’m as untidy and mismatched as a sock drawer. Sometimes I plant heirloom seeds and sometimes I eat Cheez-Its for breakfast. I go walking in the woods and look for mushrooms to identify, I walk on stilts at music festivals, I shop for extravagantly sequined dresses at thrift stores, I hike into the desert alone at night so that I can sleep under a quiet sky.
I sit on café patios, where I slip crumbs to birds and watch them flit and fluff themselves. Sometimes I wonder if I like them more than I like people. I cheated on a boyfriend once and, to be honest, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was going to tell him the truth about it. I believe in love.
Sometimes I go for weeks without thinking about my father. Sometimes—when I see a train rainbowed with graffiti, or a chipmunk that he surely would have tried to feed—I crumple with the memory of him and, even years later, it’s all I can do not to lie down in a soggy heap, right there out in the open. I’m not sure what it all adds up to. Of course I—don’t we all?—contain Whitmanian multitudes. I peel them away like coats and wonder what it means to be naked. If I shed some vital layer, who might I lose? Who might I become? These aren’t new questions, and I’m bored by the old answers—Descartes was a loser, and I have a feeling that physicality cuts closer to the matter of identity than philosophy ever did.
Thinking too hard scatters true things away toward deeper water. I soften my gaze, imagine layers of muscle and bone drawn on a clean white page. Where, between jaw and spine, hair and fingerpad, are the lines that make me identifiable? The taxonomy of identity is as refractive and hypnotic as a fish in motion.
. . .
In the evolutionary story of fish, a transitional fossil is one that has defining traits of both an ancestral group and the group that follows it on the tree of life. Consider fish and the four-legged amphibians that descended from them nearly four hundred million years ago. There wasn’t a clean divide: a fully-formed tetrapod hatching out of a fish’s egg. Instead, evolution zigzagged and inched toward newness. There were in-between creatures that bridged the gap. Tiktaalik, Neil Shubin’s arctic “fishapod,” is one of those transitional fossils. It is a fish, kind of, with scales and gills, but—like a tetrapod, it has a flattened crocodilian head and sturdy bones for walking rather than swimming. Strip down its characteristics, one after the other, and still at the center of that long-ago animal there’s no tidy identifying feature that would allow paleontologists to place it in one taxonomic clade or another.
The fact of the matter is, fish don’t fall into their own separate taxonomic clade at all. We thought they did. We called them Pisces. And then the fossils began to reveal a trickier story. If the tree of life really were like a tree, then a clade would be like a flower, a complex one that blooms open into a thousand little starburst buds. The clade, like a flower, shares a common stalk—a common ancestor—and the compound blooms that divide up out of it are the descendants of that ancestor. Each clade: a separate stalk with its own many-branched umbels. Fish all share a common ancestor, but from fish arose reptiles, mammals, birds, amphibians. We’re all part of the same clade, the same flower. And the lines between us are not crisp. Transitional fossils help remind us of this: of the in-between places. They help remind us that the divisions we’ve imposed are arbitrary, that we all belong somewhere on a family chart that looks less like a chart at all and more like a continuum of variation. We are not an “either” or an “or.” At our most naked, we sizzle with connectivity.
. . .
In a music venue on the west edge of downtown Tucson, I sometimes take my clothes off. It goes like this:
The stage stays empty as the low electric guitar opening of Gin Wigmore’s “Kill of the Night” thumps from the speakers, loud and scratchy. I give it a few measures, letting the anticipation ripen, and then I sidle from the wings, head tucked down, leading with my glittery boots. I am dressed like a big-bosomed shark. I wear a fleece onesie—a pajama suit, essentially—with a toothy hood and gray fins. I stroke my hind fin, mosey to the front of the stage, and make a show of peeling off one fleece sleeve and then the other, whirling each before tossing them behind myself onstage.
The danger is, I’m dangerous, and I might just tear you apart, Wigmore croons, and the guitar breaks into a quick pulsing riff. I tug at my shark zipper, inching it open from the neck with a look of exaggerated pleasure on my face. Maybe the audience hopes for cleavage—dollars fly—but instead, I pull an enormous stuffed goldfish from its hiding place between my breasts. The front row goes wild as I swing the fish high for all to see, lick it suggestively from tail to snout, then give it an abrupt shake with my mouth and discard it.
It’s a new discovery—the playful nakedness of burlesque performance, this glittering giddy irreverence. As my sequined layers fall away, I feel like I’m accessing some younger version of myself: a girl who loved theater, a girl who wrote stories, a girl who learned clowning and costuming at summer circus camp. Joy sizzles up, right near the center of myself. But a boyfriend looks at the pictures from my latest show. “Can’t you be classy?” he asks, and the joy gutters. “It’s vulgar. I want the outdoorsy Hannah back.”
But maybe I am Tiktaalik. Maybe I’m neither what the boyfriend thinks I’ve become, nor who I used to be. Maybe I’m both. The boyfriend leaves me. I stay onstage, hunting that elusive sizzle. I strip and strip and strip.
. . .
Strip away every layer of a fish and inside you’ll find, scooped below the spine, a balloon-like organ. Shaped like two sacs, it fills with gas through a spongey gland nestled above the vital organs. Woven from tightly twined fine veins, a rete mirabile—a wondrous net—feeds oxygen into the swim bladder and absorbs it back out, according to how buoyant the fish wishes to be. The swim bladder lets a fish balance in the water—keeps it from sinking too deep or rising too high. It’s a stabilizing organ.
But a swim bladder can also make a fish vulnerable. Say a fish rises too quickly in the water—pulled up in a net or on a line, dragged up out of a lightless deep current and into some other world altogether—the change in pressure might kill it outright. Expanded bladder, popped like a too-full balloon. Pink tissue, taut and sticky, pressing against spine and kidney, pushing up out of the throat like a birth gone wrong.
Mostly, though, swim bladders are evolutionary wonders. Without them, fish likely wouldn’t be so diverse—making up more than half of all known vertebrate species. Swim bladders allowed fish to take new territory—allowed them to regulate where they could lurk and where they could float. They diversified into far-flung habitats because of their ability to sink and rise.
Because of swim bladders, fish are multitudinous, cosmopolitan, complex.
Because of swim bladders, fish are buoyant.
. . .
What small and irreducible core will remain of me when everything else is finally stripped away? A wrinkled little self—volatile, vulgar? A lost child, thrashing from one chaotic choice to the next? My naked teenage self in the woods, toes in the cool mud, feeling for the trail? A bright orb of pain, throbbing with loss?
Together, a friend and I fill my bathtub with warm water and, as it fills, we toss flowers across the surface. Long lilies. Fat sunflowers. Baby’s breath, diffuse and papery. The water pools in the black centers of the sunflowers and carries torn petals eddying along the edges of the tub.
We step into the rising water. We lean back together: heel against ceramic, thigh against thigh. Wet blooms knock and drift against our legs. The air is filled with the spice of eucalyptus and the soggy sweetness of warm flowers. Our clothes cling, and so we pull them away. Our tops peel back like skin. We rise and step out of our underwear.
As we sink back into the bath, ragged flowers roll across our bellies. Petals hug our breasts. We sit up and lean toward each other. She pulls me closer. Her breath is humid, and her lips against mine are as wet and naked as carnations. Her body and mine are warm and downy, curve sliding against mammal curve. We kiss, and our fingerprints press into one another’s naked skin, little stamps on a letter still being written. It is new, and vulnerable, and joyful. Absent is the terror of being seen; absent is any kind of judgement toward what I’ve been, what I am. She grips my wet hair; I let my nakedness soften me. I’ve never loved another woman—someone so much like me: brown fur, hips soft as animals. Looking at her body is like looking at my own, and my gaze gentles. There’s weightlessness to it, this shared bareness. If hurt and guilt and ambivalence are flowers, they are absent from this current we’ve drawn around ourselves today.
It’s just us, plucked clean from the tangled branch that grew us. It’s just tenderness, just lift. How silly to think the measurable body held answers. Beneath my twenty-four ribs, beneath warm sternum, is something else entirely, undiagrammable. It tugs toward joy. All along under the layers was some ballooning buoyant organ tucked there right at the center, against the spine. Together, among the shed petals, we float.
