I want the Family to know about this. I didn’t tell anyone my whole life for fear of finally being caught, but it seems as though I never will be caught; now that I have my life, grasped in one tight fist, it is time to help others take hold of their own lives. Pay careful attention—I will liberate you from the great and heavy chains of your bodies, and I will give you such lightness of spirit that you need never walk the earth like those other mud-people again. 

You will need several things to succeed as I have: the first is a body of water. It may be a creek; it may be a stream; it may be a puddle reflecting the glow of traffic lights; it may be a brackish canal; but if you can, make it an ocean, for the ocean yields the best results and the most total erasure of your old self. 

The second thing you will need is a sacrifice. 

Mine was a young man, about as old as I was; and reader, do not feel bad for him. He was obnoxious, and his service to my becoming gave him far more grace than he would have found otherwise. 

For all his faults, though, he was handsome. He had cool blue eyes and dark, curly hair, which he let run long around his broad shoulders. He had a flat chest and narrow hips, large hands, and dark hair running down his arms and his legs. When I saw him for the first time, I had stared, unable to look away from his long fingers and his stubble and his easy, unburdened gait. Of course, he opened his mouth, and my opinion of him soured, but sometimes in school I would stare at him when I knew he could not see me with a hunger that I didn’t understand. 

But by the time I led him onto that darkened beach I understood. I understood, and I would have done anything to sate it, and to this day I cannot quite bring myself to regret his obliteration, just as I cannot bring myself to regret snapping off the arms of the stone crabs I caught with my older brother or flaying the fish I catch. And you, reader, will not regret it either, if you decide to follow these directions. 

The third thing you will need is a weapon. I have preferred knives, always. When I lured that young man to the beach at midnight I brought the deboning knife I’d used on a snapper just a few days earlier. I kept it, in its white plastic sheath, tucked down my bra, so that I could feel my heart beat against it. 

Your sacrifice will need to be in the water for the ritual to work. I wandered into the sea and asked him to follow me; but it is just as pertinent, in some cases, to push them in. And you must be in the water too. 

It helps to slick your weapon with the water, before you kill your sacrifice, but it is not necessary. I let my blade taste the salt sea, and then I let it taste flesh. 

I was expecting him to struggle more, but it’s as if he knew what I was doing, and had already agreed to it; he issued a soft little sigh, and staggered back, alarmed. He held his hands up palms-out when I came at him again, as if in peace. My knife went straight through one of those palms, and he staggered again, trying to get out of the water, but the waves were like grasping hands against his legs, and he fell backwards into the surf. I fell, too, forward and on top of him, pressing him against the silt which gave way ever so slightly with each wave, and only then did he begin to thrash, a sort of instinctual movement but half-hearted in its own way, and I leaned forward, wrapping my legs around his waist, and plunged my knife into his chest, and he could not even scream, for the water had covered his mouth as gently as a pillow, and I gripped him tight while he died, looking all at once sad and frightened and accepting, as though he had seen from the moment of his birth what his end would be. 

The next thing you will need is to whisper your summons to the Flesh-Sculptor, the Mother-Father Ocean, the Primordial Drink; you will need to say: 

[here, the document is too stained by salt water to be legible.]

—and it will come to you, wherever you are, glorious and terrible, a seething mass of every ruinous part of every animal on Earth, all pincers and muscly scaled hide and slick suction-cupped tentacles and grasping hands and biting mouths and it will bring you into its belly, you and the corpse you hold, and you will melt a thousand times over in its stomach acid, screaming, not in pain, but in joy so primal it will put all other emotion to shame. And then your work can truly begin, for you will hear the great beast’s voice and it will give the only command that will ever matter: 

TAKE.

I took. I took from him. I left behind my narrow shoulders and stole his wide ones, shed my wide hips which had always felt so uncomfortable, my breasts, my soft jaw; I took his strong arms and his dark body hair and his flat chest and his stubble and his dick, and I took his hands and his Adam’s Apple and the veins on his arms and his narrow hips and his deep voice, and I took his name, for I thought it would better suit me than the one I had been given at birth. 

I kept a few things of my own—why should I only get what he had? Why should I not have everything I wanted? I kept my red shock of hair and my long eyelashes and one of my brown eyes, and I kept my long nose and my sharp canine teeth and my height. I kept my freckles and my earrings and my knife. And I liked it. I wanted it. I wanted it more than anything. 

The last thing you will need is a way out. 

It need not be the same item for everyone. But it must be something to guide you back to yourself, unless you want to stay with the Primordial, and dissolve again, and change again, over and over until you become just another grasping pair of hands which it uses to consume other supplicants. If you want oblivion, or monstrosity, that badly, I will not stop you; but, assuming you want to come back to your life, and continue on as before unencumbered, you must bring a bridge. 

I brought a piece of paper with me. I hid it in my mouth, cradling it between my teeth while I killed my classmate, soaking it in the bile of the Primordial as I was dissolved. But as I rebuilt myself, nearly overcome with the ecstasies of the change, I felt the soft pressure of it against my teeth and I remembered. And as I remembered, the Primordial dissolved around me, leaving me naked on all fours in the shallows of the Gulf of Mexico, panting and raw and alive. I spat the paper out into the ocean. A fair amount of blood went with it, though not, I believe, mine. 

The page was ruined by then, but I of course remember the text it bore: 

WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, I HAD DREAMS OF SUICIDE, 

AND I STOOD AT A STEEP WINDOW, AT SUNSET, HOPING TOWARD DEATH:

IF THE LIGHT HAD NOT MELTED CLOUDS AND PLAINS TO BEAUTY, 

IF LIGHT HAD NOT TRANSFORMED THAT DAY, I WOULD HAVE LEAPT

I went home; all had been repaired. Nobody remembered the young man I killed, and nobody remembered the strange girl whom I had replaced. The effect is total, and just as I desired. And it will be for you, too. Do not give up hope, cousin, or child, or sister, or brother. You can have what you want. 

All you must do is reach out and take it.