She was found sprawled on the sidewalk like a remnant of the sea spat out by a wave.
Preserved in salt to taste, her matte skin crystallized, and her opaque eyes stared at the sky in the direction of the dwarf planet Ceres, home to Ahuna Mons, a salty cryovolcano.

Her soul rose to the summit; from there, 257 million kilometers away from Earth, her fallen body was collected by the fishmonger.

Placed inside a cooler, swaying in the trunk, among cans of beer and soda, her destiny was to cross the Rio–Niterói Bridge without decomposing. But time can be a fast solvent when one is trapped in traffic, incarcerated, navigating the asphalt above sea level. In this tropic, January is the season of heat, yet the saline ice remained half-melted, resisting the high temperatures.

Gloves are required to hang each leg on a hook in the fish shop’s display.
Suspended in the air like a salt ghost escaping the haste of the fillet maker, she was purchased.

— Wrap the whole piece, please.

Each fold took care to guard her silhouette, laid upon the counter like a reliquary. Her mineral body, illuminated by rays of sunlight passing through the pores of the cellulose, impressed itself upon the surface and imprinted its shadow onto the fibers of the paper.

A gentle burn revealed the final trace of her image.

Cured, dressed in a new skin, the woman-fish captured light, for she refused inexistence.

They say that all who look upon her image shed a tear—saline water that preserves her apparition.

But time can also be a slow solvent, and the same daylight that reveals also lightens and fades the tone of her shading.

Her saline print does not fix the image: it veils it. It is a ritual of loss, of the disappearance of a pale paper-skinned woman who was once water.

At times, I think the woman-fish never existed. Yet perhaps every image is, like her, a body in a state of preservation—an attempt to halt exposure to time, resisting as long as there is someone to see it.

Her embalmed cellulose epidermis, sensitive to light, is a spectral writing—at once veiling and trace, death and insistence. An image that refuses to disappear.

A hybrid archive: organic and imagistic being, exposed flesh, suspended and stored in shadow. The counter-image retained in the penumbra of an alchemical body—cured, veiled, and preserved—that longs to remain.