The ice sculpture was melting. Hardly a notable occurrence, seeing as it was the hottest summer on record and the museum air conditioning kept cutting out.

But here’s the thing. Two things, actually. One, only the eyes seemed to be melting and two, no one knew where the ice sculpture came from.

We spent hours trying to figure it out, contacting every catering company in the city to see if they had maybe delivered to the wrong address and there was some banquet somewhere missing its shimmering glacial centerpiece. No dice, and twin rivers of tears continued to flow down the impossibly lifelike, serene face of the man in the toga.

… was he a man?

I stepped closer, feeling the cool air radiating off of the sculpture. We’d been using he/him pronouns because of the sharp angles on the jawline and the extraordinarily defined muscles, so realistic that I convinced myself I could see the veins straining as the figure held the heavy jug. Aquarius, we figured, mythical son of Prometheus.

But where the toga fell away from the chest, and I swore the folds hadn’t been arranged like that when I first looked hours ago, the ice rounded in a gentle dome shape like a breast on a marble statue. And the fingers, the way they delicately curled around the handle, they reminded me of my own. Too thin, too dainty.

In places, where the surface of the ice was impossibly smooth and glassy, I could see myself in the crying sculpture with the ambiguous gender.

*     *     *
I don’t know exactly when we realized the sculpture wasn’t melting right. Probably long before anyone mentioned it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to be the first person to point out that, despite gallons of water having accumulated at the figure’s feet, the actual shape of the ice hadn’t changed one bit.

We could notice it, we could worry about it in the backs of our minds, but as long as we didn’t acknowledge it, as long as we didn’t say there was a problem, we could keep pretending everything was fine.

We could. I knew we could, because I’d spent my whole life doing just that.

The rest of the staff found the whole situation amusing, started posting about the mystery ice sculpture on the museum’s social media pages. People called the story fake, because the volume of the water cascading from their face had already exceeded the entire volume of water necessary to make a sculpture that size.

Gotta love the Internet. It’s easier to talk about the truth when you’re hiding behind a screen name.

We finally acknowledged it with a long silence followed by a collective “Well, shit.” And then another long silence for good measure.

“He’s not made of ice,” one of the archivists declared, her face betraying the confidence of her voice. “He’s glass, chilled somehow, and there’s…” She uncrossed her arms to gesture vaguely at the sculpture, like trying to wave away an insect. “There’s pipes under the floor or something, going up through him to make him cry.”

My body gave an involuntary shudder each time she referred to them as he or him. I glanced at the sculpture, at the rivulets tracing down their cheeks faster than ever.

“There’s no pipes in the floor,” the head of maintenance pointed out. “And isn’t it a girl, anyway? It’s got boobs.”

Tears pricked at my own eyes, unbidden by any particular emotion. At least, any I was willing to acknowledge. Maybe it was easier to react to the misgendering of a block of ice than myself.

“Anyone check the security feed? I don’t understand how they snuck him in.”

“Them,” I said quietly, but with a rage that rumbled like an iceberg breaking off and falling into the sea.

In the silence that followed, I felt the eyes on me. Everyone staring. Scrutinizing.

I looked to the sculpture as if for confirmation; I could have sworn they had raised their head to look at me. “They aren’t a man or a woman.” I paused, debating. “And … and neither am I.”

For a second, just a second, the tears of the person made of ice slowed to a mere trickle. Then the archivist opened her mouth again.

“Oh please. I’ve borrowed pads from you, you’re as much of a woman as I am.”

Usually, I could let comments like that roll off my back. At least until the end of the day, when my pillow could muffle the sound and catch the moisture of my tears. But something changed that day. Maybe I had just had enough, or maybe it was the person in the ice. All I know is I balled my hands up at my sides, took a deep breath as water flooded over my shoes, and informed them, “I’m not a woman.”

*     *     *
The news of the glaciers breaking off and melting at unprecedented rates hardly registered as anything more than background noise after my announcement, after all the people I thought I knew and trusted proceeded to laugh at me, to tell me how genders worked and that I just wanted attention.

“We have more important things to worry about right now,” I said, abandoning the pretext of mopping up the water with a towel. “The building is going to flood at this point.”

“Checked the schematics,” the maintenance man said, surreptitiously sneaking glances at my body as if checking for something, some obvious sign of my gender. “Aquarius here is situated over–”

“Shouldn’t it be Aquaria?” someone interrupted. “That’s the female suffix.”

Oh for the love of androgyny. I put my hands on either side of my head and squeezed. Really? They really had to nitpick what to call them? And they say we care too much about pronouns …

I looked for someone, anyone, to share a reassuring glance with, to tell me I wasn’t wrong to be bothered about this. I found only the sculpture, and this time I knew they had turned to look at me but no one else saw it, no one else saw the desperation and pain in their hollow, weeping eyes.

“Aquarium,” I said quietly. “That’s the gender neutral version.”

The corners of their mouth quirked upward, and for a moment I thought my veins had turned to ice.

“What are you?” I asked, my cautious footsteps creating ripples as I walked closer to them.

Around us, people still argued about what to call them, about checking the security feed, about calling the city to shut off the water mains that were clearly supplying Aquarium’s tears. Around us, the museum was as hot and chaotic as the rest of the world.

But there, in the impossibly cool air radiating around the impossible crying ice person, all was calm and quiet. Quiet enough that I should have been able to hear the ice breaking and creaking as they turned their head, as they took one hand off the jug. But there was no sound to their movement, no cracks appeared in the flawless exterior. They moved with the shimmering ease of water dancing over river rocks.

“What are you?” I asked again, although even now, I don’t know if there’s really an answer to that question. At least not one humans can properly comprehend.

They looked at me, with empty eyes carved from liquid ice, with rage and desperation and hope and plans. They extended their hand as if in offering.

I took it. So I guess everything that has happened since, I guess that’s all because of me.

*     *     *
My skin on their hand felt like an insect balancing delicately on little more than surface tension and faith. But in that contact, I was connected to something bigger, something primordial. Vengeful, even, but not altogether evil.

I saw people like me, forced into invisibility or shoved into the spotlight of impromptu comedy clubs. Prosecuted for crimes because of cis demeanors. Tortured, discriminated, murdered.

“What does that have to do with you?” I asked, but the water was up to my ankles now and people were noticing.

“Save the artifacts!” someone shouted, inciting a chaotic scramble to determine which items were most valuable and susceptible to water damage. Not that it would matter soon.

I saw flooding. Worldwide, biblical scale stuff. I saw a tidal wave about to consume an island country made of concentric circles. But before I could possibly begin to make a connection between these visions, a stone tablet was shoved into my arms, breaking the connection between me and Aquarium.

The rest of the staff’s frantic chatter became white noise, but one shouted order cut through the rest, loud and clear and alarming as an air raid siren.

“If we can’t find the source of the water in the rest of the building, smash the damn statue, see what’s under him!”

Panic surged through me. If I knew then what would come from allying with the crying ice person, would I have felt relieved at the idea of destroying them? Would it have made any difference? I don’t know, and I don’t really care. It happened, for better or worse, it happened.

“Run,” I said, because some sort of water deity had entered my life and they were a they like me and that was all that mattered.

For a second, the tears stopped flowing, just froze in place like icicles. Then the person–god, being, whatever–shattered into a fine mist and became part of the flood.

*     *     *
Cars floated down the street like boats in a river. I didn’t dare open the front door, the deluge nearing the top of our stairs and wheelchair ramp.

Torrential rainstorms from higher elevations in the area, the weather reports would say, because they couldn’t admit they didn’t know. Closer to the coast, the blame would be on the melting ice caps, rapidly rising sea levels.

I stared for a moment, we all did, and then I ran for the roof. Like there was anywhere to go once I got there. Like there was ever anywhere to go.

I wasn’t the only one on the roof, but I was still by myself, looking down at the city below going the way of Atlantis, counting disappearing windows and wondering how many stories to go until the end.

I still held the stone tablet.

I couldn’t read ancient Greek, but I had given the story to enough tour groups to appreciate the irony.

It was the story of Deucalion, son of Prometheus, one of only two survivors of the great flood that ended the first bronze age. A cleansing flood, supposedly.

“This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen anymore,” I whispered to the water as it began to lap over the ledge of the roof. “We’ve done so much. Computers, medicine, music. You can’t just erase us.”

The water at my feet formed the shape of a hand, raising up, beckoning me. And part of me wanted to go. Not because staying there was so bad, although I had felt like I’d been drowning ever since puberty. This wasn’t running away, I tried to convince myself, it was running toward something.

I just didn’t know what.

I took their hand.

*     *     *
In the Greek myth, it rained for nine days. This time around, I’m not sure. I think I melted, became indistinguishable from my tears and all the tears shed in the name of gender dysphoria, and I lost track of time.

“If this is some Kevin Costner Waterworld bullshit …” I said as I came to on a tiny island of a mountaintop, but the flood had washed the rage from my words.

Aquarium stood before me. Aquarius. Aquaria. All of them, none of them, constantly shifting through the spectrum of genders and into ultraviolet and infrared genders the human mind could only imagine. I tried very hard not to make a joke about them being genderfluid.

“Why?” I demanded instead, gesturing at the endless blue with the tablet I still held. The loss was so great, it hadn’t sunk in. Maybe it never would. Maybe I would go on forever, being mildly irritated at the loss of everything and everyone I had ever known, ever would have known, never would have had the chance to know, because it was just too much to fathom.

When they didn’t answer, I elaborated. “You killed everyone on earth. Destroyed everything. What, to punish us? To mark the end of another age of man? Who gave you the right?” I could hear my voice growing more shrill. “And why would you save me of all people?” I asked, putting my hand to my chest.

My flat chest.

Aquarium smiled. I forgot how to breathe for a second.

I rushed to the water’s edge, looked at my reflection and saw myself staring back for the first time. Not the soft, round face that broadcasted femininity no matter how I tried to hide it, and not the angular face of masculinity that scared me away from considering testosterone. The best parts of both, to go with my flat chest and my uterus and my hair that was… I pulled it in front of me to look. Blue. All right. Yeah, blue hair. Would have preferred purple, but…

My hair was purple.

I looked up at Aquaria/ius/ium. “Does the rest of it work like the hair?”

They gave a slow nod.

For an extremely selfish second, everything felt okay, my body in balance with my mind. “It’s still not right. We don’t even believe in you anymore! How can you just … just come into our lives and decide we are doing something wrong and … and destroy everything!”

In my frustration, I flung the stone tablet as far as I could. It landed with a distant splash and began to sink.

The smile became a smirk and I realized what I had done.

*     *     *
When it fell on Deucalion and his wife Pyrrah to repopulate the world, they were told to throw their mothers’ bones into the water. Their mothers’ bones, presumably, having been submerged somewhere under the worldwide ocean, this perplexed them until they realized it referred to the bones of Mother Earth: rocks.

Stones.

The stones thrown by Deucalion became men. The stones thrown by Pyrrah, women.

And I had just thrown a stone.

For the first time, the being I had met as a crying ice sculpture spoke. “It didn’t have to be you any more than it had to be them last time. It just had to be someone. One person, this time, not limited by gender. You can make men, women, both, neither, other genders entirely. This time, from the beginning, openly and without pain, the perfect body for every person who will ever be born.”

“I don’t want to be the parent of the entire human race,” I said after a long moment, tears tracing salty tracks down my cheeks. “I don’t want a new world, no matter how good gender euphoria feels. It’s not worth everyone we lost, all the good people. I want them back.”

With the ease of water moving downhill, they came to my side, took my hand. The way they looked at me, I wondered if they could see themself reflected in me.

This touch did not bring me microaggressions and systemic transphobia, nor did it give me visions of the final days of Atlantis. Rather, it gave me knowledge that I don’t think they could explain any more than I could understand with words.

They had found a better way, in the millennia since the last flood. These were cleansing waters, indeed, but not cleansing the earth of humanity. Cleansing humanity of pain.

I saw the waters recede, leaving everything dry and alive and oblivious, everyone in a body that had the parts and the hormones and the pronouns that would make their soul sing. And nothing fixed, everything fluid, adjusting and changing as needed.

“No one will know.”

“No one will know,” they confirmed.

“They won’t remember, they won’t–”

“Only in myths will there be a time when mankind pretended to have two genders. Cautionary tales about the lies we tell ourselves.”

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t want this responsibility.”

But they were gone, evaporated in the heat of a warm summer morning and leaving me alone on an island that was slowly becoming a mountain once more.