As Yet, Untitled: Mermaid, Part 1

-Fiction-

Wednesday morning, I found someone in my pool.

The water had been untreated for about a month, since Jessicka had last been there, and was a milky blue-green haze as a result. Somewhere deep inside I thought that maybe if I just never erased her from my backyard, it would be like she hadn’t really left me. I’m a sucker like that. The housewarming party had been fun, largely because I had no idea a breakup was in my immediate future. For the month since that weekend I’d been doing nothing but working and coming home alone to wallow. In the middle of my off week, as I came outside in the morning to watch the sun rise over the ocean, I caught a dark flutter under the murky blue.

I’d immediately thought it was a fish; a huge, huge fish. Somehow, could a monstrous sea bass have made it to my pool? The ocean was in view of the yard, but not so close that a sea creature could flop all the way up the beach and over the rocky escarpment to my home. A joke, I’d thought venomously then. Gil, that nutbar. Him and his fish jokes…

Gil didn’t have fish jokes, though. Jokes, sure, but fish jokes, from a guy named Gil? Come on. I also couldn’t imagine him going to the trouble of transporting a live animal of this size. The size was in fact making me a bit nervous; I lost sight of it every now and again as it would reach the end of the pool and double back, but it seemed to be at least five feet long. I watched with a morbid fascination as it came back to my end and rose to the surface.

To my shock, instead of a grotesquely large fish, a pair of odd-coloured eyes greeted me from a very human face. It was a pleasant surprise, but I staggered back anyway, because who knows what kind of nutcase wants to swim in a stranger’s algae-infested pool.

“Hey,” I managed, when I realized that I’d have to say something. I tried it again with some authority. “Hey, what are you doing here?”

The eyes – one brown, one green – hovered just above the wall for a moment, so all I could see was the top of their head. Then it bobbed up further, and I blinked. It was a girl – a woman, I guess – and she was beautiful, in a weird way. Her hair was brown, dark and light and in between, long and tangled. Her skin was clear and unnaturally fair, almost translucent. All in all, this was a much prettier fish than I was expecting.

“Y-you know you’re trespassing?” I attempted.

The girl tilted her head almost comically. She started to say something, and I guess thought better of it; all that came out of her mouth was a puff of air.

Beautiful or not, I thought I should probably lay down the law. The idea that a lot of porn starts out this way hadn’t even crossed my mind.

“Uh, you have to go,” I said lamely.

Her brow did furrow in confusion, and I thought here is another air-head girl who expects her good looks to get her whatever she wants. After Jessicka, I was through with pouting debutants. I stepped forward to punctuate my next statement with my imposing 6’, 135lb stature (a joke). “Get out of here-”I started.

She pushed off the wall and coasted backwards away from me. I stopped when I saw the rest of her form under the water; I couldn’t have spoken with my jaw on the floor anyway.

She was fish from the waist down, shining silver scales and a wide, graceful tail fin. I tried to rationalize it as a costume and couldn’t. That tail was alive, flexing like a living thing, and she was swimming as freely as sea creature in my pool.

-end excerpt-

Annick Sever
Copyright 2009