Outside, Dreaming In

Mermaid, Part 2

2009-04-28T00:56:00.006-04:00

-fiction-

The first thing I did after my discovery was to go back inside and make myself a pot of coffee. I told myself to drink at least half of it before I tried again, because surely I’d made some kind of mistake. With my thoughts out of order, I found myself wondering what her skeleton looked like under her flesh. It was actually pretty easy to imagine.

A while later, I got up from my breakfast nook and wandered back out there, meandering and wasting time like I really had somewhere else to be that day. She was under the water again when I arrived, and I watched with interest as she made laps of the pool, rarely surfacing and always staring at me when she did. As if I was the intruder. I must have stood there like a dumbfounded ox for half an hour. She stayed away from my end initially (maybe my stature really did intimidate her); after some time she ventured closer.

“So,” I started in the hopes of making conversation, “what’s your name?”

She tilted her head again in that curious and blank way of hers. I wondered if she was even hearing me; she made no move to answer. Maybe we don’t speak the same language, I thought.

“I’m Dante,” I continued, and received the same stare.

Standing there alone, gazing at a mythical creature in my backyard, I began to feel somewhat lightheaded. Maybe it was because I was blinking less than usual. Maybe too it was time I called someone who knew something about mermaids.

Gil was a guy, my best friend, who probably would put a fish in my pool to cheer me up. It’s the odd kind of practical joke that a screenwriter would perpetrate (odd in the sense that it probably wouldn’t cheer anyone up); he wrote scripts about all sorts of things, most recently a sea-faring pirate film involving mermaids, in a loose sense. Although he did it to cash in on the recent Disney pirates craze, and therefore needed to keep things easy to understand and cliché enough to interest Disney fans, he always does extensive – adequate, at least – research on the subjects he writes about. I doubted his script was in development now, but I was sure he’d know a thing or two about mermaids.

I phoned him from the kitchen, looking over the pool with the wary eye of a man who might be insane, and who knows it well. Gil lived in the same area as me, a hillside smattering of houses overlooking a cozy ocean cove in Northern California. His house was further from the water than mine, but I could sort of see him from my back yard, if l leaned past the overhang and used binoculars. We were a bit isolated in this community; there were no close neighbours. Gil and I, we were close; but physically, in the real world, he was at least half a mile away.

“Dante,” he said in way of hello.

“Gil,” I replied. “I have to talk to you about something.”

“Shoot, my friend.”

“About mermaids…if I had one, hypothetically, what would I feed her?”

“I would think that you would feed her whatever her fish species eats, Dante,” he answered without skipping a beat. He’s good about not asking questions like that. “What is her fish species?”

“What is her species? I don’t know, man, mermaid. If I had one,” I refrained from stammering here, “I wouldn’t know her species. Are there really different kinds of mermaids?”

“Well, in our reality there are not different kinds, Dante, because there are no mermaids, at all. But in our hypothetical realm, there would probably be about as many races of mermaid as there are of man.”

“But that doesn’t mean anything to the fish side, right? Do I feed her human food, or fish food?”

There was a silence then, as I imagined Gil thinking this over while squeezing one of those squishy stress-relieving tennis balls. “Fish food, I think,” he finished then. “Not fish, though. God knows we don’t eat our own species. Kelp, you know. Maybe mussels, shrimp, small animals like that.”

“Okay, great. Now how would I communicate? If she didn’t speak English?”

“Have you tried Spanish?” Gil said in what sounded like a serious tone. I prepared to tell him off. He started again before I could go on. “I’m not sure where this mermaid business is coming from, so I’ll just assume you have a new girlfriend and your deep social anxiety is forcing you to introduce her as a fictional creature. What’s this girl’s name?”

“Well, my social retardation prevents me from talking to her in a language she understands, so I don’t know. In my delusional fantasy land, she appeared in my pool this morning.”

“Well, then, you need to name her.”

“That’s a great first date strategy.”

“What are you making her for dinner?”

“You’ve already suggested kelp and small sea animals, I guess I’ll go with that and brine. Would you care to join us?”

“No, thanks. It’s always been awkward pretending to talk to your imaginary dates, so I won’t intrude. If this natural water baby is in your pool, spending a lot of time there, you might consider removing the chlorine.” Gil has always had a deep mistrust of chemicals, antibacterial and otherwise. “It’s not good for fish. Or people, really.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Thanks, Gil. I might call you back later.”

“You better. I’d like to be kept abreast of your dates more than I have been.”

“Here’s news: no one since Jessicka.”

“Right. You’re not still praying for her to come back, are you?”

“I’m way past madness, Gil.”

“Good, glad to hear it. This imaginary fish woman is much, much better for you anyway. Later, Dante.”

He hung up with a click. The mermaid – my fevered mind’s interpretation of a romantic interest, Gil said – wasn’t visible from my seat, but I could hear her splashes and other sounds through the window. Occasionally there was a loud slap, and I realized that it must be the flat of her tail, hitting the water. She really was a mermaid, in my pool on the first day of summer. The longest day of the year.

-end excerpt-

As Yet, Untitled: Mermaid, Part 1

2009-04-22T02:59:00.005-04:00

-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

More fiction!

2009-04-14T13:04:00.004-04:00

Welcome! This is going to be a blog for my writing. I have a sister blog, here, for my jewellery creations, soon to be sold on Etsy. Soon, my precious little ones, this blog you are currently standing in will be filled to the blackened brim with horror and humour and the occasional sci-fi, plus literary projects to be defined as "other".

Stay tuned to this station, it's going to get bloody real soon.

-A.