by Michelle Tea
Syrena’s hair, its intricate tangle, settled down over Sophie like a net, binding her to the mermaid’s body. Sophie was shocked at the softness of Syrena’s skin. How could she be so old and so rugged, and yet her skin soft like a dolphin’s? She should be tough as a whale, with barnacles cleaved to her scales, but she wasn’t. With her cheek to the mermaid’s back, Sophie felt such gratitude for her rescue that she nearly kissed her smooth shoulder, but she couldn’t imagine the mermaid would like that, so she didn’t.
Syrena pulled her tangles around her like a cape and with deft fingers braided her hair down the front of her body, securing Sophie tightly to her back. The mesh of hair was tight against the girl’s face, and she worried briefly about her ability to breathe. Then she remembered she was underwater. Her bones were broken. She was magic, so magic that she could keep herself alive when her body had turned to soup. The thought made her proud, but frightened: sure she was alive, in this lumpy, paralyzed state, but she couldn’t begin to imagine how to heal herself. What good was a magic that kept her half dead? Better than a magic that left you fully dead, she scolded herself. And she wasn’t really half dead. Aside from the fact that she couldn’t move and her limbs felt like sandbags, she was doing okay. She could think, her mind was clear, and she was breathing beneath the ocean. Her talisman glowed its faint blue glow, lighting up her mermaid-hair cocoon prettily, illuminating the miniature world of it—tiny fishes darting hither and thither, a hermit crab snared in a snarl poking its spiny head out to look at her.
“You are good,” Syrena said plainly, though Sophie knew she meant it as a question.
“I… I think so,” Sophie said.
“Yes, very good, I believe.” With her hair pulled back from her face, Syrena had a clear view of her surroundings. Beneath her a long-legged crab, spindly as a spider, crept along the sand. Syrena grabbed it and snapped it in half. She tore a leg from the poor creature and dug it back through her hair, poking it in Sophie’s face.
“Here,” the mermaid commanded. “You eat. Is long swim.”
Sophie screwed her face at the food the mermaid was offering. She’d eaten crab before, boiled and dipped in melted butter, but not this deep-sea creature, crusty and raw. “I’m not hungry,” she said.
The mermaid scoffed. “Well, you will be,” she said. “And when you are hungry enough you will eat mermaid food.”
At her words, Sophie suddenly felt a bit frightened about the journey ahead. “This would maybe be a great time to tell me where I’m going. Where you’re taking me,” she said, slightly more accusingly than she meant to. Sophie didn’t want to sound as if the mermaid were kidnapping her, but she did suddenly feel taken hostage—wound into the creature’s hair like an insect snared in a web.
“We go to Poland,” Syrena said, and in the tough, round sound of her voice Sophie could practically see the place, its pockmarked, cobblestoned streets reflecting the gray sky above. “There is castle on River Vistula, not far from my part of river. It like tourist castle, ya? But castle very big, and there is whole part of building tourists no see. Secret castle inside castle, ya? Boy lives there, your age I think? Tadeusz. I know his great-grandmother very well. His great-grandmother was big hero for Poland. She was a poet.”
“A poet?” A poet sounded to Sophie like the opposite of a hero. Heroes went out and rescued people and fought villains. Poets stayed in dusty corners bent over notebooks, writing about trees and giving themselves bad posture. “That’s funny,” Sophie said. She felt the mermaid buck beneath her sharply; if Sophie hadn’t been tied to the mermaid’s body with the mermaid’s own hair she’d have been flipped right off.
“Funny?” Syrena snapped. “What so funny about that?”
“Just, like, I don’t know… a poet being a hero. It’s just funny. Because poets are like, you know, they’re sort of wimpy.”
“‘Wimpy’?” The mermaid bucked again, and Sophie was glad that her spine had been pulverized because the mermaid’s movement was sharp enough to have snapped it in two. “What is word—‘wimpy’?”
“It just means you can’t fight that good.”
“And you think poet can’t fight good?”
“I don’t know if I think that, exactly, it’s more like, the world thinks it. Right? I mean, I’ve never even met a poet.” Sophie was quickly backpedaling away from her original comment. The mermaid was so sensitive!
“Is right you never met poet!” Syrena snapped. “You know poet, you know a poet is a fighter! That place you from, Chelsea? That dump could use a poet! Someone to stand on city square and holler about what a trash place it is! Someone to fight for poor little ungrateful child such as you, get you better education, get you better doctor, ya? What you think poet does?”
“Um, write, right?” Now Sophie was annoyed. “Poets write poems. Little bits of writing that don’t make any sense, usually about trees and stuff. Flowers. They’re like Hallmark cards.”
“What is ‘Hallmark card’?”
“They’re like, these cards you buy that have a poem written inside them. You get them for Mother’s Day, or for a birthday or something.”
Sophie could feel Syrena’s sigh; the mermaid’s body beneath her sagged with it. “Can’t even be mad at you,” the mermaid said, her voice little more than a mumble. “You too stupid to even be mad at. You live in world without poetry, without poets. You think poet’s job to tell your mother happy birthday. You are such a fool you don’t even know you are a fool. How can I be mad at such fool? Poet’s job to create the world.”
Sophie didn’t appreciate being called a fool, but it was true she hadn’t ever known a poet, so she just kept silent. She hadn’t known the mermaid was such a poetry fan. It was just another weird thing about her.
“Tadzio’s great-grandmother the poet Krystyna Krahelska. Much famous in Poland. Almost famous as me. In fact, when the city want to make statue of me, they have Krystyna be the model.”
“There’s a statue of you in Poland?” Sophie asked, and felt Syrena buck again. Sophie understood that every buck was the equivalent of a slap on the head.
“There two statues of me in Poland!” the mermaid roared proudly. “I tell you I am famous, you think I lie, no? What do you know. You girl with no poetry. Well, you will learn in Poland.”
“So I’m going to Poland to learn poetry?” Sophie was beyond confused. Her whole life was falling apart, everyone she cared about was in danger, and her grandmother was wicked beyond belief. And she was strapped to a mermaid’s back, being stolen away to the old country to learn poetry?
“If I have any say over your education, ya, you learn poetry. And you being brought to Poland for education. You learn about Odmieńce, you learn about Kishka. You learn about yourself. You learn about big story, ya? The whole big story, your story. Pigeons in Chelsea tell you part of story, ya?”
Sophie had a flash of her flock, a body memory of a plump and feathered body settled on her shoulder. “Yes,” she said softly.
“And I tell you part story. But there be more. Tadzio know some, he help you.”
“Is he magic, too?” Sophie asked. “Is he Odmieńce?”
“No,” Syrena said. “He just boy, just human. But he special. I tell you, his great-grandmother big hero.”
“So I’m being dragged away from my home, all the way to Poland, to learn about magic from some boy who isn’t even magic?” Sophie asked skeptically.
“When you say like that, doesn’t sound so good,” Syrena agreed. “But I only have my small part to share with you. I have to trust that all the other parts come into place. And you must trust too, Sophie. Whole world depend on it, ya?”
Sophie let the mermaid’s last, impossible phrase linger in her mind. Whole world depend on it. How could that be? How could the whole world depend on her, a girl from Chelsea who barely made it outside her town, not even into Boston, just on the other side of the bridge? Sophie’s whole world was Heard Street, Bellingham Square. It was Revere Beach a bus r
ide away, and that was as worldly as it got.
As she felt her anxiety begin to grow, the mermaid spoke again, her voice low and serious. “Plus, there is Invisible. I show it to you, is far out in ocean, but we go there. Invisible have something to do with story, but I don’t know what. Not my part to know.”
“What is it?” Sophie asked.
“Is like, force, ya?” Sophie could hear the mermaid struggling to explain. “Is like, energy. I wish I was poet, then I could explain better, ya? Invisible is there and not there; something like that takes poet to understand. I don’t understand Invisible, maybe you will, with your magic. All I know is Invisible very bad. So bad you can feel it, feel it stronger than you see it. Just wait. We will visit it.”
“Well, I can’t wait,” Sophie said sarcastically. “I’m going to see some bad vibes and then get dumped at a castle so some boy who isn’t even magic can teach me something.”
“Ya,” the mermaid said. “And then you will fight Kishka. And you will win. You must. If you lose, that feeling I showed you when we first met, that terrible badness, that will win. That badness is Kishka. So, if I you, I shut up with the smarty-pants—how you say?—bullshit. If I you, I want to learn everything I can from everyone in the world—pigeon, mermaid, boy. If I you, I want to learn every single bit of information I can learn. Because if you lose, we are all—how you say?—screwed.”
And with that the mermaid shut up, and so did Sophie. She remembered exactly how it had felt, the first time Syrena had pushed her way into Sophie’s heart and showed her who her grandmother really was. So she lay upon the mermaid’s back in quiet contemplation, fighting off the fear that threatened to crawl up from her heart and swallow her whole.
Chapter 4
Like a bullet Syrena shot through the waters, the curl and punch of her tail rocking Sophie into a soothing rhythm. The intensity of their conversation faded, and Sophie grew dreamy with the rhythm of the mermaid’s motion and the pulsing of the water around her. As they descended, Sophie felt her ears clog and pop. Through the veil of mermaid hair she saw lights in the water, luminescent creatures glowing moonish and blue, or hot pink, bright orange. A strange wormlike thing became snagged in Sophie’s net and wriggled blindly across her face. It was fleshy and glowing, with neither a head nor a tail, just color and movement. Sophie was mesmerized. And she understood what the mermaid had promised, that when she got hungry enough she would join her underwater feasting. Though the thought of biting into the alien critter repulsed her, she was drawn to it, too. What would such a thing taste like? It was bright as candy.
Syrena’s hand reached behind her and ran down her mane, searching for food. She found the soft worm and plucked it away from Sophie, popped it in her mouth. After she swallowed with a satisfied sound, she cleared her throat. “So, since I know all about you,” Syrena said to her charge, snug on her back like a baby in a papoose, “Now I will tell you all about me. Will help us pass the time to Poland. We have long way to go, ya? And frankly, I do not want to listen to you all the way. Will make me crazy to hear you yammering like human girl for so many days. Will be good for you to be quiet, listen. And be good for you to have something to listen to, so you don’t go crazy yourself, in your mind, thinking about all this saving world problem. And who know?” the mermaid asked thoughtfully, “Perhaps something in my story can help you.”
“I WAS BORN in a mermaid village,” Syrena began. “Just outside the North Sea. Maybe six hundred years ago.”
Syrena was born into a village embroiled in a life-or-death debate. At stake was the life of mermaids, and it was the mermaids themselves who were asking the question: with the ocean such a perilous place for them, was it wise to keep creating more mermaids?
There was a feeling, held passionately by many of them, that the sea was no longer a safe place for even the oldest and strongest among them. Of course, life underwater had always been heightened by the fact that at any moment sharks could arrow into the village and leave the water there reddened in their wake. The mermaids had always fortified their homes as best they could, digging great caves beneath the sand or building bunkers from the discarded shells of giant clams and old sea-monster bones. They set traps for the sharks, and some mermaids took up the task of fighting them in combat, armored in seashells, a spear in each hand. What feasts the village had when a mermaid slayed a shark!
To protect their offspring the mermaids constructed castles of foam from their own mouths and nestled their fragile eggs inside. Tucked up in the crook of a sea cave, or hidden in a jumble of rocks, the babies grew from a speck of nothing into the littlest tadpoles, finally clawing out of the soft, watery eggs. They scattered into the sea blindly, instinctively sticking close to rocks, darting into crevices, eating plankton and microbes. The ones who weren’t swallowed by fish grew larger. The ones who weren’t lassoed by hungry squid grew larger still. Eventually the mermaid babies made their way into the heart of the village, where they were greeted with cheers of joy. These were the hardiest mermaids, the craftiest, the ones with intuition like radar. The grown creatures protected them from seals and sharks and taught them how to be mermaids—how to care for their scales and their hair, how to build caves and spear fish, how to weave nets and make mermaid magic. It was the way they had lived for thousands of years.
But the coming of the people onto the seas changed everything. At first there were only a few, and their boats were humble and so were they. Knowing they were entering another’s land, the humans brought gifts for the mermaids, and the mermaids offered their own tokens in return—wreaths woven from seaweed and their own hair, clusters of pearls wrenched from the tight lips of oysters, a perfect fish, wrestled with their own hands.
First there were only a few boats, but then there were many, and the vessels grew larger and larger: no longer a single man rowing the hull of a tree, but a rowdy crew commanding a ship built from an entire forest. They sailed further from their native shores, no longer coming through the nearby channels and straits but cutting across the wide, open ocean.
And the ocean, it appeared, had made them mad. The further they traveled from home, the more troubled the men of the ships seemed to be. They were soiled and dizzy, drunk on poisons they’d made themselves, brewed from potatoes they’d have been better off eating. The men were sickly, and the mermaids felt bad for them, so they pulled themselves onto the rocks and sang.
Song, beneath the ocean, was powerful medicine. The whales knew this—they bathed the hurt and disturbed members of their pods in the vibrations of their voices. As it traveled through the waters, the noise grew in its magic. It was as if the sound directed itself toward the problem, modulated its harmonies to fix it. The songs of the whales soothed illnesses of the body and the spirit, and it was the whales who’d taught the mermaids the power of their own melodies. Mermaids who were torn by shark teeth, or had swum too low into the depths and emerged dark-minded and spooky, were ringed by a floating cotillion of their sisters and bathed in the symphony of their voices, their high squeals and low rumbles, sounds that grew and receded like the sea’s own currents. Sound that came together like a school of shimmering fish, sound so bright you could almost see it in the water. Creatures from fathoms away would gather round to listen to the mermaids, gleaning comfort and care from the sounds that bounced off the seafloor. The mermaids’ song surrounded them all in a still and sacred moment. The constant hungers of animals who prowled the sea were sated, if only for a moment. Fish who normally swallowed each other whole would look into each other’s wide, staring eyes for the first time. The world of the ocean was whole, as if every single creature was a drop of its water.
The mermaids had never sung above the waters, but the sight of the men, so sickly and wild, urged them to try to help with their sounds. And so along the rocks they arranged themselves, and as one they sounded their zawolanie—their magic cry.
It was a sound such as the men had never heard. Already crazed from too much drink and time at sea
, they raised their faces in despair, sure that their god, a terrible one, had pulled the sky apart with his fist. The sound, to them, was like a tearing, and they looked down, certain they would see their ship itself coming apart around their feet, nails popping from the wood. It was the noise of the end of the world, and it came from the mouths of the fish-women on the rocks, their mouths open as if hungry to eat them all.
The mermaids dove from the rocks as the ship, suddenly freed from the control of its crew, sailed toward them. They saw the sailors’ faces, contorted as if in the final throes of death, their grubby hands clamped to their ears. The sound of the mermaids echoed inside their minds; even as the creatures fled beneath the water, their cries seemed to continue. Men slammed their heads into the walls of the ship, trying to shake out the terrible screams; they tore the sails from the mast and wrapped their faces in them. Many, in their agony and confusion, fell from the vessel into the waters.
Beneath the water the mermaid village had been thrown into chaos as well. The mermaids churned about, distraught and alarmed. They had never known their voices to wreak havoc, but without the ocean to soften and carry it, their song’s raw power must have been too much. They looked up as the tall boots of sailors, kicking at the sea as if it were a giant beast, punctured the water’s surface. The sailors hollered and flailed. Soon, the mermaids knew, the sharks would come for them. Something must be done quickly.
A mermaid swam up to the boots of one sailor and with both hands pulled him beneath the waters. Now his struggle increased, his fists shot out at the mermaids who gathered around him, but the water slowed his motion. A stream of what looked like jellyfish rose upward from his mouth. The mermaids would have to act quickly; he would not last long beneath the waves. Circling the sailor, they began their song anew. The soft ocean waters held the vibrations and brought them to the sailor. And just as moments ago his mind was full of knives, now only tenderness filled him. His body, knotted from months at sea, relaxed. As the waters washed from him the grime of his time at sea, the mermaids’ song cleaned his head and his heart.