Girl at the Bottom of the Sea

by Michelle Tea

  When it seemed he was healed, the one who still held his boots gave her tail a powerful kick and pushed him up above the waters. He broke the surface like a boy reborn—and really, he was just a boy. No longer aged by the harshness of a sailor’s life, the mermaids could see that he was not much older than a human child.

  The mermaids rose behind the boy and swam to the rocks, where more sailors did strange dances of pain. The first mermaid to arrive was received with a boot in the face.

  “Witches!” the sailor howled. The mermaids paddled back quickly, but the men struck out, catching some in the face and head with their boots and fists. More shocked than hurt, they scattered beneath the waters.

  “They cured me!” the boy they had healed shouted to the men on the deck of the ship, a ship that had been gouged by the rocks, a ship that was crumbling and sinking. The boy saw what his crew had busied themselves with even if the mermaids did not, and he waved his hands, frantic, above the waters.

  “They are peaceful!” the boy cried. “They cured my mind—I hear the screams no more!”

  “The screams are theirs!” shouted his captain. “They’ve sunk us! Sea witches! They have bewitched you, young lad, you’ve been deviled!” Sparks shot from the captain’s hand as he brought his flaming fist to the rope of the cannon.

  The mermaids had never seen a cannon before.

  * * *

  AS THEY TRAVELED, time passed in a blur for Sophie, bundled like a baby on the mermaid’s back with visions of mermaids and sailors flitting through her mind like dreams. When Syrena ended her tale and finally stopped swimming, there was only the epic quiet of the ocean and the surges of currents washing over them—warm water, then cold, then colder, then a rush of warm again. They were so deep it was like being nowhere. Outer space, Sophie thought hazily, weightless in the dark water. She felt like an astronaut of sorts. When the mermaid undid the tangles of hair that cocooned her, Sophie floated down onto the sandy ocean floor, thinking, This is another planet entirely.

  When she looked up toward the sky, Sophie expected to see nothing, a void, in this place where the sun had never shone. But what she saw in the darkness was a great wall, a darkness upon the darkness that rose high above them. Sophie’s eyes adjusted to the dim glow of her sea-glass talisman, the light fighting against the extinguishing weight and blackness of the depths.

  It looked like a mountain range that rose up as far as she could see and extended all the way to the edges of her vision. But it made Sophie think of the wall inside her, that dark fortress Angel taught her to pull up around her heart so that no one—not good-hearted Angel or evil-hearted Kishka—could get inside, so Sophie decided to regard the epic strength and darkness rising before her as a safe space, not a sinister one. A place for them to rest.

  “Talk about the middle of nowhere!” Sophie said aloud and started to giggle, a bit overwhelmed. Even if she was part znakharka, Polish witch, she was still part teenage girl, and she was a human girl at the bottom of the sea, looking up at the biggest mountain the earth had ever kicked up. As her eyes continued to adjust, Sophie could spot thin streaks of brightness at its black peak, orange flares that shone and vanished. Were her eyes playing tricks?

  “Can you see?” Syrena asked, swirling down to the floor beside her. The mermaid stretched, raising her arms high above her head and unfurling her giant tail onto the sand. She pointed toward the mountaintop with her long, pale finger, blue in the glow of their talismans. Syrena’s sea glass sat upon her bare chest, a starfish trapped in its center like a bug in amber. Sophie’s, sitting on her grubby t-shirt, held a seashell. The blue light shone up to their faces, and their eyes met: Sophie’s wide with wonder, the mermaid’s ageless, ancient, with their own luminescence.

  “It is the earth birthing itself,” Syrena said. “Special place. The mountain—how you say it?—barfing out hot liquid earth, water-fire.”

  “It’s called lava,” Sophie said.

  Syrena rolled her eyes, a faint strobe in the darkness. “Yes, lava. Don’t be show-off. The lava barf is cooled and hard and becomes the earth. This is where everything happens. Powerful place. Good place to fix you.”

  They lay there, watching the orange tongues lapping at the peak as if they were fireworks in the sky. A fire in the sea. Here and there, great explosions of what looked like black smoke shot from cracks in the endless crags.

  “Just water,” Syrena said. “Much minerals in it, make it dark. Very rich water, very healthy for us.”

  Beneath them the ocean floor trembled, a daisy chain of earthquakes as the mountain did its eternal work creating more of the planet. Syrena leaned into Sophie and offered a lock of her hair. “Hungry yet?” the mermaid smiled. For thousands of miles, her hair had acted like a net, a trawler capturing algae and plankton, small shrimp and fishes. Syrena grabbed a thick lock of it. It was messy and weird, yet the dark tangle Syrena had dangled in front of Sophie’s nose smelled oddly delicious. Sophie’s belly rumbled. How long had it been since she had eaten? How long had she traveled on the mermaid’s back? Sophie opened her mouth to the tangle, and it was like eating a great stew. Tastes she’d never known, green tastes and blue tastes, deep and oceanic. Everything salty and briny and delicious. Syrena bowed her head to the girl and Sophie nibbled right up to the roots.

  “Okay!” the mermaid snapped, slapping away Sophie’s hands. “I am not buffet! This is me.” She shook the lock, cleaned of algae and the edible dust of the sea, at Sophie. “You pull my hair, it hurts.”

  “Sorry,” Sophie burped.

  “How is it you feel?” Syrena asked. “Still you can’t move?”

  Sophie nodded her head. “Only my head.” She paused, and then spoke out loud a thought that had been haunting her. “Syrena, is there something wrong… with my magic?” She swallowed nervously. “Shouldn’t I be able to fix myself?”

  “Even if you half Odmieńce, you can’t do everything. Nothing can. Everything need help, everyone. I will help you. And this place, it will help you.” Syrena scooped a palmful of mud from the ocean floor and gazed at it by the light of their talisman. It sparkled with phosphorescence like neon, and seemed to wriggle with the movement of things too small to see. Sophie watched in horror as the mermaid tossed the glob of mud into her mouth. A fringy bristle she had never before noticed hung like a broom over Syrena’s teeth, and she sucked at the mud, ingesting the plankton and minerals while the brush caught the sand. With a very unladylike noise, the mermaid blew the mud from the bristles, and then the bristles disappeared.

  Syrena smiled at the girl, her own teeth pearly as abalone shell. “What?” she demanded. “You never see retractable baleen before? You lie there with your mouth open, you will wish you had some too!”

  Indeed, Sophie’s mouth was a bit muddy from hanging open in shock. She tried to spit it out, but it crunched in her teeth. “Retractable baleen?”

  “Like whale,” Syrena shrugged. “But it comes and goes. See?” The mermaid opened her mouth wide, and above her teeth Sophie spied not gums but bits of brush. With a flex the baleen came down, a curtain that allowed the good stuff to pass into the mermaid’s mouth but filtered sand and grit. The baleen rose, and Syrena spoke.

  “Quite handy,” she said.

  “Are you part whale?” Sophie asked, and Syrena shrugged.

  “Perhaps. Like you are part monkey. But we are part human, too, so perhaps mermaids part monkey as well.”

  “And people are part whale?”

  Syrena scoffed, a bubble of air shooting out from her nose. “You wish.”

  “Syrena, where are we?”

  “Mid-Atlantic Ridge, is called by you people. We stay here a bit.”

  Syrena gathered Sophie in her arms and let the muscle of her tail propel them up the side of the mountain. Like flying, Sophie thought, passing over fissures and valleys rising toward the lakes of lava that bubbled at the top. Sophie could see great molten globs of it crawling from the mountain’s lip and sliding down, cooling int
o rock. Baby earth.

  They settled into the soft earth of a high crevice below the range of the hottest lava. The ridge of rock was solid and the water there was warm, strikingly so after the frigid depths of the Atlantic. Sophie felt a tingling as sensation returned to her skin. She hadn’t even realized she had been so cold.

  “Oh this is so nice,” Sophie murmured, finding herself lying on a vent that bubbled soothing hot water all over her. “Like a spa.” Sophie had never been to a spa, but she had seen pictures in magazines of women looking impossibly relaxed, with mud on their faces and slices of cucumber on their eyes, soaking in a tub. And Sophie sure did have mud on her face—both she and Syrena were streaked with it.

  “Are you comfortable, Sophie?” Syrena asked.

  “Mmmm-hmmmm,” the girl mumbled.

  “Very good. Then I will sing to you. Heal you, like my kind have done for generations.”

  Hovering over Sophie, with her talisman floating down until it bumped gently into Sophie’s own, Syrena began her song. It ricocheted off the mountain range, its power multiplying with echoes. It engulfed Sophie as completely as the water, becoming one with the water and soaking into the girl, streaming into her ears, her nose, her mouth. Heaven, Sophie thought. This must be what heaven is. The sound moved into her bones and made them whole again, turned them to song. Sophie was the song, the song was she and she was everything. What a gift it was, the mermaid’s harmony. Sophie had thought that a mermaid’s song was something that washed over you; now she understood it was something you became. Sophie was Syrena’s song—and Sophie was healed.

  “Oh!” Sophie cried when the last bit of echo had faded into the darkness. She flung her arms up around the mermaid’s neck, buried her face in her hair, the source of her sustenance. It was as if Syrena were the ocean itself, and everything it had to give.

  “Okay, okay, okay, now now,” Syrena peeled her charge off of her. “Not too fast, not too fast, okay? Your bones are whole, but they weak like baleen, okay?” The mermaid brought the brush back down across her teeth and flicked them with an opal fingernail. “They still weak. You will lie here and eat the minerals in the water, you will soak in the salt and I will sing and we will talk. Dobrze?”

  “Dobrze,” Sophie agreed, effortlessly translating and speaking the mermaid’s Polish. As she reclined upon the vent, Sophie became aware of the nutrients in the hot water, microscopic shrimps and algae, and it was as if she were lounging in a giant pot of stew. She drank from it sloppily, without baleen to strain the crunchy bits of cooled lava. Soon she began to enjoy the bite of the lava, the smash of glass and crystal beneath her teeth.

  “Is good for you, too,” the mermaid nodded approvingly. “You have the intuition. Your body tell you what it wants. Lava is good medicine—iron, calcium.” She plucked a porous black crumb from the earth beneath her and popped it in her mouth, sucking on it like a candy. The molten lava above them glowing like candlelight, the two fell into a soft and salty slumber.

  Chapter 5

  Though Syrena’s mother, whoever she might be—mermaids never knew what batch of eggs they’d hatched from, since they were raised and nurtured by the entire village—had had the run of the ocean for all her long life, Syrena was born into a world that was struggling with the idea of boundaries. Borders. For the first time there were places the mermaids could not go. Of course they’d learned to avoid the lairs of sharks and other unfriendly beasts, but this was different. As the humans above them carved out trade routes, highways that took them right into mermaid territory, so the mermaids’ landscape shrank, carved by the wake of the great boats streaming above them, strange waves that came not from the moon but from the cleaving of the waters by those terrible vessels.

  And terrible they were. With each passing season they had grown more majestic, their sails now big as clouds, their hulls built with the wood of a whole forest. No longer just a single cannon but a row of them edged each boat’s decks. With great caution the mermaids snuck above the waves and spied the great ships fearfully. By now they understood that the humans fought with one another frequently, and that the cannons were there for them to destroy each other, not the sea creatures. But the mermaids also knew that the humans would be as quick to fire at them, should any of them show their faces.

  As the ships sailed past the edge of the mermaid village, their captains would order themselves tied tightly to their post with lengths of rope, lest the mermaids begin singing and drive them mad. The rest of the crews lingered by the cannons, itching to fire. And fixed to the bows of these boats were statues carved of wood in the image of the most beautiful mermaids, hair streaming and breasts perky, a long fishtail of many colors undulating beneath them. The mermaids were enchanted and baffled by these likenesses. Why, if the sailors meant them harm, would they decorate their precious ships with their image? It infuriated the elders, who took it as foolish disrespect, and they suggested that the villagers crawl upon the rocks and sing the ships to their doom. How dare they use the magic mermaid image to appease the sea, as if the mermaids were not the sea?

  Many other mermaids agreed, and for a time a secret cadre of them would slip above the waves to torment the sailors who would create such things. In return, cannon fire crumbled the rocks they loved to lie upon to sun, and ships were torn into by the broken rocks and sunk below the surface. Then the mermaids, old and young alike, were left with the spectacle of these ruined vessels crashed down in the middle of their village, heaped with drowned sailors.

  The tenderest of them wept at the tragedy, and even the hardest could see how wrong it was to bring such destruction, whether to mermaids or to men. So the mermaids packed up their shells and spears, their instruments and hair combs, the costumes they wore for dancing and the tools they made for building. Heaping their things onto giant clamshells, they wove ropes from weeds and hair and lashed them to the shells, passing the reins to a pod of dolphins who had offered to help. With squeals of pleasure, the dolphins tugged the clam-sleighs through the waters, for dolphins see even the most tedious task as play; everything makes them happy. The mermaids swam alongside them, scanning for a home deep enough to elude the humans, yet not too deep. Living in the very depths of the ocean is not healthy; the darkness and pressure weigh heavily on the mermaid mind and bring about a great and creepy depression.

  Into the North Sea swam the mermaids, eventually coming upon a raised bed littered with boulders and rocks, the debris left behind by a long-ago glacier. “Oh!” The most enthusiastic among them clapped their hands and beat their tails, imagining what they could build from such raw materials. Forts and caves, crooks to lounge in, jumbles to hide the ephemeral castles of mermaid foam that held the eggs of their offspring.

  “It’s too high,” grumbled the elders.

  “And so the ships will avoid it,” another countered.

  “It is made for us!” cried most of them. “A gift of the sea!”

  Finally, it was decided: the mermaids would claim as their home the sprawling Dogger Bank, as the humans called it, but as a precaution against ships and their blood-hungry humans they would dig a great valley of trenches nearby, a place for them to flee should trouble come to the village.

  A new chapter of industry began for this pod of mermaids. The tougher among them, the ones who enjoyed wrestling sharks and getting into tangles with giant squids, swam out to deeper sea, and with shovels fashioned from shell and bone they began to dig deep furrows into the ocean floor. Flipping piles of mud from their tails, they watched the walls of earth rise around them as they dug deeper and deeper.

  “How do you feel?” the mermaids would inquire of one another on their lunch and snack breaks. Munching on mackerel and cod, cracking open shellfish with their sharpened canines, they considered the question.

  “Quite well,” one might murmur, “but I can feel a sort of flat doom coming on like a sneeze.”

  “Me as well,” another mermaid would nod. And so after they fed, they pushed silt and mud
from the banks, raising the trenches to a happier level.

  “This is perfect!” a worker affirmed at last, wriggling around in the lush, wet mud, sifting the nutrients in the silt through her baleen happily. “This will be a great place to hide if we must!”

  It also proved to be a great place for the mermaids to find food. The humans had begun to hang nets from their boats, allowing them to drag in the wake of their vessels, scooping up a bounty of creatures. But as they passed over the trenches their nets would catch and pull, sticking in the ditches until the sailors were forced to cut them loose. The mermaids would find wonderful bundles of fish waiting for them, as if dropped by a benevolent sea goddess. “Devil’s Hole,” the fishermen came to call it, and worked to avoid the mermaids’ hiding place. But such a wide spot was hard to avoid, and so it became a regular mermaid task to journey out to the trenches and gather up what the fishermen had dropped.

  LIKE A HUMAN child, Syrena had no memory of her life as a tadpole, no idea how she had escaped being gobbled up by a mackerel or trapped in the mouth of a clam. She may have been a wily baby, or she may have only been lucky. All she knew is she made it to the village, led by that mysterious instinct that had always led baby mermaids to their village.

  Syrena’s first clear recollection was of a village meeting during which the passions of the mermaids ran high enough that it seemed they began to produce their own currents and raise the water’s temperature. The issue was whether or not the mermaids would stop laying their eggs and creating more mermaids. “Preposterous!” many cried. Laying eggs was simply what mermaids did, like singing and building villages, like riding dolphins and shedding their tarnished scales for the beautiful, gleaming ones beneath.