by Michelle Tea
“How can we stop laying our eggs?” one mermaid asked, baffled. It was like asking their gills to stop filtering oxygen from the waters, asking their hearts to stop beating, their hair to stop growing.
“We will leave them to the sea,” an elder spoke grimly.
There was a gasp from the shocked, and stoic nodding and mumbles from those who believed they must freeze the growth of their village.
One of the warrior mermaids rose up from the clamshell on which she’d lounged. “I have traveled, and I have seen many things and spoken to many other mermaids,” she began. She was tough and fearsome, with great scars lacing her tail. Her hair was wound around her head and knotted like a turban, and her eyes flashed. A jagged shell dagger topped with a sea-monster fang was bound to her muscled arm with shark leather. The village grew silent with respect, for this mermaid had saved many of them from the attacks of sea beasts. She had helped to build the structure they were gathered under, she had helped to dig the trenches and harvested the fish, and she had ventured far into the sea, even during this treacherous time, to monitor the travels of the humans, their movements across the oceans.
“I have swum south and seen the most terrible of ships,” she continued. “They are great floating villages, filled with people the humans have stolen. They take their own kind from their homelands and shackle them in the bowels of these ships and sail them across our oceans, far away from their homes. The ships are full of misery and disease. They trade their own kind the way we trade pearls or bone. They beat and torture them and make them work like animals.”
“Their own kind?” the mermaids repeated, looking about, confused. “Other humans? You are certain?”
“Men and women, even children. Chained to the boats as if they were cannons, not living creatures.”
“If they do such things to one another, what would they do to us?” an elder exclaimed, and the warrior turned to address her.
“I can tell you,” she said. “In the east, the fishermen are hunting our sisters like whales. For food.”
“Food!”
“They think they can eat our magic,” she said. “In the south, the mermaids who try to free the captured humans have been slaughtered, their tails nailed to the ships as a warning.”
At this news, the tenderest among them began to cry, while the toughest grew even harder against the humans.
“Closest to us, in the west, mermaids have been captured and put to terrible purpose. The men try to keep us as wives—”
“Out of the water?”
“Yes, on the land. Kept in a house, like a human wife. Or kept in a filthy tank, shown at fairs like beasts.”
The mermaids’ heads and hearts spun with confusion and despair. “But we are a nation!” cried one elder. “How dare they not reckon with us!”
“Maid, they do not reckon with one another,” the warrior said softly, at last allowing a glimmer of her own sadness to show. “They will not reckon with us. We must prepare. They come deeper and deeper into our waters.”
Syrena was curled on the lap of the mermaid who had first claimed her when she swam into the village, the one who had cared for her the most. She wrapped Syrena in her great, strong braids, binding the baby to her chest. Syrena’s chubby tail wiggled in the water and her fist clutched and rattled the seedpod she kept as a toy. The older mermaid hugged baby Syrena tightly and cried into her soft hair. Only one other baby had swum into the village since Syrena had appeared nearly a year ago—her sister, Griet. She was being bounced on the tail of another tearful mermaid close by, teething her new canines on a thick chunk of the mermaid’s hair. The two baby mermaids, Syrena and Griet, had beaten the odds and made it to the village. And as the village cast its vote, so it was decided that no more would.
“Only for a time,” the elders said, hoping to take the edge off the younger mermaids’ sadness.
“Only for a time,” the mermaids all repeated to one another, their voices strained with desperate hope.
“Only for a time,” they consoled themselves as they set their eggs adrift in the sea, turning their backs to the schools of fish gathered for a feeding frenzy. They swallowed the foam meant to protect their creations, choking on its bitter taste.
Chapter 6
When Sophie awoke, the first thing she thought was, I can move! She kicked her legs out beneath her and brought her arms up in a long, delicious stretch. Oh, it felt so good to have a body! How strange had been these past days when she’d been reduced to a sort of amoeba, a brain inside a shell—like a clam, she thought, but even clams could move. Cuddled into the crook of Syrena’s great tail, Sophie grew excited at the thought of swimming alongside the mermaid. There, at the bottom of the sea, it was easy to forget a world existed above them, but it did. And Sophie would see it. Poland. What would it be like? She found herself yearning to see the sun again. She could barely remember what it felt like to stand beneath its yellowy glow.
Bringing her hands to her face to wipe away the mud and bits of mermaid scale stuck to her cheeks from using Syrena’s tail as a pillow, Sophie started. Her hands had been clenched into fists since the great wave had pounded her, and now, as she spread her fingers, she found tucked inside her palm a bit of softness, iridescent in the glow of her talisman. A feather.
Livia.
Sophie remembered the moments before her grandmother summoned the waters, when she’d plucked from the sky above her Livia, graceful and sweet-hearted, the pigeon whose love was so pure and true Sophie could still feel it inside her—the bird’s love for her crotchety husband and their beautiful children, her love for the humans who had lost their way and fallen into cruelty, her love for Sophie, the girl the pigeons had spoken of for so long, anticipating her coming. Livia had helped her and Livia had loved her. And it was because of Sophie that Livia was dead. Sophie’s tears squeezed from her eyes and merged with the sea; she was her own sad creek, sending trickles of salt into the ocean.
It was this way that Syrena found her, crumbled into a wet heap of a girl, Livia’s feather held tight in her hand. Syrena knew at once what was paining Sophie. She’d known that once Sophie regained her faculties, great grief was awaiting her. So Syrena came to her, wrapped her tail around the girl and stroked her hair with her long, cool fingers.
“What will Arthur do?” Sophie cried to the mermaid. Arthur with his hobbled feet, wounded from the chemicals people left out to try to rid the streets of pigeons. How Arthur had relied on Livia for her strength and humor and love. It was Livia’s brightness that kept cranky Arthur from sliding too deeply into hurt and anger. What would he become without her?
“Arthur will get by without her,” the mermaid said resolutely. She knew the girl might find her cold, but there was nothing to be done about it. Lives passed so quickly on land that the creatures who dwelled there could never become accustomed to death. In the oceans, life spanned millennia, and so thousands of deaths are witnessed and one learned to accept it. Syrena had lived for many years and had witnessed many wars and many atrocities in the sea and on the banks of her river, and she knew that she accepted Arthur’s plight in a way Sophie could not. She could feel the girl’s heart rage against it. Syrena could not tell if this feeling of humans was a sweet thing or an annoyance. They were like small children in this way, forever confused by the ways of life, of death’s inherent part in it. But of course it was sweet. The mermaid could feel the pounding of love behind the girl’s tears.
So Syrena let Sophie cry, but after a time the mermaid knew they must move on. She saluted the brave life of the dead bird, and the sorrow of the family she had left behind. And then it was time to go. They were still in the middle of the Atlantic; they had a long way to travel.
“I will teach you some swimming tricks now.” Syrena gave the girl a last pat and pulled back her tail. “You are ready.”
Sophie, still mourning for Livia and her flock, suddenly bristled at the way the mermaid always spoke her questions as statements. “It’s not ‘You
are ready,’” she corrected sharply. “It’s ‘Are you ready?’ or ‘You are ready?’”
“As I said,” Syrena replied. “You are ready. Don’t be dumb.”
“‘You are ready?’” Sophie stressed through gritted teeth, bringing her voice up at the end. “You ask. Otherwise it’s rude.” She pulled at the stringy tendrils hanging from the bottom of her cutoff shorts, annoyed.
“What is—rude? When I speak to you plain and direct like mermaid speak? You can’t handle it? I say too bad for you,” Syrena snorted, tiny bubbles flaring from her nose. “Humans have hardly any life and spend most of it crying. If worst thing to happen to you today is mermaid rudeness, I think good day for you, ya? Now, come. We swim. You are ready.”
“Since you are asking, no, I am not ready,” Sophie said, barely containing the tears building hotly again behind her eyes. “I’m trying to deal with the fact that someone I love is dead, and other people I love are in pain and danger, and it’s all my fault!” The sob burst forth, a shimmer in the water around Sophie’s face. She glared at the mermaid as if she were a monster.
Syrena shrugged, feeling the girl’s thoughts. “Well, I am what you call monster,” she allowed. “More or less. I know is sad Livia gone. More reason we swim now. Must fight Kishka, yes? Avenge your friend? You don’t fight Kishka with crying.”
Syrena plucked the feather from Sophie’s hand, and before the girl could protest she was at work deftly braiding it into Sophie’s long, messy hair. “You on your way to becoming real mermaid,” she said with something like tenderness. “So much tangle in your hair!”
The touch of the mermaid’s fingers could not help but calm Sophie down. The stroke and scratch of Syrena’s nails as she wove locks around Livia’s feather soothed her. She closed her eyes, and her tears came slower. Steady, but slower. The rush of memory was almost too much. Dr. Chen—how she loved her birds! How she had woven the lovely flute into Livia’s tails with affection and care. Angel, who had been on the banks of the creek as the rogue wave descended. Her mother, all alone without Sophie’s protection. Even Ella, left to a different sort of peril, her own compulsions and the compulsions of the boys she now spent her time with. How could Sophie help them—how could she help anyone, a million miles beneath the ocean, in the earth’s darkest place?
“I think we’ve made a mistake,” she said to the mermaid. “What are we doing here? We’ve got to go back! We’ve got to help everyone! Why did we leave Chelsea?” Sophie was wracked with urgency and homesickness.
“You must trust, Sophie,” Syrena said, patting her hair into place.
The feather was braided so that it hung along the girl’s cheek, brushing it gently. Sophie reached out and touched it, pulling it before her eyes. Even in the darkness, the rainbow sheen of Livia’s feather glinted, iridescent.
“Thanks,” Sophie said softly.
“Is true we must get out of here,” Syrena said briskly. “So—you are ready now.”
“‘Are you ready now?’” Sophie corrected. “And yes,” she sighed. “I am.”
* * *
“MORE ELEGANT!” SYRENA hollered to Sophie, watching her make her way through the waters. The girl’s arms shot out in front of her, grasping at the water and pushing it jerkily behind her. Her body bucked awkwardly; she looked like a frog, only less elegant. And Syrena didn’t find frogs very elegant to begin with.
The real problem was Sophie’s legs. They bowed and kicked and flailed. They propelled the girl forward—Sophie was swimming—but to Syrena it looked like a complete disaster. In the time it took for Sophie to move twenty feet, Syrena could have been a mile into the depths.
“Like this,” Syrena commanded. She stretched the length of her body, uncurling her tail, letting it undulate gently in the water. She laid her arms before her, demonstrating good, elegant swimming posture. She turned her head to Sophie. “You see? Now, you.”
Sophie kicked her legs behind her and stretched her arms out. It was a pose she could not hold. Her body would begin to fall this way or that, sinking and bobbing. She tried again, working to approximate the delicate ripple of the mermaid’s tail with her own bony legs. She tried to undulate but only jerked as if in the throes of a seizure.
“Okay, okay, very well, keep trying.”
For a moment Sophie almost had it, slinking in an underwater full-body belly dance. But immediately she lost the rhythm and sunk back down in a tangle of arms and legs.
“Syrena, I’m not a mermaid,” Sophie complained. “I don’t have a tail. I can’t just, you know, lounge around the water like you do. I’m a person. I have to swim or I just sink, you know?” Her hand rose up and gently stroked the pigeon feather wound into her hair. How swiftly this had become a little habit of comfort, but Sophie needed a lot of comfort. Even with a mermaid for a coach, she was failing her swim test.
“I had not thought of this problem,” Syrena admitted. “I just think—you swim. How you say—big deal? Is no big deal. You breathe, you eat, you swim.” Syrena felt almost embarrassed at how mermaid-centric her assumptions had been. She had spent time here and there with humans, but never in her territory, beneath the waters. Of course they could not manage below the waves as she could.
“Try walking, okay?” Sophie grumbled. “I could totally outwalk you on any piece of land on this earth. I bet you can’t even walk at all. I bet you have to, like, crawl.”
“Is true,” the mermaid admitted. “I can not walk even a small bit.”
“At least I can swim a small bit,” Sophie said proudly.
“Okay, fine, you win.”
“Have you ever even been on earth?” Sophie asked the mermaid, curious. “On the land?”
Syrena nodded. “Once, very long time ago. I was young, perhaps your age. Was very terrible.”
“What happened?”
Syrena sighed. “Here,” she said, and held out her tail to the girl. “You hold on, I pull you.”
And they headed off like that in the direction of the North Sea. At first it was fun, but as Syrena gained velocity, Sophie started to panic. She might as well have been a fish caught in the mermaid’s hair or a hermit crab stowed away in the crook of her hip fins, for Syrena pumped her tail powerfully, beating against the waters as she rocketed against the current, with no thought about the teenager hanging on to her tail for dear life.
Clasping the mermaid’s dense, slippery tail with her hands wouldn’t work, so Sophie wrapped her arms around the end in a desperate hug. With the force of the waters pulling at her and the relentless twisting of the mermaid’s movements threatening to shake her off, Sophie’s body shook like a flag in a hurricane. She thought of fake cowgirls on mechanical bulls, how they got flung off, their butts on the ground. Where would Sophie land if Syrena flicked her off her tail? And would the mermaid even know she was gone?
“Syrenaaaaaaaaaa!” Sophie hollered. But her mouth filled with water as her cry bubbled out, lost in their wild wake as they cut through the ocean. Could she risk lifting a hand off the tail, to give the mermaid a smack? Even loosening her grip destabilized her. She would go spinning off into the water, a one-girl whirlpool. There was only one way to get the mermaid’s attention. Sophie bit Syrena’s tail.
Her first try, just a nibble, didn’t even register. The mermaid’s scales were tough, thick, and they were slick like the rest of her skin but not nearly as soft as the skin of her upper body. So Sophie went in harder the next time, channeling a shark. And it worked. With an underwater shriek, the mermaid bucked and slammed her tail, and Sophie’s curiosity about what would happen to her if she flew off her ride was satisfied. She was flipped, head over heels, high into the water above their heads—catapulted, as if shot from a cannon. In the dark waters she couldn’t tell which way was up and she flailed, trying to right herself. The rapid ascent hurt, shooting cramps through her chest and making her ears pop like gunshot.
Sophie groped blindly at the ocean around her until she noticed, coming from above, the faintes
t blue light growing stronger. It was the mermaid, appearing not from above but below. With a yank of the girl’s arms, Syrena straightened Sophie in the waters, then hung there, glaring at her. The girl was dizzy from her tumbling, her ears clogged and popping. The ocean around them was cloudy with the black curls of water spouting from vents in the floor beneath them.
“What that about?” Syrena demanded. “You hungry? Here—” she shot her hand out into the dark and snagged a baby octopus, thrust the squirm of it at Sophie. “Eat this. Don’t eat mermaid!”
“I wasn’t eating you, Syrena!” Sophie accepted the small octopus and let its tentacles twine her fingers. “I was trying to get your attention! I can’t hold on to your tail like that. We need to do something else.” The octopus half climbed, half swam, in its mysterious octopus way, up Sophie’s arm.
“You very much baby,” Syrena observed. “I know this be tough for spoiled human girl from the land. To bring you into Maumarr.”
“To bring me where?” Sophie asked, confused.
“Maumarr,” the mermaid repeated. Her voice in the first part of the word sounded low and sonic, like a whale, then ending in what sounded like a growl. “This place is Maumarr. Mermaid word for the sea.”
“Maoooooo,” Sophie began awkwardly, and Syrena shushed her.
“Don’t,” she said. “Human girl cannot make mermaid sound, cannot speak mermaid language. I use your words for things, so you understand. But mermaids have our own words, you know. Older words than your human words. We be down here longer, we know it all forever. Humans not understand life here. Is cold, and hard. You must be strong.” The mermaid shook her head, remembering that she was annoyed with the girl for biting her tail, and even for riding along on her body in the first place. “What am I, a bus?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Sophie tried not to whine, not to be “very much baby.” The octopus had drifted up her neck, tickling as it moved into the salty tangle of her hair. “You really can’t carry me?” she asked the mermaid. “Am I too heavy?”