Girl at the Bottom of the Sea

by Michelle Tea

  “No, Syrena sighed. “Very light. Tell truth, can’t feel you at all. Is just principle. I am not donkey. I was told—when I come for you—that you are magic girl, and I think magic girl can swim.”

  The octopus had settled itself on the top of Sophie’s head, sort of off to the side like a little hat. It nibbled some crab larvae from her hair, its many legs burrowing into Sophie’s snarls. She reached up and gingerly stroked the tiny beast the way she had taken to stroking Livia’s feather, wound in her curls. Her hair was becoming a real catchall.

  Syrena sighed deeply, releasing a chain of shimmering bubbles in the water. “Okay,” she thought out loud. “You are part girl, which cannot swim like mermaid. You don’t have this,” Syrena stretched the marvel of her tail before them, gathered it into her arms, petting herself. Frowning, she picked at some scaly bits that hung from her long appendage. “I am mess,” she said grimly. “When all is over, I get my tail fixed. Anyway—girl part cannot swim with girl body, ya. But Odmieńce has magic.” The mermaid’s flashing eyes lit upon Sophie. “Do not try to swim like girl. Swim like Odmieńce!”

  Sophie gathered herself in the water. Swim like Odmieńce? She tried to feel powerful. She would charge powerfully forward, like a superhero bursting into the air! She counted to three in her head and lunged forward sloppily, tripping over her feet. She sunk into a hot cloud and emerged with her face sooty from minerals. It was even more bumbling than when she was simply trying to swim. Syrena cringed and covered her face with the tip of her tail.

  Gritting her teeth, bits of sand and minerals crunching beneath, Sophie hurled herself through the water again and again. But each time she just flailed, lacking even the grace of slapstick. She kicked the underwater geysers and muddied the waters. Syrena grew weary. It did not take long; patience was not one of the mermaid’s magics.

  “Listen, I told you are big special! I not abandon my river to the Boginki unless you real big deal! But this? This, how you say—bullshit!” Syrena’s hands were balled into fists, planted on her hips above her little fins. “You want to go against Kishka? Kishka command the water into a fist to pummel us! You can’t even swim through it!”

  Sophie remembered her terror as the creek rose up at her grandmother’s command. What she saw as she was punched into the sky—her grandmother’s many faces reflected in the water as if in a million shards of glass. Kishka did not move through the water, she made the water move. She was Odmieńce, 100 percent. But Sophie was only half. And was it even half? It’s not like she’d been tested at some sort of Magic Lab. Who knew—maybe her Odmieńce gene was weak. Maybe there had been a rotten mistake. She looked glumly at her impatient tutor.

  “You command the waters,” Syrena said flatly. “Or I summon a dolphin to bring you back to creek in Chelsea. I’ll be done with you.”

  Sophie gazed out into the water. It was like looking into a dark sky—grayness all around, monsoon clouds erupting from the floor. She knew there were millions of molecules here, but it looked like nothing. Darkness. She felt her magic pouch still tied to her belt loops, hanging soggy in the water. What was even inside it now? Mud? She poked and squeezed it, but was not called to it. She dropped it, and it floated limply beside her.

  While she waited, Syrena plucked a piece of shell from her hair and busied herself filing her opalescent fingernails into wicked points. She curled her lips and brought down her baleen, coated in debris from the geyser. With a huff she blew it all back into the ocean.

  Sophie turned away from her. She didn’t want to waste her time hating the mermaid. It wouldn’t help her out of this problem, this terrible problem—thousands of miles beneath the sea, far from any land, and barely able to swim. She bit down her rising panic. She closed her eyes and floated. She breathed in and out slowly, slowly, letting the water hold her. And it did, it did hold her. She was suspended ever so lightly above the vents in the ocean floor, the hot clouds billowing around her.

  What was holding her, exactly? What was water? It moved at the command of the moon, coming in strong and pulling back. It moved at the command of her grandmother, gathering itself, working against nature. Was Kishka the ocean itself? Had they swum deeper and deeper to escape something that was now all around them, something endless just waiting to strike them again? Would the sea suddenly hurl them into the sky, or would it wrap around their throats like an ocean-sized anaconda? What was this water they moved through?

  “Syrena, is the water… could it be Kishka? Could she turn into the whole ocean? Is the ocean on her side?”

  The mermaid looked at Sophie evenly and shook her head. “Ocean my home always. Ocean is ocean. Is water, is element. Basic. Like air, like fire and the earth, the lava and sand and dirt. Elements are neutral. If you have magic to work them, you make them good or evil, like puppets.”

  Sophie remembered the fist-shaped wave punching up from the water. She remembered the flash of her grandmother in her beastly bird formation, reflected in every drop of the creek. How powerful was Kishka, able to summon and control nature itself: perhaps she was nature, an unknown force of it. But Sophie was Kishka’s granddaughter. She might not be able to summon the waters and make them box for her, but surely she could figure out how to swim.

  Sophie calmed herself and grew quiet. She began to truly feel the water, alive all around her. Though she felt stillness in its embrace, she became aware of its motion, its constant shifting, the way it perpetually morphed and flowed over her body. The waters accommodated her, filling the space around her as she bobbed and floated. Its motion was never ending; its thought—thought?—ancient and eternal.

  The waters, Sophie suddenly understood, were alive. She understood it deep in her body, half girl, half Odmieńce, a body made up of so much water—indeed, most of her body was water, and Sophie started to feel the communication happening. Her body’s water in conversation with the ocean around her, like the beating of her heart, the motion of blood in her veins, an automatic, subconscious activity. Like a whisper. Sophie was water. And so she spoke to the ocean, and asked that it carry her.

  Syrena felt the motion of a new current at the bottom of the sea. A rippling, a whirling. The girl was stretched out as if upon a magic carpet of water, thick with salt and sand, alive with primal intelligence. The water responded to Sophie as it did the moon. The girl had created a tide, and the waters rushed together and brought her forward, stopping short before the mermaid. They idled there, the harmonious interaction of a million drops of water, and Sophie could feel them all, buzzing like a hive of bees working in concert, with her as a conductor. When the current stopped short Sophie exploded into giggles.

  “I get it!” she cheered, wild with glee. “The water is alive!”

  “Everything is alive,” Syrena nodded, pleased. “Everything is alive, and has its own magic. This you will see, my girl.” The mermaid smiled so wide that Sophie caught a glimpse of the gritty baleen tucked above her teeth. “Now, you swim. Not like girl, not like mermaid. Like Odmieńce.”

  Chapter 7

  And so the two shot off into the waters, in the direction of the North Sea, where the Swilkie spun itself atop the surface, a great white froth. Syrena pushed through the ocean with her muscular tail, her head bowed down, her arms forming a knife that cleaved the waters.

  Beside her, Sophie worked the sea, not so much with her body as her mind. With great focus she commanded the waves and they carried her with a swiftness that rivaled the mermaid herself. Syrena tilted her head at her charge, smirking through the net of hair webbed in her face.

  “You think you so smart now, huh? You think you faster than mermaid?” Her tail thundered behind her and she moved through the waters like pure sound.

  “Ha!” Sophie spat. “You think you’re faster than water itself?” And the current surged violently, propelling Sophie forward and knocking Syrena off course with the strength of its waves.

  “Okay, okay!” the mermaid tumbled, waving her arms. She looked like Sophie once had
, twisting dumbly in the waters. The girl felt a pang at the sight, to see such a noble, capable creature fumbling in her element. She stilled the current, feeling it treading beneath her, alive and waiting direction.

  “I’m sorry!” Sophie hollered. Syrena had collected herself, smoothing her tangles against her temples and tucking the locks behind her ears. Her pride appeared to have a dent in it.

  “Is okay,” the mermaid grumbled. “I ask for it. I just happy you swimming, okay? Why do I care if you faster than me?”

  It appeared to Sophie that the mermaid did care, but she politely pretended not to notice. “Syrena, were you really going to leave me out here? Or send me back to Chelsea on a dolphin or whatever?”

  “If you not real magic girl, ya.” She nodded. “If you not real magic, the plan not to work. You just get hurt, I get hurt, all the mermaids, everyone. You best be home, then. But”—her smile twinkled, the glow of her talisman flashing her canines—“I know you be magic girl. I always know. I just need to make you fight sometimes.”

  A feeling of longing swept over Sophie—she wanted to hug Syrena, but she knew the mermaid would never allow it. How she missed some tenderness! Her mother, Angel, the flutter of soft pigeon wings against her cheek. This work was hard. How she’d love something gentle to offset the struggle. But Syrena would not give that to her. It wasn’t the mermaid’s way. Sophie knew Syrena cared about her—she’d brought her to the middle of the Atlantic on her own back, fed her from the tangles of her hair. Syrena believed in her. But she wasn’t going to give her a hug. Sophie pushed the need away and did her best to emulate the mermaid—proud, tough, cool. Syrena was cool, Sophie realized. Like, probably the coolest person Sophie’d ever met. Well, not “person,” exactly, but still.

  “Know what would be nice thing?” Syrena asked. “You make current a little wider, you tell water to come over to me too, ya? We both get there much faster. You do this?”

  “I don’t know if I can,” Sophie said.

  “Stop with that,” the mermaid said. “You Odmieńce, you do anything. You must remember, never doubt. Doubting make you human. Knowing make you Odmieńce. Doing make you Odmieńce. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Sophie said, embarrassed at how quickly she turned back into a dumb, thirteen-year-old human. All it took was one challenge for her to dissolve into insecurity. Forget learning how to wall off her thoughts, or how to command the waters. What Sophie needed to learn was confidence.

  So she did not ask, she told the waters to spread out around her, to catch Syrena in their current. And the water did her bidding.

  As the two were carried toward the North Sea, Syrena slowed her motions and Sophie became entranced, watching the hypnotic roll of the creature’s torso and tail as she coasted along the waters. Cruise control, Sophie thought, and giggled. Her mother had been so excited when she’d gotten a car with cruise control. The feature had broken on the thirdhand car not too long after she’d bought it, but Sophie still remembered her mother’s delight. Something about not having to work so hard. About getting to relax while the vehicle picked up the slack. When Sophie was done with all this she’d teach her mother to talk to the air, she’d show her how to fly. Or at the very least, she’d get her a new car.

  SOMETHING THE MERMAID had said was haunting Sophie, something about her time on the land. What had she said? Was very terrible. She wanted to ask the creature to elaborate, but felt sheepish. Even though it felt like a magical fairy tale Syrena was spinning, it wasn’t. It was her life. Just like the talking pigeons of Chelsea weren’t myths at all but part of Sophie’s own half-human life. Just like the story of her grandfather, turned into a dog. Not a story at all. Real. Sophie realized she had much more in common with Syrena—with a mermaid—than she would ever have thought.

  As if the mermaid was in her mind, reading her thoughts, Syrena turned to Sophie. “Where I leave off?” she mumbled. “Oh, yes. The mermaids leaving their eggs to the waters. The foam that came up in their mouths. It taste so bad to eat the foam!” the mermaid cried. “Some mermaids try just to spit it out, but the foam, it will find the eggs, and protect them. Is what foam meant to do. Then you have half-protected eggs, growing, only to be killed when bigger. Much sadder. Much, much sadder.”

  Syrena’s thoughts filled with the memory of the nest of mermaid eggs that had managed to survive on the edge of the village. Patched with just enough foam, they had gestated in a hole in the coral that had been abandoned by an eel. They grew to a hopeful size, and it was then, just as they were making their way into the village, that the sunfish attacked them. The sunfish is all head, all terrible, gobbling head, and it took the baby mermaids into its beak and tore at them. They looked like moons in the water, terrible moons sucking the baby mermaids back into their jaws and again spitting them out, doing this over and over until they were small enough for the fish to swallow.

  The grown mermaids huddled and screamed. Some flung spears at the wide, round fish, but their spears sunk harmlessly into the water. The elder mermaids had stayed the hands of the ones who’d tried to kill the fish. “They weren’t supposed to live,” one said, sad and stern. “Don’t make it harder.”

  Young Syrena had huddled beside her sister. Before that day, how Syrena had loved the goofy sunfish, with its one giant fin on the top of its head and another beneath. Before Syrena had ever seen the sun, this beast was its golden image. But now it was nothing more than a monster to her. Syrena cried, hiding her face in her sister’s greenish-golden tangles.

  “Now, now,” the mermaid who cared for Syrena tried to calm her at night, wrapping her in a blanket woven from mermaid hair and seaweed, then tucking her into a clamshell. “The sunfish can’t hurt you, you’re much too big!”

  “They’re horrible!” the young mermaid wailed. “I hate them!”

  “They’re just living, as we all are. Think of how the fish must hate us for eating them. Think of the clams and the crabs and the lobsters.”

  Eventually, Syrena fell into a sleep thick with nightmares, dreaming of giant heads with tiny, vicious mouths, floating toward her. She would always hate the sunfish.

  THOUGH THE ELDER mermaids thought Syrena and her sister spoiled, they couldn’t stop the village from indulging them. It would be too cruel. Many of the mermaids doted upon the pair, teaching them mermaid ways—how to sing their songs and tend to their tails, where to find food and which bones and shells to collect for necessary things, like tools and weapons, but also for beauty, to decorate and ornament. They taught Syrena and her sister how and where to hide, from sharks, from ships, from humans, and, for Syrena, from the sunfish that still terrified her.

  It was in Syrena and Griet’s fiftieth year—when they were no longer babies but not quite full grown—that the Great War came to their waters. The mermaids who kept watch at the furthest ends of the village saw the ships approaching, and the low cries they sounded to alert the others grew as they twined together, surging into a wail that froze each mermaid in her task. This wasn’t a common warning from just one corner, alerting of a passing ship. This was a siren coming from every edge of the village, raising the alarm. Could ships really be coming in from so many directions?

  They were. The ships came swiftly, dropping anchor in the middle of the mermaids’ village. Syrena and Griet clutched each other’s hands, their eyes cast to the water’s surface, where the giant curves of metal and their lengths of clattering chain crashed through. Mermaids darted away from the plummeting objects, but the anchors smashed through the intricate seashell roofs of their homes and gathering places.

  Before the mermaids could begin to register the destruction, the humans in the ships began their fight. The ceiling of the mermaids’ world, the watery surface that rolled with waves, refracting beams of sunlight, that hazy, shifting blue, was torn in a blast of thunder. Cannon shot pierced their sky and sunk into the village, crumbling more homes. The humans seemed committed to killing not only one another but whatever got in the way of their wa
rring, be it mermaids or whales or gulls or dolphins. The waters became clouded with blooms of red, calling scavenging sharks to join the carnage.

  Swiftly the mermaids tied protective shells around their bodies and took up rocks as shields. “To the trenches!” one mermaid hollered, and the villagers beat their tails toward the protective hollows they had dug when they first settled the bank. Debris rained all around them—chunks of wood from the prows of boats, dislodged guns, the sinking bodies of dead sailors. The mermaids swam furiously, dodging the flotsam and jetsam, dodging the cannon fire that seemed never to cease, not for a moment. From above the waves they could hear the men’s gruff screams and the creaking of ships being torn apart.

  Syrena held her sister’s hand and darted quickly toward the trenches, daring to look back at her village only once as she swam. Where the intricate and elegant dwellings of shells and bones and loops of rope once stood was now home to a sunken ship, alive with the struggles of drowning humans, a swirl of earthly objects spinning in the wet chaos. She faced forward to see a new ship cutting the waters right before her, and with a gasp she let go of her sister, pushing away from the ship’s violent passage.

  “Griet!” Syrena called to her sister, but the ship was already between them. “Griet!” she shouted, paddling her tail frantically so as to not be sucked beneath the vessel. The ships were more beastly than the most gobbling sea creature; they were not like animals that could be battled on their own terms but something else, a whole world crashing into the mermaids’ world, a planet bringing its own weather down into the waters.

  SYRENA DID NOT even know she was crying for her sister until she arrived at the trenches and found little Griet huddled in a corner by a pile of fishing nets, sucking on the arm of a starfish. “Griet!” she cried as she pushed toward her through the waters. She swept her sister up with her tail and buried her face in her hair, golden-green to Syrena’s blue-black but equally as tangled. The starfish in Griet’s grasp detached the arm the mermaid chewed upon, and she handed the rest of the creature to her sister. The two little mermaids sat in the dense mud, nervously nibbling while they clasped each other’s hands feverishly.