by A. L. Knorr
"Mom," I yelled hoarsely. A tentacle slapped across my cheek. I could see nothing with all of these fish around me, closed in so near that I could hardly draw breath. My heart pounded with panic, and I tried to sweep the fish aside with my hands to clear a visual. An orca brushed alongside me and gave a whistling shriek. I heard myself hyperventilating, the water whooshed through my gills and drowned out my thoughts. I had to get to clear water. I wriggled my way towards the centre of the whirlpool, directly under the boat.
I broke through the mass of fish and into the quiet space in the centre. The tank top drifted around my body, tickling my skin and irritating me. I ripped it off in anger. My eyes darted around at the cage of marine flesh. I couldn't see my mother anywhere. How thick was this circle of sea-life? The strangeness of their behaviour barely registered. I had to find my mom.
The diesel engine above my head came to life. I looked up, anger roiling in my blood. The propeller began to turn. Eric was going to drive away. He didn't care what happened to his friends, to my mom, he didn't care about the sharks that he'd murdered, only that he get away with it.
Anger changed my panic into focus. I could not let him get away. "No you don't," I said through a clenched jaw. I tuned in to the powers I had so recently discovered. I reached my hands towards the boat, targeting the propeller. I pulled as much oxygen in through my gills as I could and sent a jet stream of air at the prop. At nothing more than a though from me, a perfect bubble formed around the blades as they began to spin, removing all traction. The engine whined as the prop spun inside its sack of air. The boat drifted, its engine screaming with effort. Diesel fumes filled the water. Leaving the bubble of air around the prop, I swam straight towards the bottom. I reached the rocks at the sea floor and looked up.
Thoughts of my mother were clawing at my mind, but I could not let Eric go. I had to teach him a lesson. I was the only one who could. My connection to the ocean and the power I had been given drove me to focus on what Eric had done.
I looked at the circling fish, the whirlpool they'd created gave me an idea. I pulled on the centre of the whirlpool, making the dimple deeper and deeper. The boat sank into the funnel. I swirled the water with my hands and my thoughts and it responded. I imagined Eric going crazy onboard, completely terrified and baffled at why his engine wasn't doing its job as he got sucked down into a whirlpool of sea creatures.
I lowered the boat as though it was in an elevator shaft. I let the fish carry me around. Bodies bumped against me, fins and tentacles nudged me, wrapped around me. I watched the boat sink past. Eric was inside the cockpit, but all I could make out were his arms, working at the controls furiously.
The desire to let the water crash down on top of the boat was immense, I wanted to see it smashed into pieces and Eric's body torn to shreds by sharks. But I had a bigger purpose than revenge, now. I was not acting for myself anymore, but for the ocean, and indirectly - for all of humankind.
The boat's hull made contact with the marine floor. It tipped onto its side. I dropped and landed on human feet in wet sand and seaweed.
The funnel became a gorge as the water rolled back. Sharp rocks, sand and seaweed were exposed to the sun as I moved the water outwards, pushing it back with my mind as easily as moving a curtain of gauzy fabric. The bodies of finless sharks tumbled over as they fell out of the whirlpool.
Worry for my mother screamed at the edges of my mind, threatening me with a breakdown. My legs quaked and I prayed that she would not be among the corpses that tumbled from the sea, or I would lose all control and everything would come crashing down.
The sun streamed into the huge hole. More and more shark corpses fell out of the water and rolled across the rocks, blood oozed onto the sand and coral. I stood on the sand, my arms out, pushing the water back. The more I pushed, the more bodies fell, and soon hundreds covered the ocean floor. The sea bed looked like a battlefield.
I stopped the water and held it there with my mind, like a hand on a silk curtain. I walked around the boat. Eric was inside the cockpit, clinging to the wheel and his speargun. The steep angle of the boat had him mashed up against the glass on the side of the cockpit. He was white as a sheet. His chest heaved and his eyes darted around madly.
"Put down the gun and come out," I said, in my siren voice. His face softened, he dropped the gun and grabbed the door frame. He pulled himself up and out of the cockpit, fighting for purchase. He leapt down from the boat, his feet landing on the rocks. His entire body was quaking so hard that I could see it.
"Look around you," I said. I faced Eric, my back to the wall of water, the swirling fish going by, watching us. “Look at what you have done.” He looked around at the thousands of corpses scattered around us. Patches of red laced the ocean floor as blood oozed from the shark's wounds. The impact of what he had done began to show on his face. He put his shaking hands to the sides of his head, his face contorting. Tears spilled down his cheeks as his eyes took in the innocent slain.
I stood there naked, my hair stuck to my torso and back, my white body dripping.
"Who are you?" he choked out. He took a step but stumbled on the wet rocks and fell to his knees. He stayed there, looking up at me, his face warped by regret and pain.
"I am the sea," I said. My siren voice came out in full force, its multi-dimension coming from everywhere, as though even the fish were speaking along with me. "I do not belong to you. I do not exist for you to plunder and rape as you wish. Your actions do not go unseen, and will not go unpunished." Tears poured from my eyes now, flowing as fully as they ever had, rivulets of water poured down my face and body.
He bent at the waist and began to weep through his hands as though his heart was breaking. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he moaned.
"Do you deserve to live?"
He looked at me through wet eyelashes, over hands covering his mouth. A deep moan in his throat was my only answer.
"Fight for us, Eric," I said. "Not against us. You are more than this, better than this. Turn your energy against those who plunder us. Champion us. Protect us. Remember that you need us, and we need you."
He bowed his head and nodded, giving a choked sob. He wrapped his arms around his chest, tears dripped from his chin. All of his pride and arrogance was gone, his shoulders slumped, heavy with shame. "I will," he sobbed.
"Promise us.”
"I promise," was his whispered reply.
I let water from the column around us trickle back across the ocean floor towards the boat, pushing the bodies of sharks towards Eric. He stood awkwardly to his feet and stepped backwards, half falling in his horror. Corpses bumped around his legs and he gave a strangled cry at the dead eyes rolling up at him, the blood swirling around his feet. His face was waxy with fear.
The water reached his waist. He splashed towards the boat as it creaked slowly upright. Eric began to swim, grey bodies crowding around him. He latched onto the side of the boat, his body lifted from the bloody chum as it began to float. He fell over the railing and onto the deck, his head appeared a moment later as he looked out at me.
"Remember us as the voice of the sea," I said, the water rising up to my chin and lifting me off the ocean floor. "Remember this as your calling to change, to be a better human."
His face went slack as I changed my voice to give him a command. "Wait until I tell you to go."
"I'll wait until you tell me to go," he repeated.
I melted back into the wall of water as I let the sea lift the boat up past me and back to the surface.
Thirty-Eight
The moment the boat returned to the surface and released my hold over the water, the sea-life scattered. I blinked at their rapid departure and sudden change of behaviour back to normal fish.
"Mom!" I cried as the fish cleared away I spotted her pale skin and black hair. She was a small figure, far away, her back to me. A cloud of bloody water surrounded her. I swam to her side and rolled her to face me. Her eyes were closed. Blood flowed through a hole just u
nder her collarbone. The spear had gone right through her.
"Mom?" I said, the fear in my voice heightened by my siren strings. Please don’t be dead. Please. Please.
"Targa?" she said, her eyes drifting open. All of her predatory features were gone, no more fangs, no more penetrating eyes or sharp talons. She was just Mira, my mom. But she was so very still. She gave a pained smile. "I'm sorry, I failed you."
"No. No mom, you didn't." I looked at the wound, feeling strongly like I should cover it, touch it. I put one palm over the hole in her chest, and the other palm over the hole in her back. I closed my eyes, tuning in to the water and salt inside her. I felt the energy and healing power of the ocean flow into me.
"Targa? What's happening?" she asked, her voice growing stronger.
I couldn't answer her, I was too locked into her wound, watching in my minds eye as the ripped edges of her flesh and fractured bone stitched together. I felt energy draining out of my limbs and into her. I opened my eyes, sleepily, and pulled back from her.
She was staring at me, her eyes wide. Then she looked down at herself. Her wound was gone. "How..." she gaped. She rotated her arm, feeling no more pain. The realization of what I had become hit her. I watched the understanding dawn. She touched my face with her hand, her eyes full of awe.
I couldn't stop a face-splitting yawn from cracking my face in two. As my eyes opened, I spotted Donovan's body, drifting and turning not far from the surface. My mom followed my gaze.
"Do you think it's too late?" I asked.
She looked at me tenderly and said, "You're so much better than me. I don't give a crap about them. But if it makes you happy..."
My mother went after Donovan.
I summoned my strength and sent out a pulse from my heart. The shape of another human form came to me. The wheezing man had drifted nearly half a kilometre from the boat already, likely pushed away by my whirlpool. Something was wrong with his shape, it seemed incomplete.
Bile rose in my throat as I saw the body. Blood clouded the water around him and a gaping wound had been opened on his thigh in the semicircular shape of a shark's mouth. I hoped that the bite had happened after he'd already drowned. I swallowed hard, and a large shark appeared in my periphery. It circled the body. I turned and swam back to the boat.
Mom was already working on Donovan on the rear of the vessel. She gave me a questioning look as I surfaced and I shook my head. She gave a remorseless nod.
This vessel was designed to spill slurry off the rear into the water so there was no railing across the back. Mom had laid Donovan's body across the back and was working to revive him. Eric sat against the back of the cockpit, watching my mom. She must have given him instruction to stay put. His face was calm and watchful.
Donovan was unconscious and not breathing, his heart still. She'd already pulled the seawater out of his lungs by the time I returned. She compressed his chest with her hands, massaging the heart. I heard his ribs crack and I winced, but sympathy for him was notably absent from my mother's face. She worked on Donovan for a long time before I heard the thud of his heart. I wondered as I watched her how many times she had done this for a drowned person.
Donovan finally took a breath on his own. He coughed and groaned. Just as Donovan opened his eyes my mother spoke to him before he had a chance to panic. "Listen both of you," she said. Eric tuned in to her. "You're turning yourself in to the Coast Guard. You're going to show them what you've done and accept the consequences of your actions. You will not remember seeing mermaids today, and you'll never fin sharks again." Her voice filled the air with its power.
Eric repeated everything she said, but Donovan said nothing. His face was vacant of understanding.
"Donovan?" I said, looking at his face, the lack of awareness in his eyes.
"There is nothing we can do," said my mom. "We are too late. He's brain-damaged. Our voices are useless on him. I'm sorry, love. I tried." She slipped back into the water beside me.
I swallowed, looking at Donovan's profile from where I bobbed in the water. His eye blinked and he looked up at the sky, but his expression was not lucid. Would he ever recover? What would his life look like from this day forward?
"Let's go," mom said. I nodded, feeling exhaustion in every bone.
"You can go, Eric," I commanded, and he got to his feet. He helped Donovan stand, and the two moved awkwardly towards the cockpit. Donovan staggered drunkenly. The engine roared to life and mom and I moved away from the boat as it drove away from us. The sun was now low in the sky.
We submerged, and put our arms around each other in an underwater hug. I felt my eyes releasing hot tears into the ocean. We swam together for home. We didn't talk. In the salt water, things seemed simple and un-extraordinary.
But as I stepped out of the water on my legs and breathed air into my lungs, just as gravity pulled down on my body, my mind felt weighed down with responsibility. I felt completely drained - mentally, physically, and emotionally.
We arrived home in silence, walking up from the beach to the house. I focused on putting one foot after the other, not giving voice to my thoughts or emotions. We walked up to our trailer and entered our house. I realized that the trailer did not feel like home anymore, it just felt like a shelter, a shell. My mom squeezed my shoulder as we closed the trailer door behind us, and that simple caring touch soothed me.
I put a block in my mind and went through the motions of preparing dinner and then getting ready for bed. We still didn't talk. It was rare for us not to have a conversation over a meal, but both of us were exhausted and at a loss for what to say. We both knew that our argument from earlier was irrelevant now. After what had happened today, everything was upside down.
That night, mom and I both slept in her bed. We hadn't done that since my dad had died. We didn't talk about it, I just crawled in with her and she wasn't surprised when I did.
Thirty-Nine
I was swimming in bright teal water, the ocean floor was rich with vividly coloured coral and beautiful tropical fish. Little white sharks flanked me on all sides and stayed with me as I swam, mimicking my every move. We circled and danced in the water, their cool bodies nestling in close to mine and then spreading out and swimming away only to return to me again. A group of manatees joined us and spiralled slowly around me, the movement of the water spinning my hair into a rope. Sea snakes and eels spiralled around the manatees creating a magical choreography of the kind only seen in animated movies.
I opened my eyes and looked straight into my mom's face. I felt a stab of disappointment. It had been such a nice dream that I wanted to go back to sleep.
Mom was just looking at me, watching as I'd slept. She smiled. "Good morning sunshine. Sleep well? You looked so peaceful."
I nodded and rubbed my eyes. "I was having a nice dream. How long have you been awake?"
"Awhile. Thinking a lot about what happened yesterday."
"Yeah." I let out a long, slow breath and rolled onto my back.
"Turns out my mother was right all along," she said quietly, and I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes were shining. "The love your father and I had..." her voice quavered in a rare show of emotion. She swallowed. "It produced an elemental." A tear slipped down her cheek. "All these years I thought she was either lying or mistaken. All these years, I have been so bitterly disappointed." She brushed a strand of hair away from my face and smiled. "But she was right after all."
I nodded. I thought of my father, and my heart ached for him in a way it hadn't in years. He would never know the gifts that their love had given to me, and he wouldn't, even if he was still alive today. I took my mom's hand and squeezed. "You don't even know the half of it, mom," I said, pushing myself upright against the headboard.
"What do you mean?"
I told her about everything that had happened to me the day before: my sonar, my ability to control water. I explained to her what happened after she'd been shot. What I did with Eric and his boat, about the swirl
ing sea-life and the massive hole I'd created in the ocean. The field of dead sharks that shocked Eric into tears. She listened, her eyes growing round. When I finished, we sat in silence for a few moments.
Then she said, "All of my theorizing about you was so wrong. Being born in brackish water didn't make you weak at all. It meant that the moment you stepped into saltier water and saturated your system, all of your powers manifested fully. Just like sunshine opening a rose." She shook her head. "Look what authentic love can do."
"And what about what happened to you?" I asked.
"Me?" She looked genuinely surprised. "Nothing happened to me."
"What are you talking about? You looked like something out of a horror movie! Is that what salt-flush looks like, because if it does then you're going on a no-sodium diet."
She laughed. "No, honey. That wasn't salt-flush, that was just really, really pissed off."
“Well, remind me never to get on your bad side. What was with the scary..." I pointed to my dog-teeth, "...and the slitty..." I pointed to my eyes, drawing my lips back in a snarl and rolling my eyes. “You were terrifying!"
She shoved at my shoulder playfully. "A lot of good it did us. You are the one who saved us, and without the fangs and talons. I'm so proud of you."
"Thanks, Mom." My heart suddenly felt so full I thought it might burst.
She took a sharp breath like she was about to say something, but then stopped.
"What?"
"No, nothing." She shook her head. "Never mind."
“Don’t do that. Just spit it out."
"Well..." She was playing with the ties on the front of her sleep shirt, looking a bit embarrassed. It looked strange on her. "Does what happened yesterday, change how you feel... about... anything?"
I was quiet for a moment. It did, I could admit the truth to myself. My stomach gave a squeeze of anxiety as I realized that it had changed everything. "Yeah," I answered softly.