Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

by Michelle Tea

  “No!” Ella cried. Her talking came fast. “You passed out and then you just stayed that way, you stayed that way and your breathing got weird and I poured water on you, I smacked you, I shook you, I was yelling in your ear, I was fucking praying for you, Sophie, I was praying to god, I thought you were dead.” In its heat and speed Ella’s voice took on the tone and timbre of her mother’s, her everyday voice suddenly enlivened with accent, a backbeat of Spanish giving her words a new pulse. Ella shook her head and wiped her face with the back of her hand, her face still wet with its own water, her nose gooey. “Not dead,” she said, taking a manic drag from her cigarette. “Brain-dead. I thought you were in a coma. You were out for an hour. I thought that was it.”

  Sophie was stunned. She’d been out an hour? Even her dream vision didn’t feel that long, maybe fifteen minutes, and dreams always felt much longer than they actually were. A normal pass-out lasted five minutes max, and most of that was just being too enamored with the tingly, relaxed sensation to break the spell by moving your body. An hour? She felt a chill dread play through her. Why had she let Ella talk her into playing pass-out?

  “An hour,” Sophie breathed.

  “Why was there a fish in your mouth?” Ella demanded. “What the fuck? Am I on drugs or something? Like acid, LSD? Did someone put something in my—” Ella wracked her brain for what she had eaten that day and came up with very little. Even the pizza from the boy on the beach had gone uneaten; as cute as he was, Ella was certain his hands were dirty, and she wasn’t going to put the food he’d touched in her mouth. She’d ingested hardly anything that day. She looked down at the cigarette fuming in her hand. “My cigarette!” she exclaimed. “Did someone put something in my cigarette?” She let it fall, half-smoked, from her hand and scuffed it out with her flip-flop.

  Sophie sat up and considered her vision. A mermaid had come for her. Her hair was a disaster and she had a bad attitude. If not for being a mermaid, Sophie thought the creature would fit right at home in her very own family, or probably anywhere in Chelsea. She was grumpy and tired, not at all what Sophie thought a mermaid should be. Mermaids were happy, weren’t they? Happy to not be human, to have fish tails, to get to swim through the ocean without a shirt on, friends with all the animals. Wasn’t her father a king or something? Weren’t all mermaids underwater princesses? They had great, burly dads with dripping silver moustaches and golden pitchfork-y things. When they got mad, the ocean made waves. Mermaids were supposed to spend their days idly grooming their hair with fishbone hair combs, singing sweet songs, gazing at their reflections in a polished seashell. Sophie’s mermaid wasn’t even pretty. She looked like she hadn’t combed her hair in hundreds of years, her face was tough and sunken, maybe an edge of beauty hung there but it was the eroded beauty found of a wicked villainess, not the innocent beauty of a mermaid. Sophie’s mermaid was not innocent, not sweet. Sophie remembered the curse words streaming from the curl of her lip; she swore worse than Ella, who had the vocabulary of a truck driver or sailor. Or a girl from Chelsea. Sophie’s mermaid’s tail was not a curling hunk of jewels but the scabby flank of a sick fish for sale in a mall pet store.

  “Were you even passed out?” Ella asked, accusingly. “Did you even have a vision?”

  Sophie yanked down the wet collar of her t-shirt, so Ella could see the sea glass. She was afraid to touch it. It felt different on her skin, hotter or colder, Sophie wasn’t sure. Just electrified somehow, charged. Sophie was surprised to see it look so ordinary. She thought it should still be glowing, that there should be an image of the mermaid imprinted on the seashell.

  “Yeah?” Ella peered at it. “What about it?” She regretted stubbing out that cigarette. She was in the grip of a nic fit. It was either smoke, or begin to obsess on the multitude of germs she’d just gotten on her body. Creek bacteria, festering diseases from that dirty bottle—there was probably dried spit on it somewhere, from whoever had drunk from it. Stuck in the weeds for so long, some animal had probably peed on it. Some animal or some boy or some man. She snatched at her purse and rifled for her pack.

  “This is what Angel gave me. Remember, I told you? I had a—” Sophie was hesitant to call it a vision, or a dream. She knew it was real. “I saw a mermaid, and she had one like it, and both of them were glowing and we were in the water. We were in the creek, right there.” Sophie pointed to the water gleaming flatly beside them. It barely picked up the moonlight, so dense was it with ick. “She’s some famous mermaid from Poland. She was sort of gnarly, like she wasn’t beautiful, her hair was really awful, and she said she’s going to help me fix Chelsea. I was talking to her underwater. We had this whole conversation. Then she did something.” Sophie’s lungs felt heavy with the memory. A twinge of the darkness she’d been shown shuddered through her. She coughed a tiny cough, and spat a splat of creek water. “Do you have any gum?” she asked her friend.

  “A famous mermaid?” Ella tossed Sophie a pack of gum from her purse. “What’s she, like, Beyoncé mermaid? Does she sing? That’s a weird vision.” Ella lit up and breathed deeply from her cigarette. Her words jumbled out on a wave of smoke. “Usually not so much happens.”

  “Usually nothing happens!” Sophie exclaimed. Usually you just had a feeling, a strange and dreamy moment, and poof, it was gone, and you tingled. Sophie didn’t tingle. Her jaw hurt as she worked the gum around her teeth. She touched it.

  “I smacked you,” Ella admitted. “I’m sorry. You were out for an hour.” She stabbed her cigarette in the dark, toward Sophie. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought you were in a coma.” A wave of the fear, still so close, broke over her again and tears squeezed out her eyes.

  “It’s okay,” Sophie said. “That’s what they do on TV. And salts. Smelling salt.” Something tugged at Sophie at the thought of salt. She felt the sear of it on her tongue, and rubbed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, seeking the flavor of it.

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t have any smelling salt,” Ella said. “What about the water? How was there so much water inside you? That was even scarier than your coma or whatever.”

  “From you pouring it on me?” Sophie suggested, even though she knew it wasn’t so. She’d felt the dribble of the creek water hitting her face, a weak splash. Not the tsunami her body expelled.

  Ella shook her head. “No way,” she said.

  “It was from talking underwater,” Sophie said. “It had to be. I must not know how to do it right. I must have gotten a bunch of water in my lungs.”

  Ella stared at her. “You weren’t really underwater, Sophie.”

  Sophie nodded. “I think I was.”

  “I fucking promise you,” Ella said, “that you were right here. You were lying right here hardly breathing while I smacked you and threw water on you. You were not in the creek. I fucking promise you.”

  Sophie thought of the mermaid. “You don’t have to swear so much,” she told her friend. “I would still understand your point if you didn’t.”

  “I don’t fucking think you would,” Ella raged. “I don’t fucking think you understand right now how scary it was that you almost died, and then you go and puke fish, and now you sound crazy, like maybe you’re brain damaged or something. Sophie!” Ella started to cry again.

  Sophie appreciated her friend’s point. Sophie totally sounded crazy. She supposed one of two things was happening. She was either crazy, or she wasn’t. She mulled it over. Thinking that she might be crazy made her feel crazy, right away. If she doubted any one thing that had happened to her over the past twenty-four hours—the way she’d felt her mother’s feelings, or Laurie LeClair’s; the way she’d come at Angel’s and found them hard, hidden, and now the mermaid and something wide and dark beyond her, something she wasn’t allowing herself to remember—if she doubted any one of these things then she’d have to doubt everything, and she knew so much to be true. If she thought that maybe, just possibly, something incredible was happening, that didn’t make her feel crazy at all. It made her f
eel upside-down and a little bit scared, but exhilarated, too. Not crazy.

  “Ella,” she addressed her friend. “I don’t think I’m crazy. I think I was just hanging out underwater with this totally busted, sort of mean mermaid.”

  Ella stared at her friend, waiting for her to snap psych! or at least bust up laughing. It didn’t happen. “Oh, no,” wailed Ella, watching Sophie’s wide-eyed, earnest face. “Great. Fucking great. You totally ruined your brain.”

  Chapter 11

  Ella left in shambles, more disturbed for what she’d seen and couldn’t understand than Sophie, who’d been its source. Sophie, who she’d left sitting on the bank of the creek, dripping and stunned, watching her walk away. Collecting herself on the walk home, Ella assembled a fake story about how mellow things had been at her tia’s house—which tia not important, her story would be brief, vague, delivered with a shrug, the low-grade sulkiness her family had come to expect from her, dismissing it with humor as hormones. What a relief to get some time alone! Ella would cry, grateful and complaining at the same time. She would be a regular girl, a teenager, a fashion magazine rolled glossy in the hand. Not a girl whose best friend had almost died from a freak drowning accident while not actually in any water. Not a girl whose best friend had lost her mind. Ella’s heart felt tight with sorrow and panic. What if what was wrong with Sophie was contagious? She rued their choice of the creek as their secret meeting place. Who knows what toxins had seeped into the banks, what invisible fumes had wafted up from the crumbly dirt, poisoning them? Ella’s mind spun. She would go home to her computer and google remedies for toxic waste exposure, she would find the antidote and she would scrub the vapors from the inside.

  * * *

  AT THE CREEK, Sophie lingered. She wasn’t ready to go home, to walk her changed, stranged self into her regular old house, to see everything so normal and dull when she felt extraordinary. She sat at the bank, the night around her ringing in empty silence. The echoes of her fight with her friend had faded, but Sophie felt charged from the conflict, from the mermaid. How would she be able to sleep? How would she ever be able to sleep again?

  Stabbing at the ground with a dusty stick, Sophie half-wished she smoked. It gave you something to do when you weren’t sure what to do next. She dropped the stick, took a snarl from the base of her skull into her hand and began to unweave it. The untangled hair frizzed in a kink, like the strands were just dying to snarl themselves together again. Sophie smoothed them with her fingers. She thought of the mermaid’s hair. It would be a full-day project, untangling that mess.

  Sophie heard the pigeons before she saw them, alerted by the music of their feathers. The bamboo whistles fluted gently, almost like wind in a tree. The flock of them descending before her was something. Their dark mass not fully visible in the night, just shapes landing, the noise of their flutter, the wind of them coming to a stop in the air and settling to the ground.

  Sophie faced them. Am I crazy, she asked herself, or have these pigeons come to see me? The head pigeon waddled forth from the pack, her tiny, bobbing head flicking on her neck, trying to get the best angle with which to regard Sophie. Her bamboo flute stuck stiffly behind her, like the cumbersome but dignified sword worn by a long-ago soldier. Behind her, the flock took a collective, respectful step back. Not crazy, Sophie decided, and pulled her sea glass from her shirt. It didn’t have quite the regal affect she wanted it to have, strung as it was to a piece of grimy cord, her house key dangling beneath it. It should be on a golden chain, Sophie thought. It should be hung from a rope of pearls. Still, it caught the bit of moonlight the night sky had to offer and lit with a dull gleam, an echo of the undersea glow it had shared with the mermaid.

  “Is it okay,” the pigeon began, “if we talk to you? We don’t want to scare you.”

  The pigeon’s voice was beautiful. It was a soothing sound, melodious. It was a lullaby, a noise made with love to address the beloved, a coo. Sophie wondered if the bird spoke in such a way to everyone, or if she were special. Then she realized that a pigeon was speaking to her, and realized she was in fact quite special. Special, not crazy.

  “You don’t scare me,” Sophie responded. “Are you Livia, Dr. Chen’s pigeon?”

  The bird ducked its head in a deliberate nod. “Dr. Chen takes care of us. We roost in the home she keeps for us on her roof. But we are all our own birds.” The flock cooed in agreement.

  “Sophie,” Livia began. “We know so much about you. We’ve been waiting for you for so long; generations of pigeons speak of your coming. We can’t believe we are so lucky to be here, in Chelsea, at the time of your arrival. We’ve been keeping your story for you, and the greater story you are to become a part of. We’ve taken such care to repeat the story carefully, to remember all the details and not confuse them. Your story is so old, none of us can trace its origin, it’s just the story we have always been told and have grown to tell our fledglings. Back when there were carrier pigeons, the carrier pigeons told the story of you. Back before we were degraded, when we were called rock doves and lived in barns and trees and were regarded by humans the way other birds are regarded, respected, even then we told your story.”

  “But then there was rebellion—” another bird stepped forwarded, his waddle more pronounced. Sophie could see that one of his pink bird legs ended not in a pronged claw, but in a mottled bundle, a blob. It looked painful to walk upon, and she watched the bird shift its weight, holding the wounded foot gingerly above the ground. “When the wars with the humans began, when they started leaving us poison, poison to eat and poison to land in, just poison everywhere, and that foolish rice they think we’d be dumb enough to eat, and throwing nets over our homes so that we were separated from our babies and our babies would die, and when they nailed jagged things to where we slept so that we had to roam the streets, looking for a safe place to sleep that wasn’t netted or poisoned or nailed with jagged things—”

  “Arthur,” Livia cooed at the bird, who had gotten quite heated, his feathers trembling.

  “All I mean is, throughout all of this, still we kept your story, all of us here.” Arthur’s wing swung out from his side and motioned to the shifting crowd behind him. “Many birds refused. They almost had me convinced, too, after my accident.” Arthur shook his melted foot at Sophie. “I was so hurt and in such pain. I thought, Why should we do anything for people, when they are trying, day and night to kill us?”

  “Arthur,” Livia cooed.

  “I know,” he assured her. “Livia brought me to my senses. It’s the darkness in the humans that makes them do such things. I tried to explain this to the rebellion, but they didn’t want to hear it. They refused to keep your story, or worse, they tried to scramble it, tell a false story, and fill it with misinformation.”

  “Why?’ Sophie asked, distraught at the thought of a flock of shit-talking pigeons out to smear her name.

  “Because they hate humans,” Arthur explained with a feathery shrug. “And you have been sent here to save them.”

  “Save humans?” Sophie asked. “Save them from what?”

  “From themselves, dear,” Livia spoke. “From the darkness inside them. You have felt it, is that correct? How old are you?”

  “Thirteen,” Sophie said. The birds cooed and fluttered.

  “Well, thirteen, yes, surely you would have felt some of this, this human darkness? The mermaid, there in the creek. She showed it to you, is that right?” The bird spoke with a politeness that seemed to belong to another era. If she were a woman, Sophie thought, a straw hat would sit on her head, and her hands would wear white gloves. Sophie held on to this idea of Livia as the reminder of what happened in the creek began to curl the edges of her memory. If all the pain the world had ever felt, the pain of the predator and of the victim, if all that madness had been stuffed into a cave to fester and ferment for a hundred thousand years—that was the hole Sophie had been dropped into. The recollection made the hair across her body stand as if surged with electrici
ty, and her bowels churned like she’d eaten something foul.

  “Oh,” said Livia, waddling toward the girl. “Oh, now, I didn’t mean to—” Livia lept upon Sophie’s shoulder and placed the soft tip of her wing to her clammy forehead. “Salt!” Livia barked, and a handful of birds took the sky, scattering in different directions. Livia unfolded her wing and fanned Sophie’s sweating face.

  “I’m sorry,” Sophie murmured. “I don’t know why I feel so sick all of a sudden. If I could lie down…”

  A trio of birds swept the dirt with their wings, brushing back rocks and chip bags, plastic soda cups and smashed glass. Sophie laid her head on the soft patch of dirt they’d combed for her. She could feel where her wet hair had crusted to her cheeks, stuck there with mud and creek grime. She placed her hands to her gurgling stomach. “The creek water,” she said to the bird. “I was in the creek… or the water got in me, I don’t know…”

  “It’s not that, lovey,” cooed the bird, pushing cooled air through her feathers and into Sophie’s face. Sophie inhaled the smell of the bird. Not the stink of a rat, though Sophie now realized she had never smelled a rat. Livia smelled like hay, Sophie imagined, something woodsy and warm. Like the pavement, yes, but like the pavement on a hot day, baked like clay, a clean-dirty smell. Livia smelled like Sophie did after a day playing in the sun. A sort of golden sweat. But she smelled like flowers, too. Like lilacs, that faint, watery fragrance. It calmed Sophie.

  “You smell nice,” she complimented the bird.

  “Oh, why thank you,” Livia cooed. “I try to take care of myself, you know.”