by A. L. Knorr
"No, I'm ok!" I replied, and received a mouthful of water for my efforts. I coughed and spat and then called, "The wind is pushing you away from me. I can't keep up!" I was swimming as fast as I could but the waves had more control over where I went than I did, and the lifejacket made my movements sluggish.
I watched as Antoni tried to yank the laser upright. I was surprised by how rapidly he was moving away from me. His face was growing smaller, harder to read. I never would have thought the wind could push a tipped boat so fast through the waves.
The laser wasn't very big but it had two sails which were both now under the water. It was completely on its side with Antoni perched awkwardly on top. It wasn't going to sink because it was made of fiberglass, but the only chance Antoni had of rescuing me was to get it sitting upright again.
He yanked and pulled on the mast with all his might, using his considerable weight. The sails lifted out of the water a few inches but wouldn't go any higher. Lasers were made to flip upright easily, but this one was designed for two people.
"The radio," I called, and got slapped in the face with another wave. I gasped and coughed.
He already had the radio up to his mouth. I couldn't hear him over the wind. In one angry motion, he threw the radio violently into the water. Why had he done that? Cold dread expanded in my stomach.
He called something over the water to me but he was so far away now that I couldn't make out a word. I was beginning to tire. If he didn't right the boat now, we each had an impossible decision to make. Antoni could abandon the laser and we could try to swim to land together, or he could continue to try to right the laser. The longer he tried, the more exhausted he would become and the further from me the wind would push him. At what point would we not be able to find each other anymore?
I on the other hand, could flail after him uselessly with my life vest holding me back or just stop swimming and bob in the wind and the waves and wait for him, hoping. A third option presented itself. I could take off the lifejacket and hold it out in front of me like a waterboard and use my legs to swim, either after the laser or towards the shore. I knew that I could swim a lot faster than I was swimming now. With every stroke I could feel the water swirl between my back and the life vest, creating drag.
Antoni and the laser were now so far away that I couldn't make out his face anymore. The boat was still on its side and I could see him pulling on it for all he was worth. He was yanking on it so violently, I wondered if he might accidentally snap the mast off.
I lay back in my life vest and floated, mulling the situation over. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths to squash the voice screaming panic in my head.
The cold was finally seeping into my bones. I shivered and my jaw clacked. I did not relish the thought of waiting and getting colder. I always felt better when I took action. This must have been something that my mother passed on to me. Never was she one to sit around and react to what life dealt her, she always took matters into her own hands.
I opened my eyes and my heart fell into a pit. The sky was getting darker by the second. A huge wave smashed me in the face, leaving me spitting and panting. That was it. I had to try.
I unsnapped my life vest, twisted the loose ends of the belt around my wrists and pushed it out in front of me. Up and down in the swells I went. I strained to look over the waves to see what had happened to Antoni and he was now a distant figure, barely visible. He disappeared behind a wall of water, and then appeared again, still struggling.
He was too far now for me to reach, so I pointed myself towards shore, which was alarmingly far away. I flattened out on the surface and began to kick my legs, but my kicks seemed useless to propel me. Was it possible that, despite my efforts, I was getting further from land? It felt like I was just getting dragged out to sea. I had never felt so powerless. My chin wobbled, and I fought back the urge to cry. How had things turned so bad so quickly?
A huge wave engulfed me and I was pulled under. My right hand let go of the lifejacket and that was all it took. The vest yanked out of my left hand like it was the ripcord of a lawn mower. The rope burn was hot and sudden. What a stupid mistake I had made. If I had had time for emotions other than fear and panic I might have felt humiliated, angry, and stupid.
Immediately I sank. All energy redirected to locating the surface. My lungs burned for air. I finally emerged and gulped oxygen greedily, looking around for the lifejacket.
The yellow vest was already several meters away. I splashed toward it but my exhausted limbs flailed uselessly. I had no control anymore and without something to hang onto I sank low in the water, feeling the enemy of my own weight in this saltless sea. Another wave buried me, pulled me under, pushed me down and turned me over.
Panic set in full blast as I tumbled like a sock in a washing machine. Survive, my mind screamed. Oxygen, my lungs wailed. Surface, my limbs cried. Which direction is up?
I opened my eyes. There was a source of light and a blob of dark in my muddled vision, but I was churning around so fast that they kept changing places.
Stop spinning and swim away from the dark, Targa! My chest burned. I rallied my fatigued limbs and made a push towards what I thought was the surface, but given my disorientation, I could have been sending myself deeper.
Where are you, Mother?
Another voice, one unattached to the outcome, laughed at the irony of the daughter of a mermaid, dead by drowning. Was this really how it was going to end?
As I made one more desperate push toward what I thought was the surface, something hard hit me brutally on the very top of my head.
In shock and pain, I gasped for air, but there was none to be had. Water flooded my mouth and filled my lungs. Liquid went where it was not wanted and filled every branch in my lungs that was screaming for sweet, life-filled oxygen. The pain was excruciating, but worse than that was a feeling of betrayal. My own body had failed me. My body spasmed in an effort to expel the sea water but it lasted only a moment, for everything then went black and I knew no more.
Chapter 14
Pain.
I was alive. I had to be, because I was in agony. There wasn't supposed to be pain in heaven, right? Or maybe I'd gone to hell. I didn't think hell would be quite so prescriptive with its discomforts though. My eyes hurt and my neck burned. My head ached with a dull throb. I felt weightless, temperature-less. I felt myself turning, drifting, being cradled. I was suspended in fluid, but this fluid was richer than water. There was so much more... information, in this fluid. Had I died and been re-born? Was I drifting in amniotic fluid, about to be born anew as some other person?
A crack of light entered my pupils and pain sliced through my head - a searing line of fire. I squeezed my eyes shut. Hands covered my face. My hands. I forced my eyes open. Why did they hurt so much? I felt confused, disoriented. My memory was fuzzy, as though I was trapped between deep sleep and consciousness.
Fluid. Not amniotic fluid. Water. Traces of salt. I could taste the salt, what little there was, through my skin. The salt pulled me, tugged me gently back to consciousness.
Why was I in the sea? I tried to take a deep breath to clear my head. Oxygen flooded my brain but no air filled my lungs. With the oxygen my vision cleared, and cleared, and cleared, now so sharp it was painful. Everything became acute lines, striking contrasts and jagged edges against softness.
I looked toward the source of light above me. Baltic. I was twenty or so feet below the surface. Water moved ferociously above me yet down here it was so peaceful. I looked down. Another thirty feet stretched between the ocean floor and myself. A small blue item rolled across the sand, caught by my razor-sharp vision. A water shoe. Mine?
I could easily see a long way in every direction. Underwater terrain and ocean scape stretched out beneath and around me. Sand drifted back and forth across the marine floor. Seaweed fronds waved with green tendrils, welcoming me to their environment. They were mesmerizing, as was the play of light and shadow across the rocks.
/> Red rock formations rose up from the sandy floor. One so high that it nearly reached the surface. A fuzzy memory of sudden pain on the top of my head surfaced to consciousness and I wondered if that was what I had crashed into. I touched my skull and winced. A goose-egg had formed, tall and proud like a horn.
A tickling sensation floated past my belly and I looked down, my shorts were shredded and caught around my waist. Below that I no longer had legs, but a silvery white tail. It gleamed in the light. The metallic, pearly sheen of it was all colours and no colours, like a sardine flashing in the sun. The light glinted harshly off it and into my eyes and I blinked at the strange sensation. My eyes had developed a new way of seeing, and what entered my vision and then into my brain was like sitting down to a feast of overly rich foods. I didn't have the ability to digest what was in front of me. It was all too much colour, too much texture, too much depth, too many dimensions.
My brain tried to move the legs that I no longer had. The metallic tail moved instead, propelling me abruptly and awkwardly towards the surface. I floundered and tried to stop; the sensation of movement threw every sense into turmoil. My arms shot out, my hands open and flat, trying to stabilize. Water caught between my fingers. Being still was all I could handle for the moment. I felt awkward in this foreign body, almost afraid of it. Underneath the information my senses were taking in, there was a throb of power, as though I had gone to sleep as weak an infant and woken up fully grown and strong.
Underneath the processing of my new reality was an awareness that this change, my new self, was something I had wanted for my entire life. There was someone that I loved deeply who needed to know what was happening to me, someone who would be incredulous. Joyful.
All concept of time vanished as I drifted, too overwhelmed to move. My brain adjusted slowly to my hyper-powerful eyes, and to the new sensations and information that my skin and scales were taking in. The painful edges of details jarring my heightened senses began to soften. The overwhelm slowly dimmed.
I curled my tail back and forth, using my arms and hands to stabilize and direct myself. I drifted forward, giving myself time to become accustomed to how to move my body.
I was not drawn to the choppy surface. Instinctively, I knew that down here was where the peace was. I changed direction and familiarized myself with my new musculature. My heart was pounding hard, but the speed of it was slow, much slower than my heart had ever beaten before. It was a heavy, powerful thud in my chest, but not more than once every two seconds. Though I was in shock I did not panic. I felt a calm amidst my confusion.
I looked down, inspecting myself closely for the first time. My tail was very long and covered in layered scales. Long delicate and transparent fins trailed from the end, which I could spread or close in a similar way to fingers. I ran my hands down my tail and discovered with surprise that it was much more sensitive to the touch than my skin was. I could feel the currents of water sweeping around me, and that the water below me was moving in a different direction than the water above me. I could read that the temperature closer to the surface was different than the temperature below me, but I felt neither cold nor hot myself.
A flash of annoyance at the fabric that was encasing me, irritating me, and I ripped my sun shirt off. I held it for a moment, looking at it with disdain. Why did I need such a hindrance? Not willing to discard it to float in the ocean like so much garbage, I knotted the long sleeves around my waist.
I began to swim with more purpose this time, and as my speed increased rapidly, I couldn't help but smile for the first time since my re-birth. I was flying! I lost all care for the pains throughout my body. The sensation of propelling myself through water intoxicated me. I laughed spontaneously and then laughed again at the queer sound of my own voice, how loud it was. Then I became aware of the sounds all around me.
Distant fish gliding through the water, snapping and crackling sounds, even the sound of a whale many miles away. In the back of my brain, very far away, someone had told me that there wasn't much sea life in the Baltic. I knew differently now because there was a symphony of sounds all around me proving there was plenty of life down here.
Water caught again at my hands and I looked to see transparent webbing between my fingers, and my skin was stark and white with a faint green tinge. Was that my colour or was it just the light that made me look green?
As I slowed, I registered that my neck felt stiff and wrenched out of place, like someone had tried to hang me. I also noted a burning sensation on either side of my neck. I moved my hands to touch, my fingertips searching for the source of my pain. There. Underneath and a little behind my ears. Four small gills on either side, opening and closing. Pulling in water, extracting the oxygen and feeding it into my blood.
I rubbed the muscles in my neck and the ache slowly subsided. I marvelled at the feel of water sweeping over my gills. They worked automatically, but I could also pull the water in and push it out at will. Sort of like hyperventilating with human lungs.
Oxygen and salt, no matter how trace it was, were working together to clear the death from my body. They were erasing it, diluting it, nullifying it. My memory began to return with more clarity. I began to register rational thought as well as emotions, as what had happened began to come clear. The shock of drowning was wearing off and the realization of what I had become was setting in.
I had died. Drowned in the Baltic. I now remembered the fire in my lungs as they had filled with water, the panic of suffocation, the awful feeling of betrayal. I had died. I knew it as surely as I knew that there was a sea turtle gliding low over the stones below me, its shell a symphony of greens and its movements as graceful as a dancer.
I had died.
And now, I was a mermaid. I had finally become my mother's daughter.
Chapter 15
In a burst of excitement, I exploded through the water like a torpedo. I spiralled through the sea, shot toward the surface and broke through, my new body clearing the waves easily. Above the waves, air filled my human lungs before I sliced back into the water and my gills took over again.
With the air in my lungs, a quiet voice spoke.
Antoni.
I landed in the water and took oxygen in through my gills. I ignored the voice. I was having too much fun swimming and spinning, diving and ascending, observing this vast new world. I had explorations to make, which were far more important than the voice whispering in the back of my brain.
I spied something on the ocean floor that wiped the smile from my face. It was a crab walking across the sand but it moved slowly, awkwardly, painfully. I focused in on him, my eyes pulling him forward and sharpening his edges. He'd become tangled in a piece of fishing line.
I swam towards him and shocked myself again at the speed with which I could move. I had been far away but I was on him in half a breath. He put up his little claws in a defensive stance. I stopped before him, and his pincers slowly lowered halfway. Through the water, I picked up tiny waves of fear, but the emotion was dull, instinctual. He was a simple creature. He was frightened, but he had already accepted his new reality, that he couldn't move properly anymore. There was no self-pity or uncertainty, only wariness and a determination to live.
I had never seen much beauty in crabs before; I had always found them to be creepy. Their pincers were uninviting, and the way they scuttled around on too many legs was too much like a spider for my liking. But through my new eyes, he was as beautiful as a creature could get. His body was flat on top and the colour of rust. His pincers were cream coloured with little scarlet tips. He looked at me with his tiny black eyes and I saw emotion where I'd never been able to see it with my human eyes.
"You're ok. I'm not going to hurt you," I said, and was startled to discover my new voice. It didn't burble and gurgle the way a humans does when they try to speak underwater. No bubbles came out of my mouth because I wasn't dispelling air; I was just emitting sound. My voice had a multi-layered, musical quality. It sounded like three v
iolins, each playing a single note harmonized with the others, each word blended into the next.
He lowered his claws all the way and was still. I reached my hand towards him very slowly. I untangled the filament from his body and tied it around my shredded shorts. The idea of leaving it to float in the water was abhorrent to me.
The little crab opened and closed his pincers and then shuffled off across the sand, moving much more naturally than before.
Antoni, said the quiet voice, a little more insistent this time. It was like I had two minds, one in the back that was trying to tell me that something urgently needed my attention and that I should surface, and one in the front telling me to explore this new world and my new body.
I swam up to where the water was churning from the storm. My head broke the surface. The wind hit me in the face and I took a huge breath into my lungs. Like a duster through thick cobwebs, my thoughts cleared.
Where is Antoni? I have to find him! How long have I been swimming about? What is wrong with me?
Holy shit. I'm a mermaid.
I scanned the surface of the sea, my anxiety mounting. The waves were higher and more powerful than before but instead of being alarmed by them, I relished the churning water. The storm was making the ocean alive, filling it with oxygen and distributing minerals and nutrients throughout.
I have to find my mother, tell her... tell her...
The clouds overhead were black and thunderous and I could feel a light spitting of rain in my face. There was going to be a downpour.
I have to find Antoni. Now. Now. Now.
Holy shit. I'm not human anymore.
A tiny, white dot far out to sea caught my eye. It had to be the laser. I dove and flipped my tail and took off towards it. The ocean floor flew by. Stones and rock formations zoomed by underneath me. I passed a small piece of broken ship and felt a strong urge to stop and investigate.