Somewhere, Petra heard the sound of a door locking.
“You won’t know what to do, exactly, and people disappear all the time, and I seemed pretty smart. Not like those other girls, you’ll think, though that won’t be true, either. I am exactly like those other girls. All of them.”
“Jen—”
But Jen was gone. At first it felt so silly that Petra looked in the footwell, and the backseat, and through the window.
She got out of the car and walked across the gravel to the cottage with its unpainted trim, and the asbestos shingles a dull green moss. Somewhere, the incessant barking of a dog.
As she was hesitating, the front door opened, and there was Jennifer. The dog barking inside the house, louder now.
Somewhere a man shouted, “Who is it?”
“It’s—” Jen began.
Petra cut her off. “Let’s go somewhere. Let’s go to the Bino’s. I’ll buy you all the fries and gravy you can eat. I’ll buy you the big order.” She knew it was stupid to say out loud, but she went on, “We’ll listen to mix tapes and we’ll go to the beach in the middle of the night. We’ll go now. I’ll buy gummy worms. I’ll buy freezies.”
“What are you even doing here?”
“Please,” she said, “just come out for a drive.”
That was the last she saw of Jen, as the dog started barking again, and the door closed, and the light inside the cottage went out.
The Little Mermaid, in Passing
Angela Slatter
“Go on. It’ll hurt for a while. For your whole life, really, but there’s always a cost, isn’t there? Go. Go on, up to the surface. Up, up, up, you silly flighty little thing. To the beach, when the sun hits you… well, you’ll see soon enough. Off you go.”
I watch as the girl hesitates, looks at the pretty amber bottle clutched tightly in her webbed fingers, face caught between gleeful longing and uncertainty. She opens her mouth to say something, ask a question she should have asked earlier, but all that issues is a wet puff of blood that dissolves in the water around her. Ah. My suturing needs work.
But it’s a small thing, I tell her, part of the bargain. I don’t say, but perhaps I should, that the price for something you want desperately, but should not have, is always red “Go on now, away with you.”
And, voiceless, she goes.
The tail is magnificent, a glimmering limb of now-green, now-blue, now-stormy scales, reflecting the glow from the phosphorescent sea creatures that pass through this place, lighting the rocky cave entrance as they come and go. I’d have contracted for that if I could, if she’d not required it for her own ends. The hair, too, is lush and dark with bright points as if stars rest there; it won’t look so wondrous out of the water, but she’ll need it all the same. No matter; what I have is superb enough. I’m just being greedy, greedy as a mortal, coveting what I’ve not got whilst forgetting what I do have.
I watch until she’s no more than a speck against the watery sky of my kingdom, nothing more than a black dot against the flickering light that drifts down from the above-world. It’s so long since I’ve been there, since I’ve bothered to breathe the salty air instead of wetness. I’m not sure I’d even be able to use nose and lungs in place of gills anymore. Anything you don’t value, don’t use, don’t exercise, will desert you.
Just a dot, now, just a mote, then gone. She’s broken the surface. She’ll head for the beach, if she’s smart, before she opens the bottle and drinks the contents. If she’s stupid she’ll do it in the wrong order, and will likely drown. When the legs come through, they will hurt. She’ll feel cleaved, she’ll panic. When you panic, you drown.
Still, I did warn her.
Didn’t I?
Sometimes I forget the script, the patter; I’m so very tired. I always warn them, but perhaps I omit some of the lines, through boredom or forgetfulness. Sometimes spite. Sometimes these girls are so… haughty. Demanding. Entitled. Mean. An almost unending list of sins, I suppose. Those who look down on me as if I am somehow less, as if refusing to live as they do, where they do, makes me questionable. Refusing to be one with the Mer Queen’s safe, tidy little enclave.
They don’t know—care?—that I was like them once; that, though changed by the things I do, I share their blood. My true history has been lost, I imagine, fallen through the cracks between years as those who knew me have disappeared or died, for we are immortal but not invulnerable and can be killed. Only one remains of my contemporaries and I doubt my name passes her lips too often.
I am made pale, yes, by my acts: bleached as whale bones on a strand. White as if the water has washed much of me away, but whatever I lost of myself was replaced by something stronger, a power and pragmatism that others have envied and feared, sought and bought. I have become a concentration of prices paid, of deals done, of treasures left behind. I am the place where folk come when they have nowhere else to go, when their wants and desires get the better of them.
Like that silly little girl. A granddaughter, no doubt. Or a great-grandchild, perhaps. I can see her bloodline in the cast of her face, the tilt of her head. An echo of my sister’s cheekbones, the pout of the lips. The girl who is gone and will never be again, not as herself. She’ll be something else, something new; something less. The joke is not lost on me.
I recall the object in my hands, clutched as tightly, as greedily as the girl did her amber bottle. Mine is a purple jar, fat as a glutton’s belly, a silver lid firmly holding down the contents, which would otherwise float and flee, perhaps follow its former owner, try to reunite with that little fool. It swirls inside the colored glass, like a fog trying to blow itself out.
Her voice, so lovely, so perfect.
So lightly held.
So unvalued.
So easily bargained away.
Little fool.
All for a man, and not even one who lives beneath, not one of her own kind who swims the ocean. A man who moves by legs alone, who breathes air, whose near-dead face was apparently so beautiful its sight knocked the sense from the girl’s head, put a cloud of idiot desire in her mind and set her heart’s course askew. So that nothing else would inhabit her thoughts, so she’d be haunted by it until, at last, she went and begged.
I wonder how long it took? How many days, weeks, months of pleading and whining until her grandmother’s patience wore out, heart wore through, until it was obvious to the old fish that the girl had one final decision to make, one chance left, one last hope. I can count on five fingers the number of maidens who’ve come to me and, in the end, not gone through with their plan. So few who hesitate, take a moment to think, realize that the price is always too great, that their lives are not over if they do not have this purported heart’s desire, the absence of which has been tearing at them. So few who say “no” when I’ve named the price, who’ve bent their heads and backed away, swum off with nothing more than their gods-given gifts and my grudging respect.
So few, so rare.
But enough. I have matters to which to attend. A twitch of my own tail, I knife through the water, back to the deep cave from which I reign. Make my way to the place where my magic resides.
We have all suffered. We have all lost precious things. We have all been faced with the choice of losing ourselves to gain an idea of love.
My mother made her own such decision. Destined to marry one man to please her father, she went to the Sea Witch of old who then ruled this dark corner of the ocean, and she overthrew everything fate had intended for her. She got the man of her dreams and much good it did her: he was a wastrel, cared not a jot for her heart once she’d brought him the pearly crown, the coral sceptre. She thought, poor fool, that if she could have children, ensure their grasp on the throne with a dynasty, he’d love her again—which presumed he ever loved her in the first place.