Think of a Mermaid Lagoon
“A mermaid has no tears, therefore she suffers so much more.”
-Hans Christian Anderson, The Little Mermaid
I woke up on sand, a blonde man smoking a joint, naked on the beach, a mermaid tale slapping at the lapping waves nearby.
“Hey, beautiful,” Midnight said.
I’ve lost track of how long I’ve been here.
***
Midnight’s cigarette glowed in the dark, illuminating him in the most unflattering of lights.
“Have you seen the mermaids lately?”
He shook his head, pinched the cancer between his lips and offered the end to me. I leaned forward and took it in my own teeth, inhaling the sickness.
“They’ve been gone longer than usual this time,” I said as he forced the smoke back into his own mouth.
He shrugged.
“Don’t worry so much, Angie.”
I bit my pinky nail and watched him finish. We stood like strangers in the darkness. I thought about dropping to my knees, undoing his belt-buckle and taking him in my mouth, eager, like I was at first Holy Communion. He’d cum in my mouth and I’d swallow like the blood of Christ and then maybe he’d tell me where the mermaids were. But it was hot and sticky outside, and Midnight’s semen tasted like piss from all the smoking.
“Wanna fuck?”
I could only see his green eyes, as mine adjusted to the darkness I’d become friends with.
I shrugged.
“No, that’s okay,” I said, with bore. “I gotta find the mermaids.”
I turned to go but he reached out and grabbed hold of my arm.
“Midnight, don’t be like this.”
“It’s been weeks, Angie.”
“Call me Anjelica. You know I hate that nickname.”
I saw his teeth glint and he smirked at me. I was disgusted I was willing to suck his cock for mermaids only moments ago.
“Whoever used to call you that on the outside is dead to us, Angie, they don’t own your name anymore.”
I yanked my arm from his grip, his nails leaving their mark.
“And neither do you.”
***
Mister made too much sense when he took my breasts in his too big hands. The age difference would’ve made mother die and father laugh.
“You write beautiful poetry,” he said into my hair back when I hadn’t even met Midnight.
My poetry wasn’t any good. I was still pretty back then.
***
“You can’t go around making up stories like that, Anjelica.”
“Think of what you could’ve done to that poor man’s career?”
“It’s really very immature of you.”
A flood in my brain, each voice a droplet. I was drowning in my own head. I stared at the paperwork in front of me. A lot of pages to sum up one thing: my being a liar. I screamed truth till I went mute. My father shook his head and my mother cried. Mr. was their friend, they invited him to Sunday dinner. Our town was small, how could I make a mockery of our family.
I signed the papers.
Mr. came to my bedroom that night.
I reminded him I was fifteen.
When he left I considered sticking my head in the oven like Sylvia. Instead I chose to run away. It was a foggy night. I tripped on the side of the highway and hit my head.
***
“I think the mermaids are gone.”
Sally looked up from her copy of A Christmas Carol. I was pretty sure it was sometime in the summer, but we couldn’t really tell here anymore. It was always perfect, warm, balmy weather outside. There were no calendars or clocks, just the sun in the sky, and the stars at night. Sally loved that book. I was always asking her why she read it so often, and she’d always says the same thing: ‘It’s about getting a second chance, isn’t that what we’ve all gotten? Isn’t that what the mermaids gave us?’ I could never argue with that.
She pushed her red glasses further up her nose.
“You’re always worrying, Anjelica. Sometimes they just swim off for a bit, they’ll come back, they always do.”
“But, Sally,” I said leaning over the counter of the Stop N’ Shop. “You know I keep track of them, and they’ve been gone for three moons now.”
“You don’t keep track of em, Anjelica, you bother em. You harass them with your silly questions about the outside. Why you’re so eager to go back to whatever sent you running beats me.”
She picked her book back up and I knew that was the end of it.
I was the ugly duckling of the town, always trying to find my way back home. I felt suffocated here in this town with no beginning and no end. You could walk to the outskirts and you’d plop right back in town square. We had a bookshop, and Sally’s Stop N Shop, and a Soda Parlor, and a Movie Theater that only played black and white films in a language none of us spoke. Everyone else was happy to roast in the sun by the ocean, and wave at the mermaids as they swam by. Others like, Midnight, were happy to smoke and drink themselves into oblivion. That was what made me hate this place the most–you couldn’t die.
I wondered out loud to Sally and Midnight on various occasions if maybe we were already dead and this was hell. To which Sally had laughed and said this was heaven. Midnight hadn’t said anything, he just put another cigarette between his teeth and asked me suck him.
“What would happen though if the mermaids never came back, Sally?”
She groaned, and shooed me out of her shop with a wave of her hand.
***
I fucked Midnight the first day. He was already naked so it made the job easier. He asked where I was from. I told him Kansas. I asked him where he was from. He refused.
I didn’t love Midnight, I didn’t even like him that much. The only thing that made him special to me was he never asked what had happened. Everyone else was eager to share their tales of woe that lead them to these shores. Abusive husbands, lost jobs, dead loved-ones, not me. I kept Mr. in my head. The only ones I told were the mermaids.
I’d been here for about five moons when I fell asleep down by the cove. The sound of one of their tales hitting the sand woke me. She was near the water’s edge combing tangles out of her silver hair. She waved me over.
“Hello, Anjelica.”
“How do you know my name?”
She smiled, and it haunted me like a new moon.
“I know everyone’s names, I’m one of the keepers.”
“What’s your name?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve had so many. You may pick a name you’d like to call me, and that’s what it shall be–only to you, of course–it will bond us.”
“Sylvia,” I said without thinking.
She looked like she knew.
“Why am I here? What is here?”
“The Lagoon.”
“But why?”
“I cannot answer that questions for you Anjelica.”
I hated answers like that but I quickly learned they were the only kinds the mermaids gave.
“I want to go home,” I said.
She moon-smiled again.
“We both know that is a lie. At least right now. Perhaps in the future it will change.”
She swam off, leaving me in the wet sand.
I was back in it waiting for her. I’d give anything to see her silver hair again and get frustrating non-answers. But she was nowhere to be seen.
***
“Is being here a punishment?” I asked Sylvia a few moons back.
I was detangling her hair for her and she was shimmering in the starlight.
“For some,” she said softly.
“Who?”
She looked over her shoulder at me.
“You’re so pretty, Anjelica. It’s not surprising what happened. It’s awful and disgusts me, but it does not shock me in the slightest.”
I yanked a tangle out of her hair.
“I want to go home,” I said for the millionth time.
“Why? You want to go back to the man who raped you and the parents who didn’t believe you? You want to return to the ‘friends’ who called you slut? You want to return to a madness you didn’t deserve?”
“This is a madness I don’t deserve!” I shouted. “There is nothing here but sand and mundanity. I hate it here. Everyone else may be stupidly engrossed in the magic of mermaids, but let me tell you, listening to your bullshit every night has made that magic wear off. I want to go home because I want to go back to reality, to make something of myself and my life.”
She sighed, looking like she might cry starry tears.
“I wish I could send you home.”
For the first time I didn’t see her as the guard, I saw her as the prisoner.
***
I returned to Midnight’s spot on the sand after leaving Sally’s. He was naked and bathing in the sun.
“Still strung-up about the mermaids?”
I nodded as I sat down next to him. He placed a hand on my thigh. I didn’t move it away. I didn’t hate Midnight.
“You ever talk to them?” I asked.
“Of course, Angie,” he said.
I flinched at the name. Mister was in my head. His fingers prodding me as he licked that name into my tears.
“Sorry,” Midnight mumbled. “Anjelica. Anyway, I’m not a mindless idiot like Sally and the rest of The Lagoon. I don’t see the mermaids as shiny pets to wave and gawk at. I talk to one of them.”
“Which one?”
“Sylvia.”
Sylvia. It was my name for her. It wasn’t her name. If Midnight met her the odds he’d choose the same exact name for her as me were impossible. I chose the name after my suicide icon, I didn’t know a damn thing about Midnight, besides what every crevice of his naked flesh looked like, but I knew he couldn’t possibly have thought about baking his own head as many times as me.
“Did she tell you that was her name?” I asked slowly.
“Yeah, you know her. I see you brushing her hair all the time.”
He didn’t name her. Sylvia had kept the name, and worn it like it was really hers.
“Midnight,” I whispered. “Why are you here?”
“Same reason you are,” he said while looking back me.
Of course he knew.
“I want to go home,” I whispered to the moon.
“Why?” I don’t know if it was Midnight or the moon that whispered back.
“So I can reclaim myself,” I said. “So I can be me again. So the demons don’t win.”
I felt Midnight’s arms wrap around me and I heard myself start to cry. I looked on the horizon for the mermaids–for Sylvia. I knew they would never return. They had found their own way out, leaving us to rot. I remembered what Sylvia had said to me: it was a punishment for some to be here. We were foolish enough to think it was us.
Molly Likovich has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Rust+Moth, Red Paint Hill Publishing, Germ Magazine, and The Scarab. She is a Creative Writing English major at Salisbury University.
Photo Credit: Melina McDermott