Playing Mermaids - A Short Story

[lustygallant]

I want to play mermaids again.

When you’re a kid, everyone wants to play mermaids. I didn’t see much of pools when I was a kid, but every time I did, it was mermaids for me. Everyone wanted to play mermaids, the girls and the boys too, with their Marco and their Polo and their splashing and their games. They were the sea kings, not Kings but kings, waving around three-pronged sticks and summoning their splashing storms, and the girls were the princesses, cutting through the water and pulling themselves up on the top step, not completely out of the water but enough to comb their long hair and sing their siren song. And I was a princess too, until they said no.

The mermaids always want to be human. They always want what they don’t have. So do we. So do I. So I was a princess, and the others said no, you can’t be a princess, you don’t wear a two-piece, just ugly trunks. And the sea witch said something was wrong with me, and some other things, and I was a human again, floating alone in a sea of mermaids and mermen who were just exactly what they wanted to be, and what they were. That’s how the story goes. The sea witch gives you your legs.

The sea witch gives you a lot of things. She gives you feelings, the feeling of salty dread when she looks at you like a stray sardine just begging to be skewered on a stick. She gives you gifts you don’t like, gifts you can’t use, gifts that don’t belong to you but to the mermaids and mermen. And merpeople. They don’t all fit in one or the other, even though the sea witch says they all do.

But the sea witch can’t always stop you. Sometimes you’re all on your own and you jump into the water and you flick your legs, and you never let them come apart and suddenly you have your own mermaid tail. Being a mermaid is lonely when you don’t wear a two-piece, just ugly trunks. But it’s better than not being a mermaid at all. You have your own sea to rule, and while the strange and scary humans you don’t know any more sit in the sun and cook like little fishes you dolphin kick through the chlorinated waves like the princess they said you can’t be. There’s no sea witch to steal your voice when you want to scream, and while there isn’t anyone else either, you’re used to that. You can work with it.

Then one day, it’s time to leave and go home. You rise from your submerged sanctuary and you sit on a towel in the car and listen to music you hate and you stare out the window and you wish that magic were real, that mermaids were real, and you think wouldn’t it be grand if I woke up one day and all of the me that isn’t me just fell away and suddenly I had a lovely tail? And you let your head bounce against the window, and you go home and you sink into a bath and you try to hold on to it, to the call of the sea, but this is a bathtub and the bathtub makes for a much less exciting sea. A bath is a pale imitation of the wide-open waters and sun-kissed tiles of your own little sea.

On that day, you get out for the last time. You never really leave the sea, but the sea leaves you, and you lose your tail but you don’t lose the sea witch, and the mermaids and mermen stay themselves but you can’t anymore. And you tell yourself that you’re a mermaid, but how can that be without the sea? The scales fall from your tail and the scales fall from your eyes and there are no more seas, just pools, and all the pools are cloudy and green and full of muck, and a mermaid could survive in this but not you.

I want to play mermaids again. But the tail won’t come.

One day, we got out of the pool and not the sea, we became more like our parents because we swore we wouldn’t. We don’t play mermaids anymore because it isn’t our sea anymore, we went out and got legs. The mermaids and the mermen have their own mermaids and mermen, their own merpeople who don’t mind so much if you wear trunks but might one day. The siren song has died and the storms have quelled and now there’s just a gross little neglected pool and that’s all there ever was. The sea witch goes away but she’s always there, because she still has your tail until you decide she doesn’t.

I will play mermaids again.

I didn’t need a sea witch to give me my tail, I just needed a better one. The Sea King, not king but King, smiles and says that he will help, an soon I will wear a two-piece instead of just ugly trunks and my tail will come back and I will sink into the pool. I will sink into the ocean and I will dolphin kick and leap and marvel at my undersea kingdom, my kingdom of one, really one, really me alone, but it isn’t so bad because the sea witch is far away. And it will hurt a little, because I’m always alone, but I’m never alone, and even though alone is better together, I will have my tail. I was always a mermaid. And I always will be.

I played mermaids again.

[Muse]

I stand tall and applaud.  

Always be you, Galla-chan!  *hugs*