Leslie Cairns
Just Don’t Do Mermaid
My husky plays with her dollar tree teddy bear: flinging it in the air, watching it spiral near the ceiling fan, and smirking at me when she misses – or catches it. She sleeps with it upside down, near the concave of her belly, as she dreams of Greenies, and chasing field mice, and other unsavory things. She gnaws at its ears and licks it as if it’s a baby, or a fair weather friend. Her longing, catching the bear so it cannot escape – the fever of it, makes me think of before I lost you, forever.
I held onto you then, too. I didn’t grab your ears but I wanted to. I planned lunch dates you sighed about near your birthday. Your feet wiggling in your flip flops, the pedicure you got without me. You got cared for by someone else. Someone rubbed your feet where you planted them near lilies, near orchards, the garden I watched you make as the night fell and the dust settled near the cobwebs and the crevices and the polished silver, nestled in the drawers, as they always were. You taught me home, and you showed me wedding dress shows that made me believe – for a moment– that you would help me pick one out someday.
Just don’t do mermaid, you said with a laugh. I thought of how mermaids were magic, and as we sat across from each other – mother and daughter except not – we were magic too. We never should have met. I wondered, if like fish tale green envy and mottled up nail polish that ferments– if we would last, or implode, from what we kept bottled up.
The magic is gone, you said to me once. We used to fit, but now I just need some space.
We’d exchanged words that thumped out loud in moonlight – scared rabbit on exposed skin, waiting for a moment , a salve, for everything to change. Except, of course, it never did. Like the phone that hangs heavy in my hands on your birthday, the calls I almost make – the peonies I almost send from states away– the dresses I won’t wear because I don’t want to pick one without you. The weddings we won’t mark on our calendars, the Xs getting closer and closer to days of magic, where our heads would be bent towards each other, curls spiraling, as we picked out lavender lattes or wine bars, cheese or charcuterie boards of glistening meat. If we would sit my in laws with your family, if we could bend two families at the root, making them complete and beating again.
There’s a kind of sensual loss in the way we almost planned my very best life, my very best day. Like the shriveling of the nose after smelling juniper on lounging summer days. The iced tea in the fridge too sweet, but you still devour it. Sometimes I want to draw a mermaid, make her hair turn ugly and sinister. Braid it back around her head like a crown with spears and thorns and gravel. As if the mermaid dress was what made us dissolve. As if it was me, peeking back at the episode with the tight torso and the long tail, the longing I felt there, then pretended I didn’t–
That our difference in dress and style was what did us in, not something larger, more oceanic, more wide and yawning and trite and earthquaking and dividing– the words we cannot utter, the love that fizzled out, the way the tides change without giving us a shout –
Instead I blame the dress. I sneak into a store and spill coffee grinds on the tallest mermaid fin. I hope a bride’s day is ruined like mine was. I hope that she feels that loss of dreams, the shifting of the skin.
And then, and then, I hate myself for it. I put the dress on, all ruined and grotesque. I picture you telling me it’s going to be alright. That even if the dress is ruined, our love – our love – still somehow fits.
Leslie Cairns lives in Denver, CO. She has a prose chapbook, The Food is the Fodder, with Bottlecap Press. She also has upcoming work in Ellipsis Letters, Fulminare Review, Moss Puppy Mag, and others.
