Heather Pegas
The Mermaid Has Finally Had It
The mermaid surfaces, and for once, just this once, there is nothing about or below. No ships, no dolphins, no noisy gulls, just quiet. How can she process this blessing?
The mermaid is alone, but she doesn’t feel great. She’s too hot. Her skin and scales feel dry in the air.
It is the mermaid’s birthday, and she’s feeling her age. Sailors still like the shape of her tail, it gets their attention, but they turn away at the missing breast, the scarred floor of her chest. They see her hair has turned grey-green, call her a merma’am, and laugh.
The mermaid’s daughter and her friends need constant reassurance and talking down from erotic encounters with fickle seamen. They are forever falling in, and painfully out of, “love” but they reject her hard-won wisdom.
How could she understand?
Most mermen are not around much, cannot be counted on in any meaningful way. Loud, voracious, eating almost all the catch as soon as it’s caught. Then swimming, swimming away, their asses as prominent as cats’. And so aggressive in their swimming (unlike the maids, careful and controlled—no splashes, no tipoffs, so as not to be snatched out of the sea). The mermaid’s former stepson, for instance, is unspeakable. Seriously, don’t speak of him.
The mermaid’s mother is elderly now and needs a lot of attention. The mermaid must swim a hundred miles each week capturing and transporting oysters, anemones and squid for her. She rubs her mother’s sore fin, and sits many hours listening to old stories, of how much better things were when the sea was old and cool.
Mermaids! They always give too much.
The mermaid had entered the fray once. She’d sung her own ocean songs in a voice that felt, to her, clear and important. But the others turned cold, wet shoulders, and drowned her out. She lost the will to sing and now prefers to be by herself. In caves, in trenches, on rocks…
Or sometimes with other creatures of the sea. The otters show her how to crack clams on her still firm stomach, and many early mornings, she confabs with the albatross. She remembers. There are a million dying jellyfish, but their stingers don’t sting her. They glow, even at the darkest depths. The mermaid feels lightest with them.
The mermaid has taken to eating sea bream, maybe too much, but it heightens her mood, relieves her stress. She is not proud of this, says she’ll quit later. Her shoulders grow ever more round.
The mermaid’s fears are myriad. What if her illness returns? Will her child be safe? What of her mother when she can no longer swim? Why is she always so hot, and why is there never anyone, anyone, to lend a webbed hand?
Has all this irritation and pressure made her a pearl? It certainly seems not. This birthday, in particular, she feels forgotten and alone. Awash in the past, and desire. Time was, she lived in a creature-teeming sea. And planned to swim around the world! She thought one day she would color her hair some un(sea)mly color. Pink. And oh, how she wanted to be heard—or at the very least, held.
On this day, basking by herself on the warm water, the mermaid remembers her fond father, her first sailor, many heart-held mermaids who have gone below, true friends. Nothing is as it was, and she’s not sure how much longer she can float on.
But her kind, they’ve always had an out, a way to escape. For those who think deeply, for those who dare, and when it gets bad enough, she will follow those who chose that way. If it ever gets so bad she can go, she thinks, and is it now time to go, she wonders, down into the deep…
into the deep…
into the deep.
Heather Pegas lives in Los Angeles where she writes grant proposals, essays, stories and flash. Her work is featured in publications such as Tahoma Literary Review, Tiny Molecules, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, Roi Fainéant and Weird Lit Magazine.
