Aspies For Freedom

...and also one of the longest. It's about eight pages single-spaced on Appleworks. So, I'll just post the first third or so of it here, and if people like it, I can post more. It doesn't have a title, I'm terrible at thinking of titles, so suggest one if you like!


She was a child, small and round-limbed, slithering through the dust under the bed. She’d lost something-- what? a marble? a ribbon? a key? a pink plastic teacup? It seemed so important at the time-- and she was hunting for it amid the shoes and old magazines in grimy, untidy stacks. The sun filtered into the room in lines, caught between the slats of the blinds on the windows. Dust motes drifted through the old-newspaper-colored shafts of light and settled on her exposed feet, warming them. The room was her father’s. She wasn’t supposed to go in without permission, giving her rummaging a faint thrill of forbiddenness and mystery. Her outstretched fingers brushed leather, cheap paper, cardboard and, finally, at the very back of the tangled mess...fur?

Curious, she tugged on the short, thick, silky hair. Her family had a cat, but Neptune’s fur felt nothing like this. She wondered if it was an old coat, or a mink stole. She wondered why she’d never seen her father wear it. She wondered what a ‘mink’ was, exactly, or a ‘stole’, for that matter. The pelt, dull with dust, tumbled out in a mottled heap. It wasn’t a coat, but a raw-edged animal skin, like the rugs made of tiger and bear skins she’d seen in books. The inside was smooth, soft leather, pale as the moon. It was almost glowing, a watery white light in the yellowy-dim room. She spread it out fully on the dark, warped floorboards. The fur on top was a light silver-gray speckled with black and tan. The beast had two furry, clawed paws, or flippers, a tail almost like a fish’s, a face with whiskers, a small nose and two empty holes where its eyes should have been. Even flat and boneless, she could see what it was. There were seals in the harbor sometimes, sunning themselves on the docks and the pebbly beach. She’d always liked their sleek torpedo bodies, their huge, inky eyes. Pulling the pelt over herself, staring out through its hollow eyes, she wondered if she could swim like a seal.

The little girl had a beautiful mother, a tiny woman with wild, dark hair and fine lines around her black eyes, which were as round and pleading as a seal’s. She was hanging laundry on the line, white shirts and dresses and underpants ruffling in the cool, salty breeze, when her daughter strode solemnly out of the house, wrapped in the sealskin, its face nearly covering hers. Neptune, the cat, came up with his tail in a question mark and tried to twine around her ankles, tripping the child. She yelled, and hurriedly gathered the skin out of the dirt. “Stupidhead cat....Mom! Mo-om! Look at this!”
Her mother came running over, not noticing or not caring that she’d let her husband’s best shirt drop in a mud puddle. She knelt beside the girl to stare at the pelt. She stroked the fur, her breath catching in her throat, and, quite suddenly, lifted the sealskin and buried her face in it. Her narrow shoulders shook as though she were laughing, or crying. She clutched the skin to herself so tightly that her knuckles went white.

The little girl was uneasy. Grown-ups did strange things sometimes, but she’d never seen her mother like this. She was a calm, quiet, slightly sad woman, hard to shock or upset, not given to displays of intense emotion, and here she was, now curled around the sealskin on the ground, murmuring something into its smooth-moon underside that her daughter didn’t understand. It called to mind waves lashing a rocky shore, something swimming strong and sure through the deep, green, salty ocean.


Mer and Brendan go walking on the beach, listening to the harsh cries of gulls and feeling the coarse, dark sand clammy and damp between their toes. The ocean is gray-green today, the waves small and hard and close together. The water is like a woman pounding the shore with her fists, thinks Mer. Or kneading it like bread. The slick head of a seal, dark with water, breaks the surface and slips beneath it again, quick as blinking. “Suborder Pinnipedia ,” she remarks, “family Phocidae . These are the true seals; they’re more streamlined than fur seals and sea lions, better long-distance swimmers, but they’re really clumsy on land. They just sort of wriggle.” Mer likes seals. Brendan looks down at the whorled shells and small rocks half-buried in sand. His flaxen hair flops in his face. “There’s a Scottish myth,” he says, thoughtfully, “about these fairies, selkies, they’re called, who look like ordinary seals every day of the year but one. Then, they peel off their skins and become beautiful women.” In front of him, Mer’s back stiffens. She begins to walk faster, almost running, kicking up sand and glistening debris. “Weird,” she shouts back to him as he struggles to keep up. Her voice is light and airy, but her mouth is a grim line and her black eyes glitter with what might be lurking tears. He doesn’t know what he might’ve said to upset her, but Mer is odd, laughing and weeping unpredictably, suddenly angry, suddenly calm. “I’m sorry,” he yells. She laughs, a quiet, gentle laugh like a slow trickle of water. “You need a haircut,” she says. “It’s growing over your eyes. Come to my house later, and I’ll do it for you.”


Brendan had a sister, but now she’s gone. They were born together three months premature. Brendan emerged from their mother’s womb first, very red and very wrinkled and too small, frighteningly small, but alive and wailing. His sister slipped out eight minutes later, quiet, dead, cold, her skin tinted blue. She was a surprise; their mother hadn’t known that she carried twins. The baby girl was never named, and buried quietly and anonymously within the week. Brendan didn’t even know about her until he was seven. He told his parents about the pale little girl with a voice like static who played with him sometimes, chasing bumblebees through the garden, climbing trees and dropping acorns on the heads of passers-by. “She can walk through walls. She showed me. She says she’s my sister. She says we’re meant to be together, and she can float , like a balloon. She can disappear. She doesn’t wear shoes,” he declared one night at dinner. “I think she’s a ghost,” and his mothers hands shook and his father snarled at him that they’d talk about it after they were all through eating.

A month later, Brendan’s mother began to speak to invisible people. At first, Brendan thought that they might be ghosts, like the floating girl he still played with, secretly, but he could never see them any more than anyone else could. Maybe everyone has their own ghosts, he pondered, and they can’t see each other’s. But there were other things, too. His mother stayed up all night, roaming the neighborhood barefoot and haunted, or cooking extravagant, exotic meals. She set them outside, garlanded with flowers, lilies and marigolds, roses. Her hands were covered in scratches from the thorns, long and painful, dripping blood rubies. She held them over the feasts she’d prepared. “Food for the dead,” she muttered. “Come and stay. I have rosemary for rememberance.” She imagined the spirits flooding in from the sea, from the stars, forcing their way into her mouth, into her lungs and her stomach and her heart, a ghost baby seeding itself inside her. Every year, she became more haunted, chain-smoking cigarettes and forgetting to sleep. She had medicines with sinister-sounding names, bottles of candy-colored pills she never took.

“This is not your fault,” Brendan’s father told him one day. “Your mother is sick, and she’s had a lot of problems in her life.” Brendan nodded, and three days later, his father was gone, vanished with barely a trace. Brendan was nine. He knew it was his fault, then, everything, everything. From then on, he ignored the ghosts and smoky, blurry-edged creatures he saw, walked through them as though they weren’t there. He tried very hard not to see anything that other people couldn’t see, and, eventually, he mostly suceeded.


Mer had a mother, but now she’s gone. “When I was five, she walked into the ocean and never walked out,” she told Brendan once, as they ate grayish hamburgers and toxic-green Jell-O off of flesh-colored plastic trays in the middle-school cafeteria. There was a long silence then, one that might have been awkward, but neither Mer nor Brendan was talkative and such pauses often came and went between them. Finally Brendan said, carefully, as though he were handling something fragile and precious, “So she committed suicide?”
Mer glared at him with her coaly eyes, huge and deep. He wished he hadn’t asked her anything. “She didn’t die. She left. She’s gone.” Mer spit each word like a pebble into a well, one after the other, slowly. Brendan didn’t raise the subject again. He knows about gone , unlike the loud, spiky-haired boys on the basketball team, the giggly girls with fruit-scented lipgloss snapping their bubblegum and squealing around the long table in the center of the cafeteria. He and Mer are friends because they can sense the sorrow on each other, a fine powder clinging to their skin. The thing that makes other people glance at them askew, whisper around them in the halls as though they might be dangerous, push them, always, away, is what draws Mer and Brendan together, irresistibly.


Her mother’s name was Marjorie, or at least that was what everyone called her. Sometimes she didn’t answer at first when someone called out to her, then gave a sudden jerk of her shoulders and looked at the person who’d said the name, startled, as though she’d only just remembered that it was hers. Her mother had light brown, freckled skin, nearly poreless, and slightly large hands and feet. Her mother liked to keep the windows open, no matter how drafty and damp it made the house, so she could smell the ocean, hear its faint rumblings. Her mother painted in a studio upstairs that used to be a large closet, canvasses of circles and murky shapes like bizarre sea creatures, canvasses of bright, sharp brush strokes and vaguely human figures twisting together, legs and arms melding, indistinguishable from one another. The little girl found them somewhat frightening, but they fascinated her, too. Her mother painted in oils, greens and blues and yellows and purples and crimsons and obsidians and ochres thickly smeared like paste. Her mother sometimes embedded shells and feathers, seaglass and old bottlecaps in her paintings. They throbbed out of the flat shapes like sores and suns. When the little girl asked her what they were supposed to be, her mother told her that they were her dreams. “Maybe they tell the future. Maybe they’re buried memories of the distant past. Maybe they mean nothing at all,” she said. “I just let them spill out, have their say.”

This is a very interesting story. I like it a lot. Wanna see more, please.

Oh yes, more please. You are an amazingly evocative writer.

Okay. Here is the second part:

Mer dreams of the sea, swallowing her whole, filling her, She dreams of saltwater, like tears, in her blood, shivering behind her eyes. She dreams that her heart explodes into a whale while her fingers fall off, frostbitten, and swim away like seals.

She wakes up cold and slightly damp. She has kicked off her blankets in the night and it has rained a little. The sill of the window she always keeps open is covered in tiny drops of water, like clear, polished pieces of glass. There’s something warm and sticky between her legs. When she investigates, her fingers come away saturated with blood. Mer is not too surprised. Her body has been doing strange things for months now. She’s the right age for it, thirteen, but the changes make her uneasy. Her breasts have begun to press outward. Her bones feel stretched, as though they’re shifting and lengthening inside her. There is also a thin, but noticeable, mottled-silver down growing on her back, her legs, her neck, her palms. Mer has taken to wearing turtlenecks or scarves, and a pair of long, satiny black gloves she found at a garage sale. On someone else, they might look glamorous, but they’re too long for Mer’s fingers, and her arms are thin. The hair is getting thicker, beginning to spread across more and more of her body. She doesn’t know how much longer it can be hidden, but she finds herself reluctant to shave it off. In an eerie way, it’s very beautiful under moonlight, when she’s alone, when she lets herself forget that she’s a girl, and girls do not have fur like wolves. Or seals, she thinks, smiling slightly.

Mer stumbles to the bathroom to clean herself, trying not to wake her father as she does. Her belly feels bloated, a knot of pain throbbing at her core, as though she’s swallowed something huge and wild. Neptune, fat and brindled in the doorway, looks up at her with golden eyes and meows loudly. She snarls at him. There are fierce things in her this morning. The pain clenches like a fist, hard.


“Last night,” says Brendan, taking a long drag off one of the cigarettes he’s stolen from his mother and supressing a cough, “I dreamed that my mom came into my room as I slept. She had a long, long knife, wicked and sharp. She cut into my back with it, and I tried to scream, but I was still asleep, hovering outside myself. Then these wings came rising out of the wound, all gory. But they were beautiful...feathery, but strong, and red, bright red with yellow and green underneath. The wings of a parrot, or a phoenix.” He looks happy today, almost manic, but very tired. There are dark rings around his eyes. His newly cut hair sticks up wildly in some places and hangs down in straggles elsewhere. There’s a sheen on his skin and he keeps pushing his glasses up his nose. They are too large for his face, with green plastic frames. He inhales another lungful of cigarette smoke.
Mer wants to snatch the cigarette out of his hand. “You’ll get cancer doing that,” she says, instead. Brendan shrugs. “It calms my nerves.” Mer snorts. That’s what Brendan’s mother likes to say.
“It’s true,” says Brendan, his eyes watering slightly. Mer looks up at him, unconvinced. They were the same height when they met, not quite two years ago. Now Brendan is much taller, Mer realizes. She’s not sure when it happened. He’s leaner, too, with a sharp chin and broad shoulders. Extremely handsome, almost beautiful, really, underneath his scruffiness, and, slowly, people are starting to take notice. Even the girls at the long table in the center of the cafeteria, made up with garish eyeshadow and trying to act as grown-up as possible. They offer him sticks of their neon gum, flutter their tarry, mascaraed eyelashes, attempt sultry laughs that end up sounding more like gargling. Even Mer, now, who tries not to think too much about his mouth, red and just a little chapped, wrapped around a cigarette.

So far he’s been oblivious, but how long can that last? He takes another drag, blows a plume of smoke into the air. It sails away over Mer’s head, dissipating on the breeze. He coughs. Mer feels the knot in her abdomen constrict. Their feet, in beat-up sneakers, pound the pitted, lumpy street. The school, an ugly, squat brown brick building like an enormous toad, is just ahead. It eats children and excretes tall, confused, broken-hearted creatures, aching in strange places.


Her mother loved to sing, loved to dance, and was hopelessly awful at both. Her father took his wife to a ballroom dancing class, once. She broke three of his toes when she accidentally trod on his foot, and they never went again. Her mother was incredibly clumsy, sometimes. Her mother’s voice was a low, pleasant contralto, but she couldn’t carry a tune even a little bit. Her mother liked sushi, but wouldn't touch cooked fish. Her mother had a strange accent, unplaceable, something between Swedish and Italian (or maybe it was more Australian, or even Japanese). Her mother combed the little girl’s tangled black hair, her own tangled black hair, and braided and pinned it into fantastic shapes. Arcs and spirals, whorls and waterfalls with white ribbons intertwined. Her father had wanted to name her Anna, but her mother insisted on Mer. “It means ‘sea’ in French,” she’d said. “I want her to know where she comes from.”


Fork scrapes against plate, skrish, skrish . Outside, a dog begins to howl, a high-pitched yodeling sort of noise, mournful and comical at the same time. Mer and her father are eating takeout Chinese food in silence, slurping up the greasy noodles without really tasting them. They both have other things to do, after.

Mer’s father looks at her, chewing, elbows propped on the table, long eyelashes casting spiky shadows on her cheeks, her beaky nose. She looks like her mother. He tries to find something of himself in her, but she seems to be all Marjorie; large features and short limbs, skin like coffee with two creams. Marjorie, as he first saw her, sitting on a dock in the harbor late one night, Marjorie, later, asleep in his bed, her mouth just open and her hair creeping over a pillow like seaweed as afternoon light kaleidoscoped into the room in shattered patterns, broken by the venetian blinds. He’d been dreading the moment of her waking; he knew she’d leave, then, slip back to the harbor and abandon him to a too-big, empty house, rooms of sheet-covered furniture fluttering spookily, creaking, moisture-warped wood. Or maybe he’d wake up, entwined with cold sheets, sweating, the past few hours a lonely, hallucinatory dream. How can this be their daughter? It seems impossible. She’s so moody, so prone to strange obsessions. Look at her, in those long debutante gloves, that gaudy silk scarf wrapped around her neck. You’d think she was going to the opera, not eating cheap takeout at home. He worries about the amount of time she spends on the beach, walking near the ocean with that creepy, sullen boy, Bradley or Brennan or whatever his name is. He takes after his mother, if you ask Mer’s dad. You can see the same haunted madness in his eyes, too bright, like seeds.

Mer’s father loves her, but she’s an enigma to him.

Mer catches him staring at her. She frowns, and takes another packet of sweet and sour sauce from the small pile in the center of the table.


It is eight o’ clock. On the wall, the cat-shaped clock rolls its eyes in its head and lashes its tail. It’s supposed to be cute, or charming or something, but Brendan has never trusted its smug, too-wide leer. His mother bites her lip as she stirs a pot of spaghetti sauce on the stove. The skin on her neck looks droopy. Her hair, orange and gray, falls from its bun and dangles over the pot in limp twists. Brendan worries about hair in the food.

“Once,” she says, startling him, “once upon a time, a poor, lonely man captured a peri and made her his wife. He stole her wings while she was bathing, her wings and her magic cap. Have I told you this story already?”

Brendan shakes his head. She continues, “Her sisters flew away without her, clutching their own golden caps to their heads. She had no choice but to return home with the human man.There was nowhere else to go, and she was tired, and hungry. He promised her so many things. A bed. A quilt. A fancy dress, a bowl of stew, books and musical instruments, rare herbs, his undying love for her. His teeth were white, and they all showed when he smiled. His eyes were sad. He really did seem to have fallen in love with her, or at least a desperate, clinging kind of lust, although he wouldn’t tell her where he’d hidden her wings and the source of her magical powers. But she was young, and wild. She was desperate, too, so she went with him. ***, I think I’ve burned this sauce. It’s sticking.”

Sometimes his mother will do this, break into renditions of obscure fairy tales. She majored in Folklore in college, she told Brendan once. Now, she’s a short-order cook at a greasy spoon with filthy yellow vinyl booths and framed tabloid headlines on the walls. Elvis’s Poltergeist is Haunting My Toaster!, Cheating Husband Reincarnated as His Mistress’s Pet Cockatiel, I Married the Loch Ness Monster!


“That story,” Brendan remarks as he spoons spaghetti and slightly crusty sauce onto his plate, “reminds me of the one you told about the selkie. With a hat instead of a sealskin.”

“What story?”

“You know, the one you just told. The peri with the golden cap. It gets stolen, and she has to go and live with the man who took it.”

“Oh. Well, the fairy bride motif is found in many cultures.” She twirls her fork in the air, hands aflutter like small, separate animals. “She might be a seal or a fox or a crane or a deer that’s taken human shape. She might be an angel, or a peri, or a mountain spirit. She might come to her human husband of her own accord or she might have to follow him after he hides the source of her power. In the end, though, she always leaves him. The rocks and the snow and the sea call her home.”

What if he leaves her first? Brendan thinks, What if she never finds the cap or the wings? What if she has children? He remembers Mer, pushing her Jell-O with a plastic spoon to make it wobble as she told him, “My mother walked into the ocean.” Her father, slouched and balding, greeting her at the door and casting a suspicious look in his direction.He thinks of his father, kissing his mother, sweeping her off the floor, when he was very young and his mother’s hair was shiny and bright, a halo of red. His father in a fedora that cast a shadow over his eyes. His father, smiling to show all his teeth. His mother, curled around a glass of scotch on the sofa, cigarette in one hand, her eyes glazed in the glow of the t.v screen. The movie was about a young boy who could see ghosts. He thinks.


(to be continued...)

And here is the last segment:



Finally, after a long, long time, she looked up, straightened her back, shook the dust from the sealskin and folded it carefully. Her daughter tilted her head in a silent query.
“It’s okay,” said Marjorie, “I’m all right.” The air was warm and moist as the inside of a mouth. Her husband was out of town. “Let’s have a picnic on the shore tonight,” she continued,
“and sleep outside. It’ll be a fine night. I’ll show you the constellations.”

Mer smiled, turning her eyes into creased crescents. “Can we make sandwiches with strawberry jam? And white bread, and the crunchy kind of peanut butter? And can we cut them up like stars and bells and ducks with the cookie cutters?”

“Anything you want, baby.” She tousled her hair and the child squirmed away, shrieking, “I’m not a baby! I’m not! “


Another morning, and Mer and Brendan are skipping school. There’s no discussion between them, no conscious decision; they just walk past it and away. No one seems to notice, no one tries to stop them. They walk through the town, looking at graffitied walls and toothless old men in bulky coats digging through dumpsters, a beautiful lady wearing pale face powder, white lipstick (at least they assume she has makeup on) and huge headphones shoved over her ears singing along, loudly, with what sounds like opera. There’s a harrowed looking woman pushing a baby’s stroller with one hand and struggling to carry a large paper bag of groceries in the other. A boy who doesn’t look much older than they are is playing a violin next to the fountain by the library. It is shaped like a fish with long, pointed fins, spitting a thin, bright stream of water into the air. The boy’s violin case is open in front of him, its velvet lining scattered with quarters and dimes. Mer and Brendan each drop a dollar in. The boy launches into something slow, low pitched, sweet. It almost sounds like a lullaby. They walk on, shuffling their shoes and swinging their arms, not in a hurry. Eventually, they find their way to the beach. The harbor is busy with fishermen and there’s a bustling, neon-lit perpetual carnival of a boardwalk further down, but there are still several pockets of rocky, harsh-sanded isolation, and those are the places that Mer and Brendan always gravitate towards.


They talk about many things, mothers and mermaids and chains. Rain, aches and pains. Brendan tells Mer a dirty joke, laughs too loudly as she frowns at him, puzzled, then carefully explains it to her. “Oh,” she says. “I guess that’s sort of funny. Maybe.” They kick off their shoes, roll up their pant legs and let the tide wash over their feet. If Brendan notices the fur on Mer’s legs, on the tops of her feet, he says nothing. When she spreads her toes out in the cold, stinging water, there’s a thick, translucent webbing between them. When they wade out after only a few minutes, goosebumped and slightly blue, Brendan pulls a half-empty packet of Virginia Slims and a lighter from his jacket pocket. Gently, Mer takes them out of his hands and lays them on the sand. He reaches for them again, but she’s holding his wrists. Her eyes are so close, and so big, and so dark. He can barely tell the iris from the pupil. He can count every one of her eyelashes. She blinks, and leans closer still.



He’s walking, stomping head down, shrugging into his long, tan overcoat on a secluded part of the beach, the water and the ground rough enough to discourage most people from lingering there to sunbathe or swim. The fishing’s not great, either. It’s his lunch break now, but he’s not hungry, so he’s taking a walk. There are some seals sunning themselves on the rocks ahead, sleek and placid. The sight of them drives him further into his ugly, stormy mood. He’s felt out of sorts for several days now, and he isn’t entirely sure why. Maybe it’s the weather. There’s been so much rain lately. He kicks the ground, raising a spray of pebbles. He turns a corner, around an outcropping of jet-black rock, pitted with small holes and eroded dents. There are a couple of teenagers necking in its shadow, a boy with unevenly trimmed blonde hair, and a small girl with thin arms in gloves, which are wrapped around the boy’s supple back. He looks away, embarrassed, but there’s something familiar about these two. He stops. Stares at them.



Brendan’s breath tickles Mer’s neck. She feels shuddery and strange. He’s unbuttoning her shirt. She buries her face in his hair. They’re on the edge of something huge, an unknown transformation.

And then there are hands, large hands gripping her shoulders, pulling her up and off and away. Brendan’s eyes are wide, his mouth hanging open. He stammers, “S-sorry, sir.” It comes out a squeak.

“Go home, you little ***,” says Mer’s father’s voice, flat, cold, scary. He sounds like he’s about to rip someone’s throat out. Brendan clambers to his feet and races off down the beach, not looking back. Mer turns around to face him, slowly. She stands there, shoeless, shivering, her blouse most of the way open. Her father gives her a look of pure anguish. His eyes travel to her silver, webbed feet. “You’re too young ,” he whispers. “It’s too soon for this.” Somehow, Mer doesn’t think he’s referring to Brendan, at least not entirely. She fumbles with her clothes, blushing madly. Once her sneakers have been jammed back on her feet, her father grabs her roughly by the wrist and drags her away from the shore, towards the town, towards home. “You take after your mother,” he says, sharply. “I should have known. You can be sure you won’t be seeing that boy again...” he trails off. His shoulders tremble as though he’s suppressing a sob. “I don’t want you to leave me, Mer. Not yet. But perhaps there’s something we can do.” They pass the fountain, the huge brownstone library and the violinist. Mer’s father is beginning to frighten her. He sounds crazy, raving. “I loved your mother,” he continues, “and I thought she loved me, too. I suppose she did, really. I didn’t hold her tightly enough, though, and she couldn’t resist the chance to return...”

“Maybe,” Mer cuts in, a little timidly, “you wanted to keep her too much, and that’s what drove her away.”

“Maybe, but I won’t lose you. You’re my daughter as much as you are hers, if not more. I raised you. Raised you singlehandedly for the past eight years, in fact. She didn’t even care enough to visit. Not one time .” Mer can feel the bitterness in his voice, thick and sticky enough to drown in. Part of her agrees with him, hears the sense in what he’s telling her. Another part of her murmurs through her blood and nerves, speaking of tides and salt, fish and hidden places, palaces far underwater. Her heart pounds in its cage of bone. She doesn’t know which part of her is right.

They round a corner, and Mer is being marched up the driveway to their peeling yellow front door. Keeping an iron grip on Mer’s wrist, her father unlocks the door and marches her inside, up the creaky wooden stairs. With a mighty shove, she’s inside, on the nubbly, blue-green carpet. Her father has shut and locked the door before she can get to her feet. “I’ll deal with you after work,” he promises, muffled by the wood. Mer lies on the floor, stunned, panic beginning to crawl through her guts like a small, trapped animal. She has never seen her father like this, not ever, not once. Even after Marjorie left, when she came back from the beach alone, he only cried, picked her up and held her close until she wriggled out of his grasp.



They sat on a checkered blanket on the shore, their sandwiches long eaten, watching the waves tumble and the sky shade into the indigo of twilight. Mer’s mother told her stories, strange, violent tales made soothing by her lilting voice. Above them, the stars began to blink and glimmer, tiny lanterns or faraway suns.

“Far, far to the north of here,” Marjorie intoned, “people tell of a goddess who dwells deep beneath the ocean. She is forever dreaming, locked in slumber. She is huge as mountains, a giant with tangled hair and fingerless hands, but once, she was a little girl like you.”

Mer looked up at her, wide eyes wider. She continued, “ From the moment of her birth, she was hungry. It was no fault of hers, but her appetite frightened her parents. As a baby, she wore her mother out with her constant nursing. As a child, she craved raw meat and tore into it with her hands and her sharp teeth. When she was older, she was as ravenous for young men as she had been for meat, and wore them out the way she’d worn her mother out until they were little more than shadows.

Finally, her parents couldn’t deal with this fearsome hunger anymore. While she slept one night, they put her in a boat and rowed out to sea. They tried to toss her overboard, but she awoke, and clung to the side of the boat, trying desperately to climb back in. When it became apparent that her grip was not weakening, her father cut off her fingertips with his knife. She screamed in anguish and wept at her family’s betrayal, but she did not let go. Her father cut off more of her fingers, and more still, but she only let go and sank under the water when she had no fingers left at all.

A strange thing happened to the pieces of her fingers as they touched the sea. The fingertips became pale-scaled fish. The smallest joints became seals, the middle joints became sea-lions and walruses, the largest joints stretched into whales, which swam off singing slow, haunting songs.”

Marjorie paused for breath. A half-moon had appeared in the sky, sharp and white. It looked like a scrap of paper floating in the dark. Her daughter curled against her. Mer’s eyes were shut and her breathing was deep and even, her mouth open. She was asleep. Marjorie reached for the sealskin, rolled up neatly and placed on the blanket beside her. Gently, she let Mer slide to the blanket. She stood up. She wondered if she was doing the right thing.

The ocean was shining. Further down on the beach, there were seals. They watched her in the cold chiaroscuro of the moonlit night. Some of them made soft noises.

She threw the skin over her face and pulled it around her arms and shoulders. She left her legs free, for the time being.


Mer stands up, shakily, and walks to the window. As usual, it is open. There’s an oak outside, with branches that stretch almost into the room. They scratch against the windowpanes when the wind blows, as though frustrated by the tiny opening. Mer takes off her gloves for a better grip, and reaches out. She grabs the nearest, thickest branch and pulls herself to its underside, wrapping her arms and legs around it like a tree sloth. She crawls backwards along it until she reaches the trunk, then, carefully, she lets go with her legs and drops onto a lower branch. Climbing down the tree is slow work. She’s only three stories up, but Mer isn’t very agile and she doesn’t want to fall. When she reaches the ground her limbs are sore, her palms full of splinters.

She walks back to the beach, to the spot she and Brendan visited earlier. She doesn’t know where else to go. Surprisingly few people even glance at her webbed, furred appendages as she passes. The air smells like salt and sweat, taco stands and something burning. A hint of cotton-candy sticky sweetness wafts over from the boardwalk. The sea smells like the sea. Someone, maybe Brendan, maybe her father, once told Mer that the scent of the ocean came partly from the salt and partly from the thousands and millions of dead fish and other aquatic animals rotting beneath its surface. Mer doesn’t know whether she believes this, but it matters little to her. She loves that smell, fishy, salty, tangy. It’s like tears, or blood.


Mer felt her mother’s hands moving her head, her mother standing up. Sleepily, she half opened one eye. Marjorie walked down the beach. In silhouette, she looked like a mythical being, a sort of reverse mermaid: a seal with human legs. She must be wearing the skin, thought Mer, more awake now. She paused at the water’s edge, letting the foam lick her feet for a moment. Maybe she looked over her shoulder, back at Mer and the lights of the town, but it was too dark to really tell. Mer wondered if she was dreaming.


There is a girl, about Mer’s age, standing on the rough, dark sand. She’s the palest person Mer has ever seen, with hair, eyes and skin that are almost colorless. Her loose dress is a deep black, as is the ribbon that holds back her hair. She wears nothing else. Her small, bare feet look cold. The toenails are almost blue. A bird sits on each of her shoulders. They look a little like overgrown hummingbirds with brilliant red, yellow, and green feathers. Their long, thin beaks are the color of maraschino cherries. The birds stare at Mer with keen, blackberry eyes. She’s slightly disconcerted by their gaze.

“Hi,” says the girl, waving.

“Hello,” says Mer. “Aren’t your feet cold?”

The stranger shakes her head. “I’m fine. Do you like the birds? They’re phoenixes.”

“Oh,” says Mer. “Um...that’s interesting. They’re very pretty.” The bird on the left lifts its wings, fanning them out as though displaying the feathers to Mer. It makes a noise that’s somewhere between a coo and a croak.

“They’ve just emerged from their pyre,” says the girl. Indeed, there’s smoke rising on the horizon, thick and wooly and gray. Mer can hear the sirens and bells of fire engines, rushing to the source of all that smoke. She opens her mouth to speak, but the girl is gone. She doesn’t fade into the air. She doesn’t walk away. She’s there and then she isn’t. That’s all.

Mer realizes, suddenly, that the sun is setting. The sky looks like melting sherbet. There’s a red feather lying in the sand, and the light makes it glow like it’s on fire. There’s a figure walking towards her, up the beach, all in shadow. At first she thinks it’s her father.

Further down on the beach, there are seals. They watch her, solemnly, expectantly.

Her mother walked into the sea.

Mer stands in the surf, letting it crash over her feet. The wind plays with her hair. She looks at her hands, at a beer bottle bobbing in the current, and wonders what to do. The seals are watching, with eyes like hers.

She never came back.

Eventually, it begins to get dark. The moon rises, white as a halo, a paper lantern, a lightbulb. It pulls the tide in and out, in and out. A seal lifts its head from the water to breathe, sleek and wet, before diving back into the waves.

Just wonderful.

Thank you. ::-_-::