The mermaid dons a black bikini and shaves her legs. She lathers her body with thick sunscreen, squeezes lemon juice into her hair so the sun may bless her blonde, the droplets trickling down her back. She heads to the beach with her best friend Carla to find a fairy tale ending, the cooler of Coronas on her arm and a wide-brimmed sun hat atop her head, laughing in a way she hopes someone will find alluring. She looks up and down the shore to see who has noticed her. She and Carla sit and sweat, talking of whether it’s better to wish for love upon a starfish or pray for a happily-ever-after in the blink of the ever-elusive green flash when the sun kisses the horizon each evening.
They’re hot and hungry, so they walk down the beach to the little snack shop in search of something to satisfy them. The mermaid acquires a collection of shells in her cover-up pocket along the way, letting the breeze blow the sheer lace behind her. At the stand, Carla orders a hot dog and the mermaid orders ice cream. They sit on a picnic bench listening to the tropical music tinkle from the weathered speakers, the children whining to their parents about sprinkles on their soft-serve, the waves’ constant rhythm.
The man sits down at the table. His friend joins him. He says, “Hello.”
The mermaid exchanges glances with Carla and they both giggle with their eyes.
He has chosen chocolate ice cream, just like her. It must be fate. He’s tall and tan, probably a bit older than her. He gets a drop of ice cream in his beard and she dabs it with a napkin.
He asks, “Have you found any sand dollars yet?” She hasn’t. She sips her Corona.
They all wade into the water, beers held high like trophies so the waves won’t splash them. The mermaid shrieks at the splashes, giggles, ruffles her hair, adjusts the straps of her bikini. How does a mermaid persuade a man to love her? He pulls the orange from the rim of his Blue Moon and sucks the juice from it. When he’s finished, he tosses the peel into the waves, and it sinks below the surface.
They reach a dip in the sand, and he tells them this is where they should look. She digs her toes deep into the ocean floor, fearing fish, fearing crabs, fearing whatever lurks below the surface. Finally, she toes a rough circle. She’s found one. Yes, a real sand dollar, just here! He wades over. She struggles to pull it up, her toes around its edges, but it keeps slipping free. Somehow, he steps on her foot.
“Oops, sorry,” he says.
The heat on her cheeks isn’t just from the sun. He wrangles the sand dollar and pulls it up, hands it to her. She thanks him. He smiles.
“Where did you come from?” he says. “I’m afraid I’ll blink and you’ll disappear.”
She’s drunk on Corona and sunshine and ice cream and love, and so she leans in to kiss him, the sweet orange still on his lips. Their bodies touch beneath the water.
—
The mermaid had taken a job at the Surf Shack to pay for beer in college, but now she works full-time to pay the bills as she decides what to do with her life. Sun-scorched tourists arrive to buy seashell sculptures and soft t-shirts that say “Florida” and goggles and boogie boards. They also buy dried-up and bleached sand dollars, which are not as good as the real thing, she knows, but she keeps that to herself.
This job used to bore her, but now she occupies herself by drawing cartoon caricatures on receipt paper: doodles of her and the man holding hands, kissing, swimming as merpeople. She doodles herself as the queen mermaid, a crown of sand dollars in her hair, the kind man by her side. She doodles kingdoms sculpted with sand and sunshine and kisses that taste of oranges. A lady with peeling shoulders and a pink nose compliments her doodles. She thinks the mermaid should make a flipbook.
The mermaid moves in with the man. Sure, it’s fast, but Carla’s moving south for a job and it’s cheaper than living alone and everything is going so well with her and him. In their new home, she arranges the sand dollars they found that first day together on a shelf with a little note: her + him ♡♡♡. As she fixes them just so, he tells her again of the story of their sand dollars, of how he saw her from afar and knew she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, how he mustered up the courage to talk to her, how he’d purposefully bought chocolate ice cream so they’d have something in common. She kisses him.
Carla asks her to meet at the beach for sunset. It’d be nice to see her once more before she moves, but the man puts on a movie and the mermaid feels so safe cuddled in his arms. She texts Carla an apology later; she didn’t mean to fall asleep.
—
The man takes the mermaid to the beach after dark hoping to witness the magic of sea turtles hatching and crawling to the waves. They should emerge any night now. Once out of their shells, the turtles follow the moon’s glow on the water to the ocean and swim to eternity. But some
fall prey to the artificial lights on shore. They’re bleary-eyed and easily blinded when they’re young. If they choose the wrong path, fall under the spell of porch windows instead of water, they’ll wander too far upshore and die. Tonight, the mermaid and the man serve as guardians of the turtles and their fate, and the mermaid is eager to save the day.
They sit near the dunes and wait. In the inky dark, the waves lap the sand, and the sea grass bows to the breeze. As they pass the ember of a joint between them, he says, “How often do guys hit on you when you’re working?”
She scoffs at him.
He says, “Don’t play dumb. I know they do.”
She laughs.
He says, “What do you say when they ask for your number?”
She turns to face him. “You’re actually upset?”
He says, “I don’t want anyone to steal you away from me.”
He tells her of the ex who had an affair, of the late-night laughter from the bathroom, of the long nights at work, of the “you can trust me” charade. He’s so heartbroken, so fragmented. When he looks at her, she sees that he’s unsure whether she’s the light that will lead him to the ocean or a blinding illusion leaving him lost on land.
The mermaid laces her fingers between his and squeezes tight. “You have nothing to worry about. It’s mostly families anyway.”
He sighs. “I just have a hard time trusting people.”
She says, “Calm down. I love you.”
He says, “Please don’t hide anything from me. Please, no secrets.”
She kisses his nose.
He says, “Don’t ever leave me.”
He’s desperate and she’s committed to picking up his broken pieces. When the sea turtles hatch just before dawn, they cheer them on. Each step closer to the water is one step closer to happily ever after. She loves seeing him smile at her. Each one of the turtles makes it.
—
The man convinces the mermaid to move to the center of the state with him. It’s better for his work, so she goes. On the phone, Carla tries to convince her otherwise–“What will you do there?”–but they’re going to start a life together, so she must. When people love each other, they must make sacrifices. Carla doesn’t get it.
Landlocked in central Florida, no longer close to the waves, the mermaid tries not to be miserable. She gets a job at another Surf Shack, more boring than the last, but they hire her as Assistant Manager. He works long hours, often leaving before she wakes and coming home after she’s asleep. The mermaid does yoga and swims in the pool, braids and unbraids her hair. She doodles pictures of her in a wedding dress and him in a tux at the altar on the beach, toasting with Coronas instead of champagne. She suggests they take a day trip to visit Carla, maybe meet up at a beach in the middle, but this never comes to fruition. They’re all just too busy.
He says, “You’re going to leave me. You have all those dudes coming in looking for a piece of ass on vacation. You’re going to fall in love with them.”
She says, “No.”
He says, “You never even tell me about work. You’re hiding things. I know it.”
She says, No. No no no.
Every once in a while, he gets angry. Every once in a while, they fight. Sometimes he yells too loudly, curses, calls her names. He doesn’t mean it. He always apologizes. Remember, it’s not his fault. That woman broke his heart. He just needs some love. And she just needs some patience.
The mermaid keeps a jar of salt water on the bedside table to remind herself of waves, sand dollars, and chocolate ice cream. She doesn’t open it often. Only for the chance to smell the ocean, to drown out the things he doesn’t mean to say. Why would you abandon love when you’ve already found it?
He says, “I love you.”
He says, “You’re my one and only, my sand dollar queen.”
He says, “You shouldn’t show off your boobs like that.”
He says, “Men are always trying to hit on you.”
He says, “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
He says, “If you leave me, you’ll leave the best thing that’s ever happened to you.”
He says, “Our love is a fairy tale.”
He says, “Are you really going to wear that? You look slutty.”
He says, “I’m so lucky I found you, so lucky.”
He says, “Those guys are looking at you.”
He says, “Stop it. Stop being like that. Stop talking to them. Stop looking at them.”
He says, “Stop acting like you don’t even love me.”
He says, “You don’t even love me.”
He says, “I wouldn’t survive without you.”
He says, “I would literally die without you. I’m serious. I’m not doing this without you.”
Only part of her, only one percent of the mermaid’s heart, wonders if this isn’t the truth.
When he tells her these things, she quiets the world around her, creates an eye in the hurricane of his words. She sinks into her own head. Remember, sunshine equals happiness. Oranges equal kisses. Sand dollars equal true love.
She opens the jar of salt water.
—
When the first bruises appear, they look like watercolors of the waves: blues and purples, splashes of green. When the mermaid looks at them, she pushes away that moment on the floor–t-shirt ripped, tears filling her eyes–and thinks of the ocean. It was an accident. The man apologizes and she forgives him. She apologizes for provoking him. Why did she have to push his buttons? She wraps herself in a hug and carves half-moons into her arms with her fingernails.
On the phone, Carla says she should leave him. The mermaid imagines it but knows she wouldn’t like it. It would mean admitting failure. Sure, this is not how she had dreamed this would be, but true love takes resilience, hard work, effort. It can get complicated and messy, but they must be committed. She will not give up, must never give up. They’ll get through it. Together.
This becomes the mermaid’s daily mantra.
When it happens again, she suggests anger management.
He says, “I don’t have a problem.”
He says, “It was an accident.”
He says, “I’m sorry. I’m really really sorry.”
He says, “It won’t happen again. I promise.”
He says, “If anyone asks, just say you fell off your bike. No one has to know.”
She was supposed to go to a party at Carla’s, stay for the weekend, and catch up, but she decides to stay home. He brings her chocolate ice cream, and they cuddle on the couch watching movies. He swipes a bit of ice cream on her nose. She laughs.
He says, “You know I love you, right?”
—
The mermaid begins to have nightmares. The recurring one, the worst one, is always about the ocean. She’s swimming in the waves when a storm comes. The dark clouds don’t scare her, nor does the lightning. Even the waves rising high above her head don’t invoke fear. She swims against them, moving deep into the ocean water. She lets her nose and mouth fill with salt water.
She swims toward a glowing orange post bobbing in the water. This is where the other mermaids wait for her. If she passes their test by making it to the buoy, they’ll baptize her as one of their own. They’ll sew her legs together, braid seaweed into her hair, pull her down into the depths, forever anchoring her to the waves with love. She can see them just up ahead, their eyes shimmering, their shoulders tall, their thoughts never murky, but clear and free. They sing to her, telling her to hurry. She pushes on and reaches them. They squeeze her shoulders, kiss her tears away. She’s safe here. And soon, all will be saved!
But then here the man comes, and it all happens so fast. He lassos her in a life raft, pulling her away from her mermaid sisters. He drags her through the water to his rescue boat and she can’t break free. He lays her out on the deck like a caught fish. The storm stops and the clouds clear. The sun leeches water droplets from her skin. She’s panting, dehydrated, and begging for guidance in the mermaid’s songs—something, anything to save her—but the motor on his boat drowns out their voices, and he’s steering the boat back to shore.
She always has this dream.
When she awakes, sticky with sweat, she tries to finish the dream, imagines her escape. Because the mermaid, baptized in waves and in love with the water, wouldn’t stay on dry land. A true mermaid would return to the ocean. With a sparkling tail, she’d climb out the apartment window, pulling past the edges that dig into her hip bones, leaving open sores just before her tail began. She’d land face-first in the dirt. She’d bite her lip bloody to avoid screaming. She’d pull herself across the grass, itchy and sharp, razoring her bare chest. Her tail would weigh her down—dead weight on land—but she’d move forward. She’d reach the road. Worry about it. Dig her fingernails into the concrete and inch forward. One tiny bit. She’d drag herself across the asphalt. She’d be dry-heaving and shriveled, lobstering in the sun. The road’s jagged teeth would gnaw at her stomach, pull the scales of her tail back like pulled-up fingernails. Still, she’d pull forward. Once she got a taste of salt water, she’d know what to do.
The man interrupts her fantasy as he eels himself around her body in bed, and she tries to will these thoughts away. He’ll read her face, read her mind. She can’t hide anything. No secrets. His leg wraps around her own, and she notices how rigid and human she is. She’s never actually had a mermaid tail. She doesn’t have the bravery or the courage or the beauty. She’s just a human girl. A twenty-something nobody who doesn’t know anything. She slips out of his grasp and goes to the bathroom, looks at herself in the mirror. She hears slut, trying too hard, lazy bitch. She dressed up as Ariel once for Halloween as a child and sold herself on the fairy tale. Now she’s made a silly mermaid shrine of her life. And none of it has earned her a happily ever after.
So the human girl chops off her hair. Snip snip done. She won’t pretend anymore.
The human girl quits wishing to be blessed blonde. She quits wearing makeup. Avoids mirrors. She stays indoors, forgets about the water. She zones into TV shows, silly rom-coms where nothing is like reality and everyone earns true love. Her skin pales. She takes off work, claims she’s sick. All she wears are sweatpants.
—
She hasn’t seen Carla in months, maybe a year. How long has it been? Carla loves her job. And she’s getting married. She’s happy. That’s all she knows.
The human girl keeps her short hair in a messy bun, keeps a list of affirmations on the bathroom mirror, keeps the fridge stocked with microwave meals, keeps reminding him that they’re in love, keeps showing up to the job she hates, keeps watching movies with him on the couch. She doesn’t keep the shelves dusted, and one day, while she’s wrapped up tight in his arms, she notices the sand dollars are coated in thick dust.
She buys large canvases and gallons of paint. She paints the mermaid over and over. She smears blues and greens together. She makes navy and turquoise and aqua and emerald. She paints the mermaid buying ice cream and Coronas, paying for them with sand dollars. She paints the mermaid squeezing lemon juice into her hair. She paints the mermaid happy. She paints her over and over and over until she has a hundred mermaid canvases, maybe more. She sends one to Carla. Carla thinks it’s the best she’s ever done. Carla thinks she could sell them. Carla thinks, maybe, this is her ticket out.
But she doesn’t need a ticket out because this is her home, a home of Coronas and oranges and t-shirts that say “Florida.” Even though she never drinks Coronas anymore and he never eats oranges and the t-shirts that say “Florida” are filled with holes. She loves him. He loves her.
He comes home late again and the chicken she made for dinner is long cold, his plate waiting in the microwave. She shows him a painting of the mermaid sitting alone on the shore of an uncharted island. He says, “Will you quit it with the mermaid paintings already?” and bites into his cold chicken.
He loves her. He loves her. He loves her.
In the evening, after he’s gone to bed, she stares at herself in the mirror, repeats to herself:
You love him. You love him. You love. You—
The human girl drives to the coast alone. Unprompted, unplanned, a surprise even to herself. She wears the gray faded “Florida” tee, the soft one that has always been her favorite. She walks through the town, through the shops, through the tourists. She buys a lemon and squeezes it into her roots. She buys a Corona and sips it, lets it dribble down her chin. She wants to have a good day.
She wanders onto the beach. Slipping off her gym shoes and socks, she wriggles her toes into the sand. She exhales, turns her nose up to the sun, and buries her toes in further. Then, she begins to walk. She finds the children yelping when they come up from the waves with mouthfuls of water; the young women lying on their backs, headphones in, dreaming of fairy tales; the waves lapping back and forth across the sand, a rhythm. How sure they are, how consistent. How she’d missed this.
She moves toward the ocean, feverish in the heat. The water kisses her toes. She walks further in, not caring that she’s fully clothed, in jeans no less, and that she didn’t bring anything to change. She knows this is stupid. Stupid for wearing clothes in the ocean, stupid for being here. She worries that someone will think she’s crazy, that someone will stop her–“Look at this silly girl,” they’d say–but no one notices her. Still, she wades further. Her t-shirt fills with water and pulls her down, and she likes the weight. The water feels like home.
The human girl swims out, buoying above the waves. She dives deep and tries to touch the bottom. She crosses her legs like a mermaid and dives deep again, comes up for air breathless. Wipes the salt from her eyes. Her hair sticks to her neck. She breaks out of mermaid pose, scissoring her legs sideways into right angles, treading water. She stares back at the beach, at a group of friends laughing and eating soft-serve.
What will she tell him? What will he think of her wet clothes? What will he say? What is she even doing?
She closes her eyes to the sun and sinks her head back, pressing her ears below the surface. Here, with her ears underwater, his voice is silenced. Everything is silenced. She lets her legs float, her arms relax. She must pay attention to this. In the quiet of the water, she hears the fish swimming, the ocean’s body rising and falling with each wave’s breath, the mermaids singing, telling her to hurry, telling her to live.
This is her being happy.
Eventually, she walks out of the water, knowing that she looks a fool but not caring in the slightest. As she walks back through the shops to her car, she notices a bleached sand dollar for sale. It’s bright white and smells of nothing. She rubs her finger over it, a rough, chalky residue. It’s a dead creature on display for a buck fifty. When she looks up, she finds the shop owner staring at her like she’s a sick, wet dog dripping on his floor. He tentatively asks if she’d like to buy it. She laughs and puts it back.
—
The human girl packs a bag, gets in the car, and drives away. She doesn’t leave a note. She doesn’t text him. She doesn’t return his calls. She buries him in her mind and drives. She wonders if it would be easier if she were a mermaid with scales pulled back so people could see the damage, be gentle with her as she healed. But when she leaves him, her bruises have faded. There are no visible scars of evidence. Only Carla knows and the human girl didn’t even have to tell her. She sleeps on Carla’s couch, gets a new job, gets a new life.
Carla takes her to the beach for Sunday Funday. She wears a new one-piece bathing suit, a new cover-up. She sits under the umbrella watching Carla laugh with her fiancé in the waves, splash each other and giggle. She doesn’t even know she’s crying until Carla asks what’s wrong. She wonders if tears leave scars.
She wipes her eyes and says, “It’s just salt water.”
They go to the stand and get hot dogs, no ice cream. Carla and her fiancé flirt. Carla kisses his cheek, leans her head on his shoulder, then reaches her hand across the table to squeeze the human girl’s fingers.
—
She answers one of the man’s calls. Maybe by accident, maybe something else. He says he’d like to see her. That it’s important. She’s nervous, but she goes. He brings flowers. He wraps her body in a hug that feels like opening a photo album that’d been forgotten in storage. She sits with him in the car and stares at the ocean in the distance. They take turns saying pleasantries, the answers guarded as they try to read each other: How are you? How have you been?
He says, “I miss you.”
He folds her hand in his and rubs his thumb over her knuckle.
“It will be different this time,” he says. “I promise.”
She looks away, pretends to watch a seagull but there are no seagulls around.
He says, “I love you.”
The human girl repeats his words, an echo. He kisses her and tastes of oranges.
She lets him fuck her on the hood of the car. She tries to imagine the past, but the ocean and sand dollars and sea turtles and oranges all feel like a distant something with a distant somebody, a movie she watched years ago and can’t quite remember how it ended. His voice in her head asks if she’s told anyone about him, if she’s fucking anyone else, if that time with her shoulder left a scar, if she’ll stay with him tonight.
She wonders if this is the current that will drown her, an endless cycle of love, fight, leave, repeat.
After, she tries to leave quickly, but he keeps pulling her back. One more kiss. One more. She gets out of the car and walks away.
He says, “I love you! See you soon!”
She whispers, “Okay.”
The weight of his gaze hangs on her all the way to her car, all the way home. Inside, she takes a long shower, baptizes a new self.
—
The human girl doesn’t tell Carla about this. Instead, she prepares dinner, a nice one, full of fresh asparagus and perfectly cooked chicken. After, she watches a movie with Carla and her fiancé, a buddy comedy. They laugh on the couch and then go to bed in peace. She goes to work the next day and sets a goal to accomplish everything on her checklist. The man blows up her phone, but she ignores his texts, ignores his calls. She’s never been religious, but she prays she’s made the right choice. Prays he’ll leave her alone. Prays for forgiveness that she abandoned him. Prays they’ll both be okay.
She commits to this new ritual: ignore his texts, ignore his calls. Instead, prepare a lovely dinner. Watch a movie with Carla and her fiancé. Associate Corona with Carla, and toast to a great evening. Go to work the next day. Ignore his texts. Ignore his calls. Check every box off the to-do list. Prepare dinner. Watch a movie. Ignore the texts, put the phone on do-not-disturb. Go to work. Refuse to eat oranges. Ignore the calls. Prepare dinner. Pray. Pray. Forget his face. Forget his voice. Watch a movie. Fall in love with the guy on TV. Work. Ignore. Ignore. Ignore. Prepare. Watch. Pray. Work. Ignore ignore ignore. Ignore. Prepare dinner. Watch a movie. Forget he existed. Remember to forget until he’s gone.
—
That last time, she realizes later, didn’t feel like the last time. She didn’t take the time to commit his features to memory. She didn’t put her hand on his face to measure the distance between his eyes, the length of his nose, the shape of his small mouth. She can’t remember the weight of his arms surrounding her anymore. She can’t remember what color his eyes are.
She conditions herself to blur his image and erase all memories. She learns to speak in euphemisms–some stupid guy, weren’t right for each other, bad relationship. For a long time, she refuses to say his name, as if it were a curse that could destroy her.
She wonders if she should regret this forgetting. She wonders if she’ll ever feel like remembering. But months later, she finds one sand dollar in a box in the back of the closet, bleached and buried, that she had saved “just in case,” and it seems so stupid and irrelevant that it lands straight in the trash without a second thought.
—
She lathers her body with sunscreen, dons her black bikini and sun hat, and heads to the beach. She finds Carla under the umbrella, keeping her pregnant belly shielded from the sun, the blue cooler full of mocktails beside her. They toast each other with slices of watermelon, talk of art and newborns and ice cream. She doodles a portrait in the sand with her big toe as they chat, crowns this doodle with seashells, then smiles at her work. The mermaid in the portrait still dreams of happily-ever-afters. Carla asks her to paint a mermaid mural in the baby’s bedroom.
She walks to the water, taking her time to let each step sink in the sand. She collects one seashell, purple and iridescent, along the way. When her toes touch the water, she lets out the breath she didn’t know she was holding and tilts her chin to the sun. It warms her face and freckles her nose. The mermaid song of her dreams finally makes sense. She breathes the salt air, listens to the gulls. When she opens her eyes, she sees the sun dazzling the water to shimmering turquoise. The mermaid stands with her shoulders high and her feet grounded, resolute at the shore of once upon a time.