The Little Mermaid
On the first day of summer vacation, after a long drive with my chatty grandmother I had come to the cliffs with a sandwich and a water bottle full of lemonade. I had done just this thing since the first year my grandmother insisted that I spend my summers with her. I guess other kids would miss their parents, but I can't remember the last time I saw my dad for more than twenty minutes. He's the high-end, drop your kids in boarding school business man. I don't even spend Christmas with him, he's too busy to bother.
I never knew my mother, Gran always said that she was just some woman that dad got pregnant one summer. My mother decided she didn't want to deal with me, and left me in a basket at Gran's doorstep. I always thought it was like something out of a fairytale, but when you're turning fourteen and you still don't have a mom and your dad doesn't care that you exist the fairytale kinda wears thin. But out here on the cliffs over the ocean, none of that really mattered. It was just me and the wind and the sea.
I breathed deeply and then bit into my sandwich remembering the vivid dreams that I had been having of this beach for the past several weeks. Anxious to get back to the only home I'd ever known, I suppose. I stayed on the cliffs until the sun started to set, playing a game from my childhood trying to spot faces in the foam. Sometimes I could even hear their laughter. I shook it off and carried the empty water bottle back to Gran's cottage. She would never forgive me if I polluted anything.
Walking into the cottage, was as always like walking into a feeling of love and well-being. Gran herself walked briskly from the kitchen in a bright purple jogging suit that was something of a shock on her small frame. "Was the sea still there dear?" She asked, her head cocked to the side like a parrot. I pulled her into a hug.
"Yeah Gran the sea was still there just the same as I remember. I think you're shrinking though." I chuckled at her as she scrambled away and straightened her mad-cap white hair. She chuckled back at me though and I pulled my duffel bags off the floor and headed up to the second floor. For as long as my memory lasted, this small room had been mine and I had always been welcome here. I let the bags hit the floor near the closet that sloped with the roof and I fell into the fluffy bed. Fishes and mermaids danced around on the childish comforter that I had had for years puffed up around me as I closed my eyes.
Almost immediately I fell asleep and began dreaming. Just as I had for weeks I knew I was dreaming and it startled me how real everything around me looked. I was underwater being tugged toward something or someone who was calling me by name. I wanted to be afraid but I was surrounded by the sweetest faces, all singing soothing songs to my ears.
As I moved deeper under the ocean I saw a glow in front of me out of proportion to the depths through which I was traveling. Soon I seemed to be moving over an under-water city, more beautiful than anything I had ever seen before and yet so familiar. I reached out to brush some coral blooms and tugged a flower from a tree, it flowed with me, somehow adding its scent to my experience under the water.
Soon we were in the middle of the city, in a grand courtyard. Me and the millions of singing women who all seemed to stop on cue as two new arrivals entered the courtyard. One was a woman so beautiful I wanted to cry. She had beautiful red hair that flowed around her head like a cloud and the brightest smile on her lips, her top half was nude which should have made me blush but I felt weirdly unconnected in the dream. From where her belly-button should be and down was the tail of a fish with scales that glowed and sparkled a million different colors. I wanted to stay by her side forever. But the man beside her frightened me away almost before I had the thought. His teeth were sharp and jagged and his lower body had the strong powerful lines of a shark.
I floated in the middle of the courtyard awkwardly waiting for something to happen. But nothing did, nothing happened. The woman smiled at me, the man gnashed his teeth at me and I just floated there in the middle of a city under the ocean. Finally when I was just about to scream myself awake the woman spoke. "You have to learn, learn fast. I'm so sorry. You were never supposed to happen." And then I woke up.
