Time has almost no meaning to me. In the water, we always move forward, so basically we live on that small edge between what humans call "present" and "the future". These words sound strange to me, as does "ten years ago". Time has a different meaning to me. I had even none, but then I read in a science school book that speed is defined by the distance covered in a certain measurement of time, and I like speed. I like to drive Andrea's car, though he does not like me driving it. Hi thinks I drive to fast, and that I take too much risk. I'm always scared when he is driving, since he sees things often long after I have noticed the, and he is completely unable to listen out. But you really can here if there's a car around that bend, or a motorcycle or a cyclist. But there is none, so I can overtake the tractor in front of me because I know I won't hit anything. Andrea, next to me, however, changes the color of his face to white and presses a "Diomio!" between his clenched teeth. But when he drives, it's always me that has to tell him: "Be careful, there is a deer behind this bushes heading to the road!"

But when I notice the animal and slam the brakes, then comes another "Diomio"! I can't stop the car, get out and hunt down whatever was hiding in the shrubbery just to show him that I had a reason. Not every time.

I had been out of the water for two days, and it was the weekend. Andrea is a biologist at an institute situated at Trieste a town not far away, his wife Chiara was sitting next to me, and he was in the back next to their eight year old daughter, Maria. They were not in on the secret, so I tried to move that car as a driver as deaf and blind as a human would do. However, I like to drive, and so he let me behind the wheel. In the water, amazing speeds are possible, even with just a little push in the tail, but it's good to sit still and have the impact of speed. I never said everything the humans did was wrong.

We drove up to the little lake in the mountains. Only a few other people were there, it was fairly warm weather, and there was a small meadow leading up to the lake. I was very reluctant to go into that cold water, but Maria wanted to, and I was a bid afraid that a human child would make fun of me for being too chicken. So I went in, and sure the coldness of the water was not so bad as if I just had entered the sea and my transformation would have begun.

In my human-like form and in freshwater, I had to learn to swim, and of course not just to breathe in water. No gills for the humanoid girl! Come up for breath was as annoying as the different buoyance of fresh water. In the lake, I had to stay at the surface, and I needed more strength to support my weight than in the ocean.

But we passed the day, and in the evening, we got a pizza in a nearby restaurant – "frutti mare" for me, of course. Maria was a bit disgusted of the things on my pizza: whole little calamari as well as parts of bigger ones, some shellfish and sardine filet populated my meal, and I teased her be gently sucking in a longer, olive-oil-and-oregano covered tentacle, chewing it with visual pleasure., while Maria grimaced, until her pasta al sugo came.

I let Andrea drive back to his home, where I was also staying. I had a room in that house, which most of the time was not used, but I kept my land things there – my clothes, my human world papers, my computer and my phone. A phone is very much useless in the ocean, since there's no wifi and electric devices generally don't mix very well with salt water. Maria was in my room, and I was reading to her from "The little Mermaid", a story she knew well, but also enjoyed my strange additions to the story, for example that of Frank, the fat merman who liked to eat and sleep and who did not like to help others with the things that mermaids needed to do. Of course I, his name wasn't really Frank. However, Maria liked it when in the story, he still had to do all the things he was told by the mermaids. Suddenly, Andrea came into my room. "Lele, you have got to see this!"

He gave me his computer, and on the screen there was a video of a collapsing tower somewhere out on the sea. "What is this?", I wanted to know.

"An oil company drilled for oil in the Pacific Ocean near the American cost, and they were short before the first probe extraction, when the drilling pole collapsed and took the ship with them. Several people died!"

I watched the footage, not too disturbed about the fact that people died. They had no business there, even if they thought they had, but they had been out there because of human greed, and whatever they were doing, it was bad for the ocean and everything living in it. So much was clear to me. Maria showed no interest in the boring grown-up thing, and her father asked me: "You think they are some out there?"

"I don't know, but I think there should be." Maria of course didn't pick up what we were talking about. There were many others like me, and there was no reason to believe there would be any ocean without some of us calling it home. There were others in the Mediterranean, and I knew that colonies living south of us have been pushed out to the Ionic Sea by my ancestors, since they needed their deeper waters for themselves.

"I would guess so. I googled the location, and look at that: 'Bristol Cove – Mermaid Capital of the World'!" Maria looked at us. "I like mermaids!" she crowed happily. "Yeah, me too," I reassured her. Most of those I knew, that was.

Her mother called Maria to prepare for bedtime. Mermaid mothers had it easier, since we were not so tied to the changes of day and night. Often it was easier to hunt at night, and the little ones followed the changing patterns of the grown-ups.

"That looks like… how do you call it?"

"Kitsch," Andrea answered. That shop here has worse stuff than any Disney movie, he commented at a photo of a shop owned by a certain Helen. So I added a new word to my vocabulary. But there was also a photo of the owner, and something in her face, in her eyes made me feel strangely familiar, as if I should know her. But she was a random stranger from the other side of the world. Unless…

"It's more a hobby to me, but I do research old knowledge about your kind. And what I have found out so far is that in ancient times, there have been many contacts between us and you. At least starting with the Old Greeks I'm pretty sure." Andrea looked at some other images and articles about Bristol Cove and the area.

"Didn't you tell me that when Europeans went across the Atlantic Ocean, our existence had already become am myth? There is a statue of a mermaid in Copenhagen, and from what I have seen on photos, she just is a human with a fishtail…" I stopped talking when Andrea pulled up two images. They were drawings of two girls' faces. I didn't know how drew them, but I instantly know what they were. I hissed.

Andrea looked up to me. "That's from the Sheriff's office; they're from the 'wanted' board. Drug-related, obviously.

I reached down and hit the back button to go back to the photo of Helen Hawkins. The phone number of her shop was on the website of Bristol Cove's tourist office.