[2676] "The Little Mermaid" (Literary Short Story excerpt, modern re-telling)

Modern re-telling of The Little Mermaid, without the fantasy/fairytale elements. This is only an excerpt; the full short story will be nearer 8,000 words. Literary style, slight magical realism

The Little Mermaid

The day he finally found me was one of those wet autumn days in New York City that turn all the golden and crimson leaves gray, yanking them from shivering branches to clot in sodden heaps in the gutters. 

I was in my apartment by the fireplace, thinking of my ghosts. The only sounds were the steady rain outside and the soft scratching of my rocking chair on the wooden floor. I’d turned all the lamps off so that the only light filtering through the window was gray and fluid, sifting shadows over my tiny room as the heavy rainclouds groaned across the sky. I felt suspended underwater, sitting quietly at the bottom of the sea as the waves crashed high above me.

I was thinking of home. Not the cramped New Jersey townhouse my family ended up in, filling the remainder of my childhood with the smell of rotten eggs from wheezing radiators. I mean the home I was born in. Temissea Harbor.

I hadn’t seen anyone from that town in forty seven years. People who are born in Temissea rarely leave. They are bound by the deep roots their ancestors laid in the sand dunes, crawling out of whatever shipwreck had landed them there. There was a collective sense of fear about the world beyond that harbor, as though everyone had inherited a bone-weariness of travel across the vast expanse of sea and never wanted to take another step toward the setting sun.

Temissea is cocooned in its own microclimate: it is always a completely different world in the town than somewhere fifteen miles inland. There is a warm current that runs from the belly of the sea straight into the harbor – the same one that brought all our ancestors to the rocky shore via a hundred shipwrecks - and when it hits the cold air spilling down from the mountains it creates a giant cloud that squats atop the town, erasing shadows. Everything there is always gray and wet. There is a heaviness to the air, sodden with water, that always made me think of Temissea as a land between the earth and sea: not quite of one or the other. 

The only people who want to live in Temissea are those who live partly on and in the water. It has been a fishing village for roughly three hundred years, and plenty of boats from around New England and Canada, and sometimes even as far away as Europe, dock there for maintenance and re-supply. For this reason Temissea is half filled with people whose great-great-great-great grandparents have known each other all their lives, and half filled with total strangers passing through quickly and faintly, like mist over the ocean. 

But I speak of it as though it still exists, and there are days I wonder if it ever did. If perhaps everything that happened there had been a fairytale in a dream, and that the world I knew had since crumbled onto the dunes and dissolved into sea foam. Every year it floated further and further away in my memory, like an unmoored boat disappearing over the horizon.

Until, of course, the day Officer Corrigan finally found me. Forty seven years after my family had fled.

When the phone rang, startling me out of my daydreams, I didn’t recognize the voice on the other end. The voice I remembered was young and velvety, and this one was deep and rough, as though he’d swallowed rocks that had scraped his throat. He had to repeat his name several times until an image floated into my mind: a smooth face and thick, wavy hair the color of straw. Thick boots trailing sand onto my mother’s rug. Wide green eyes filled with too many emotions for a nine-year-old girl to understand.

It had taken him a long time to find me, he said. He was sorry for the passing of my parents several years ago. He’d always assured them the case was cold but not closed, that he would keep it open as long as he was on the force. 

His voice was so far away, in both time and space, it was like speaking to an echo. I heard myself respond in quiet grunts.

He was sorry to dredge it all up again, he said, and I saw in my mind a shipwreck lifted, creaking and groaning, from the waves, masts cracked to daggers, sea-water pouring from the ragged holes in its barnacle-crusted hull. After all this time, he said, he was sorry to remind me of it. As though it hadn’t all lain within me, a vast and terrible weight on my body’s inner floor, for all these years. He was calling, he said, his voice very slow and careful, because the case was open again.

A boat had been found.

The boat. They were sure of it.

I felt all the breath leave my body, deflating through every pore.

I had been only nine, he knew, but even so my testimony would be invaluable. Because, after forty-seven years, they had a suspect.

Hello? Was I still there? 

My breath returned in a rush, and I gasped as though my head had broken the surface of water. 

I was. Yes. What testimony did he need?

There was silence on the other end, and I heard a tiny sound, like the scratch of a mouse’s foot on sand, or perhaps the lighting of a match. There was a sucking inhalation, and then a long exhale.

What did I remember, he said, of the girl we called Maren? 

Outside the rain continued to fall just as though time had not stopped still. Then, very slowly, I felt it bend back on itself, the years and the months, the weeks and days, the hours and the minutes, the seconds and the breaths and the spaces between breaths.

I remembered everything. 

Which is to say that I barely remembered a thing. None of us ever really knew who Maren was. 

From the day we found her to the day she disappeared, she never spoke a single word.

***

I was up early on the summer morning Maren came into our lives. My mother was frying up some bacon while my father read the paper that always arrived from Boston a week late. I was eating a bowl of cheerios and staring out the window at the ocean, which was very calm and green. The house was very quiet, except for the popping of the bacon fat in the pan and the languid rustle of paper as my father turned a page. I’d thought Jonah was still asleep. The night before, he’d gone to the Cove for a party. 

Temissea is the kind of place where all the young people, all those between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, are incredibly beautiful. I don’t know what it is about Temissea that makes that happen. It might be that bodies have some knowledge of the way their lives will go, of how gray and austere all the long years dragging on from thirty will be, and – like flowers that bloom spectacularly for a few days at the height of summer – put all the energy of their brief youth toward shining as magnificently as possible. Or it may be that, with their cold, wet lives stretching before them as one monotonous gray cloud, keeping slow and erratic time with the thumping of the waves, the people of Temissea infused their young with an almost divine beauty born of the hope they’d escape the fate of their elders, worn down by the tides like dull sea glass.

I used to like walking in the Cove on Sunday mornings. I’d probably intended to do so that morning, though I don’t recall if I’d had other plans. There were all sorts of treasures to be found there after a party: colorful bottles, dropped earrings, cigarette stubs. Bathing suit tops. Lighters. Smoking firewood. Half-eaten packages of gum. I used to take a bucket to collect everything I thought was interesting. One day I brought home a condom, thinking it was a type of jellyfish. After that my mother had forbidden me to go again. But I always found a way to sneak out, and a box of my treasures– minus the condom– was hidden under a floorboard in my room.

I still remember the taste of cheerios in my mouth when I saw Jonah come across the wooden planks that connected our house to the beach across the sand dunes. He was walking barefoot across the planks, carrying a girl in his arms.

He made it all the way across the screen porch and into the kitchen doorway before my mother noticed him. She screamed and dropped the spatula: hot bacon grease splattered the walls and sizzled a hole straight through my father’s open newspaper page. My father sat frozen for a moment, gaping at Jonah, and then they both rushed over, squawking, to take hold of the girl and lay her on the couch.

She was wrapped in a dirty beach towel, and her feet were tangled with pieces of seaweed. Her skin was shockingly pale, like the underbelly of a fish, and thin blue veins scrawled like spiderweb threads very close to the surface. She looked around quite calmly with eyes the flat gray of a rain cloud. Her lips seemed purple with cold, though she didn’t shiver. Her hair hung in long, tangled ropes almost down to the floor. 

It was green.

No one in Temissea ever dyed their hair, not even the housewives who turned gray at thirty-two, so I wasn’t used to seeing unusual hair colors. Now, of course, living in New York City, I see all sorts of outlandish shades. So now I think it must have been dyed.

Except that, even through the haze of ten years, I remember it looking very real. It wasn’t a bright shade of green, or even a very beautiful one. It was the green of seaweed seen through the murky haze of the ocean after a storm: dark, cloudy, slightly purple. An organic-looking green, like something that soaked in sunlight and floated rhythmically back and forth in rolling waves. 

I didn’t move from my chair. There is something instinctual in the primitive realm of a nine-year-old’s brain that tells it to stay still and silent when adults are moving and talking too quickly. There was a certain pitch to my parents’ voices that warned me to remain perfectly invisible. So I sat and watched in silence, my mouthful of cheerios going soggy on my tongue, as they all fluttered around the girl.

Jonah explained that he had found her in the Cove that morning, hidden behind a pile of rocks that fill with small, still pools whenever the tide comes in. It was a testament to their shock that neither my mother nor my father demanded to know why he’d still been at the Cove that morning. He had a strict curfew at 1am, but he also had a girlfriend. Madison West was the most beautiful, popular girl in the school, and they had been dating now for almost a year. I didn’t like her in the slightest, but I never once thought of telling my parents about all the nights Jonah’s window opened and closed and I heard the sound of his wooden headboard thunking dully against the wall.

The girl had been naked when my brother found her. He had wrapped her in a beach towel that had been lying by the smoking fire pit. She’d been awake, but had not responded to any of his questions. 

She could not walk.

My mother covered the girl in blankets and attempted to pull the seaweed out from between her toes. She made shushing noises, like a mother soothing a crying baby.

“You need to look at her legs,” Jonah said. He turned away, a blush staining his neck. “Her thighs and…and higher. I only saw because of the way she was lying.”

My mother gently peeled back the blankets to look. She sucked in her breath sharply, and I saw her briefly close her eyes, her face blanching. Then she sank to her knees beside the girl, putting her hand tentatively on the girl’s blanketed form.

“My dear,” she whispered, “Who hurt you?”

The girl just stared back, her gaze placid, and smiled a bit. 

My mother nodded at her, patting the blanket reassuringly. “All right,” she murmured, “Not now. Let’s get you washed.”

Jonah said “I will carry her.”

I watched as my brother carried her up the rickety wooden stairs to the second floor bathroom, my father hovering behind them with his hands held out as though he feared they’d fall. My mother followed, and I heard her soothing voice as she turned the faucet on; the water made a clanking, groaning sound as it wound its up the twisting pipes in the walls to shudder out of the bathtub’s rusty faucet. 

My father and Jonah came back down the stairs, the wood creaking in protest. My father came back  to his seat looking as though he were in a dream. He sat down and rubbed his hands over his face as though trying to smooth out all the wrinkles. 

Jonah stood at the foot of the stairs, staring up at the closed bathroom door. His hand was wrapped around the bannister, and his knuckles were white. He was breathing shallowly, and his cheeks were flushed as though he had a fever. He looked as though he was physically restraining himself, as though he was poised to leap back up those stairs and fling open the bathroom door.

The police were called. I remember them walking into our house, ducking under the low beam of our doorway and knocking the sand off their boots. The older officer, Weisser. And of course his young deputy, Officer Corrigan. 

My father eyed them suspiciously, turning a pipe over and over in his calloused fisherman’s hands. Temissea is the type of town where everyone knows everyone’s business, and there’s a taboo against calling the police. Everyone knows Mrs. McComb’s house has too many women under one roof, a porch light that stays on all night, and front steps worn down with too many boot-treads. Everyone knows what happens down at the Cove. 

But no one likes a rat. 

The police deal almost exclusively with out-of-towners, and ninety-nine percent of their cases happen down at the docks. The local paper reports on them, and sometimes the dreariness of Temissee life gets spiced up with the story of a murder or a rape or a drowning, but it’s always the nice kind: the kind you can tut about but then fold over and leave on the kitchen table, moving your mind to other, more important things like the ironing of the laundry or the cleaning of the boat. The kind that happens to other people. That side-swipes you like a truck passing too close on the highway, leaving no scratch but blowing your hair back with its breeze.

I sat on the floor by the stairs, hidden from the living room. The girl lay on the couch, my mother beside her and Jonah sitting on a chair near her head. After her bath my mother had dressed the girl in one of her own nightgowns: a soft, frothy confection of white cotton and lace that made her look like a doll. I could see all their faces through the bannister bars, and listened to them all speaking in low, almost rhythmic voices. The police asked a lot of questions, but the girl didn’t say a word. She simply stared at them, and there was something strange about the shape of her eyes. Very round. Glassy. She rarely blinked. Sometimes she would make a sudden, gasping sound, opening her mouth wide. Then she would pant a bit, her hand on her chest, until she calmed down. 

Almost like she sometimes forgot how to breathe.

**cuts off middle of this segment because I didn't want to post too many words