Mermaids of Glendale - a novel

Chapter 2

“Ma'am, please don't crawl under the -- Oh, my god!"

"There's nothing to see here," said Marina. "Really."

"But...but...she's got a tail!" said the Neiman Marcus sales assistant, taking a step back from the shoe department display table. At this exclamation, heads turned and cell phone cameras were engaged as the early morning bargain hunters turned their attention from footwear to, well, they didn't really know what they were seeing.

Lorna had felt as though she was in a whirlpool, a maelstrom, from the very first moment the department store doors had opened. The press of so many bodies crashed around Lorna as she was taken on the wave through the glass doors of Neiman Marcus and into the women’s shoe department. Lorna had lost sight of Marina within moments, tossed back and forth through the seaweed limbs and coral shoulders of a couple hundred shoe-crazed women and then there, shining at the center of a trestle-table like a lighthouse on a storm-wracked promontory, sat the shoes, the Stella McCartney’s Lorna coveted, now ultra-discounted. Lorna fought her way back, reaching out her hand, grabbing the edge of the display table and using it like an anchor to draw herself forward.

“Eeep!” said Lorna, her voice like that of a porpoise as she pulled up to the table, inch by inexorable inch, her other hand reaching for the shoes, those delightful sky blue d’Orsay cork wedges with the Vegan-friendly faux leather. Lorna’s fingers touched the soft, velvety insole and then her legs gave way and she found herself falling to the polished tile floor, her hand receding from the shoes and then she had to give them up and try to steady herself with both hands on the edge of the display table even as she watched an opposing pair of hands snatch the shoes up from the table and then they were gone from Lorna’s sight.

“Nooo!” she shrieked, but not because the shoes had been snatched away from her by a competing shopper, a department store Darwinist where it was survival of the fittest.

Lorna let go of the display table’s edge and let herself slip down, down among the bulrushes of legs. Lorna crawled under the table, thoughts of Stella McCartney now gone. All around her were the gaggle of voices, the clatter of shoes, the distant chiming of cash registers and credit card scans.

Lorna had shrieked because her legs were transforming into a fish tail again.

“Nooo!” repeated Lorna. “I can’t turn into a fish. Fish don’t have feet!”

Maybe she was still thinking about the shoes after all.

“Lorna,” said a voice, far away at first and then again louder, closer. “Lorn!”

Lorna’s attention was on the shimmering scales flowing against her skin, flowing like spilled mercury across a tabletop, moving with a life of their own. Her thighs were moving together, and on downwards her flesh was merging, fusing, her knees disappearing into fish-skin.

“Lorn!”

Lorna’s feet were elongating, becoming longer, thinner, her ankles growing together and forming the –What’s that part called? Lorna asked and in the same moment her racing mind supplied its own answer.

“Caudal fin,” whispered Lorna, watching as the transformation finalized, stabilized. “It’s called the caudal fin.”

Lorna didn’t know how she knew this, in much the same way she didn’t know why the sudden merging of flesh and bone didn’t hurt and only… tingled, like when due to bad circulation a limb has been asleep and begins to wake up.

“Where are you, Lorna?”

Lorna turned her head to see Marina, or rather Lorna recognized Marina by her shoes and the Lululemon yoga pants she was wearing. Lorna reached out and tugged at Marina’s pants leg.