Becoming Mermaids

Chapter 11: Shadows Fall So Blue

Sam flitted in and out of sleep, woken by strange dreams. She was falling, or resting peacefully in the air, her tail curled under her in a circular arc. Monsters with fearsome teeth and dead eyes wanted to eat her babies, but she herself was already eating them. Darkness was closing in on her, and she was one with the darkness.

Every time she woke, her mind had to scramble to separate dream from reality. No monsters, check. Fishtail sprouting from my hips, check. She wondered why Coquette hadn't taken the tail back, but it was 2 a.m. and Coquette was out. Whenever Coquette was in, it was late morning or early afternoon, and she passed out right away, smelling of tequila.

It struck Sam that she had passed some sort of threshold— being a mermaid in her dreams as well as awake— like when you're learning a foreign language and start dreaming in that language. She had hoped to get that far with Spanish— really tried, for years— but always got awkward stares whenever she tried to converse with the hombres on the bus. Eventually, she got too embarrassed to try.

One day, she woke to the sounds of Spanish. It was Coquette in the bathroom, on the telephone.

But perhaps that was a dream, too, because just as she was about to drag herself to the bathroom door and ask Coquette who she was talking to, her own phone buzzed, waking her. It was mid-morning. The phone buzzed again and again, an angry hornet.

She picked it up. It was Jamie, her teenage boss. "You're late," he said in his best boss-voice.

"Late for what?" she asked, surprised to hear how groggy she was.

"Your shift started hours ago! What's the matter with you lately?"

She looked at the clock. Indeed, she would have been late if she still had a job. "Um, didn't I quit?"

Silence.

"I thought when I walked out that day, that was it. You mean I'm still on the timesheet?"

Jamie thought long and hard, then reoriented himself, starting with the tone of his voice. "Look kid, I'll give you another chance. You can keep your job if you get here within the hour."

Sam glanced down at the tail where her legs should have been. "I don't think that'll be possible."

"Look— I'm warning you—"

"Bye, Jamie." She hung up.

She felt for the gemstone, but it wasn't around her neck. Springing up on two wrists, she walrused around the room, searching. Andy hadn't told her it was in her shoe.

Hours of searching ended in despair. She wanted to fling herself on the bed, weeping, but no matter how hard she tried, no tears came out of her eyes. She took a shower.

She took a lot of showers. Once, Coquette came in, slept, and left while the water was still running. Never even asked what Sam was doing in there. The answer, if Sam had the courage to give it, was that she was losing her faith.

She wasn't losing her childhood belief in angels and miracles— that happened long before she ever moved to California. What she was beginning to doubt was the existence of her own self: threads of her personality were unraveling, leaving nothing behind. She used to believe her consciousness was some indivisible unit, an atom of soul that could make decisions and feel coherent emotions. But what she found instead, as the water of the shower streamed over her human flesh and fish alike, was that she was more of a mob of discordant voices. Sometimes one faction would have their sway, sometimes another. She couldn't personally identify with any of these voices, and there was nothing else there to call her self. No part of her that could say, "I am Sam. Sam I am."