Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [3]
This is what rapture is, Margrethe thought. That thing she saw come over the nuns’ faces as they knelt in prayer. She’d tried turning to heaven, the way the women surrounding her did, but her heart, she knew, was too tied to the earth.
Behind her the bells rang, announcing the late morning devotions.
Suddenly the mermaid looked up and saw Margrethe. Margrethe gasped, caught. She could see the blue of the mermaid’s eyes, as if the whole scene had become magnified, feel it inside her despite the distance between them. It was as if, for one moment, the mermaid was right there in the convent garden.
Save him, the trees, the wind seemed to whisper. A voice inside her. You, come now.
Margrethe stopped breathing, could barely feel her own body. And then, with one last look at the man, a last kiss on the lips, the creature pushed off from the rocks and dove back into the sea.
Margrethe cried out and, without thinking, ran through the convent gate and down the stone steps—hundreds of them—that led to the beach. She hugged the furs to her body, almost slipping, reaching to the thin iron banister to steady herself, the air rushing and whirring around her, the stairs streaming under her endlessly. She arrived at the beach, stumbled over rocks, but there was no trace of the mermaid. Only him, the man the creature had pulled to shore. And there, by his hand, one gleaming oyster shell.
Margrethe stood at the shoreline, then waded into the sea, not caring as water soaked through her boots. She stared out, but there was only endless ocean, cut up by rocks and ice and the worried, suffocating sky. Suddenly the world seemed entirely bleak and without hope. “Come back,” Margrethe whispered. “Please.”
But the sea was quiet now. The rocks pushed up from the water, motionless, like uncaring gods. The waves moved back and forth along the shoreline, slapping it, lunging to the earth, and then disappearing again.
CHAPTER TWO
The Mermaid
THE PALACE’S GREAT HALL WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET THAT afternoon. The ocean floor, dense with sea plants and anemones and coral plates, was still, and the amber walls swayed only slightly, sprouting flowers that brushed the mermaid’s skin as she swam past. The high-pointed amber windows had been flung open, and schools of glowing silver fish with pointed teeth poured through, illuminating the dark water. Above, thousands of mussel shells opened and closed with the currents. If she squinted, looked as hard as she could, she imagined she could make out the dim glare of the sun above.
Her name was Lenia. She was the youngest daughter of the sea queen, and lived with her mother, father, grandmother, and five sisters in a large coral palace on the ocean floor.
She made her way to the end of the great hall, where a piece of heavy, clouded glass hung over the grand fireplace. Both glass and fireplace had been recovered from sunken ships full of human bones and ephemera and treasures. Lenia found it strange to see her own image, and she usually avoided the glass and its tricks. But today she felt so different and changed, she had to see if it would be obvious to anyone else.
Her sisters had badgered her all morning, their singing drifting through the water and every room of the palace, trying to lure her out to the garden, where they had all been waiting to hear her story. She had the most beautiful voice, everyone had always said, and it was she who’d been most excited, of all the sisters, to swim to the upper world. She was the one who had the human statue in her garden, a garden as round and red as the sun. She was the one who’d asked their grandmother countless times to tell her about men and women, about souls. But Lenia had waited in her room until she was quite sure her sisters had left for the day, until the only resident left in the palace was their old grandmother, who knew better than anyone that Lenia would talk when she was ready, and only then.