Mermaid_ A Twist on the Classic Tale - Carolyn Turgeon [4]
Lenia came upon the clouded glass. It took her a minute to focus on her blue eyes, her white skin, the glittering moon hair that flew out on all sides of her in the water, her small, pink-tipped breasts, her long silver-gray tail, the oyster shells lining it, symbols of her high rank. Behind her, an octopus swayed this way and that, and a group of sea horses floated past.
She leaned in until she was inches from her own reflection.
She pressed her palms into her waist, her smooth, cold skin. She had thought she might look more … human, she realized. But she was the same as she’d always been. She didn’t even look older.
Her face stared out at her from the glass, as if it were mocking her. There was nothing human about her. Her skin was opalescent, changing color ever so slightly as she shifted in the water. Her lips were stained pink with the sea flowers that had been ground for her. Water moved in and out of the tiny gills on her neck. And right below the curve of her belly, her skin took on a high sheen and then turned, slowly, to scale. Long, thin silver fish scales layered down her tail.
She had wanted to go to the upper world for as long as she could remember. One by one her sisters had been allowed to travel to the surface of the water on their eighteenth birthdays, for the entire day, while she, the youngest, had to wait in the palace for their return. After each sister’s visit, they’d all gather in the gardens and hear tales of the curiosities and wonders that lay above. The fish would slip past their shoulders and faces as the lucky sister wove her tale, and Lenia would listen breathlessly as her sisters spoke of the glimmering cities and clattering carriages they’d watched from the shore, the star-sprinkled night skies, the flying swans like long white veils over the sea, the mortal children with legs rather than tails, and the icebergs that glistened like pearls. Her sisters had been impressed by these things, but happy enough to return to the sea when their birthdays were over. But to Lenia, the whole upper world seemed so vast, so strange, so full, that she’d been determined to venture farther than any of her sisters on her own eighteenth birthday, memorizing every moment of it.
Once, mermaids had been able to visit the upper world whenever they wanted. They’d appeared to sailors, bewitched travelers, stolen beautiful young men from seasides, brought them down to the world below. But things had changed in the last few hundred years, as humans took more and more to the sea. After a group of mermaid sisters had been hauled up by fishermen and brutally killed, Lenia’s great-grandmother had issued a royal decree forbidding any further interaction between the two worlds. “They are dangerous,” she had said. “They will kill us all if they have the chance.” Still, to honor that long-ago link between merpeople and humans, every mermaid and merman was allowed this one day, on his or her eighteenth birthday, to travel alone to the upper world, as long as they kept carefully out of view of humans.
To most of Lenia’s kind, humans were base, predatory. They lived short, violent lives before dying and leaving their bodies to rot, which most merpeople found quite inelegant—as they themselves lived for three hundred years before turning gracefully to foam. The bloated bodies of humans littered the ocean floor; human ships sank and became tombs full of garbage and bones. In recent years, some merpeople had even elected to stay in the sea on their eighteenth birthdays, refusing any contact with the upper world at all.
Her sisters, more than anyone, had mocked Lenia’s love for humans. Nadine would bring Lenia the bones of sailors and, whenever she could get to them before the fish, decaying body parts. “Look how disgusting,” she would say, holding up a disintegrating finger, pieces of skin flapping off it like small sails. “Look what happens to them.”
But none of her family’s prejudices had lessened Lenia’s desire to see the upper world for herself. She had anticipated her visit for so long that she had insisted on going