The Mermaid Game: A summer short story Read online

   

   

  The Mermaid Game

  A summer short story

   

   

  By Kell Andrews

   

   

   

  Copyright © 2015 Kelly Andrews.

  All rights reserved.

   

   

   

  Cover illustration and design by Kell Andrews.

  www.kellandrews.com

   

   

   

  For Mom — magic and memory

   

   

   

   

  For one week that summer, the sisters called themselves Coral and Pearl. Those weren't their real names, but their real names didn’t matter during the mermaid game. Their mother had a rented a little house at the Jersey Shore — just a shack, really, smaller than the one they had always rented when their dad used to come with them. Coral and Pearl shared a room, just like they did at home now, but here sharing didn’t bother Coral because they were always at the beach.

  Half the little houses in town had been condemned after the hurricane, and the beach dropped off sharply like a cliff, the fine sand scrubbed away by waves, leaving a coarse grit of broken shells and tiny pebbles.

  Coral and Pearl had always played together at the beach because they were the only kids they knew there. This year they nearly the only kids at all. Coral invented the mermaid game the first day of vacation, showing Pearl how to keep her feet together like a tail, pumping up and down as she swam. Together they thrashed their bodies in the shallows of low tide, and Coral forgot she, at 12, was too old to play at mermaids and too old to play with 7-year-old Pearl, except as a babysitter.

  “Do you think there are real mermaids, Coral?” Pearl asked the second day, her face full of hope.

  Coral tried to think of something that wasn’t a lie. “The ocean is really deep. Scientists find new species all the time. Old ones too – fish they thought were extinct. Why not mermaids?”

  “What do you think they’d look like?”

  “Real mermaids?” Coral said, swimming towards her sister. “Well, real ones wouldn’t be part fish. People are mammals. I think mermaids would be too – maybe like a seal. Or a dolphin.” She dolphin-kicked, trying to leap out of the water.

  She sank down again when she saw a boy her age stroll by, a bucket sloshing in one hand, his eyes on the mix of sharp sand and shells the storms had uncovered.

  He was tanned far darker than the girls’ mother would allow, and his shaggy sun-bleached hair fell over his eyes. Now and then he stooped to pick something up, depositing it into the bucket with a splash.

  After he had passed, Coral twirled her arms and green water flew from the arc her fingers etched in the surf. She was controlling the tides, the waters bending to her every gesture. She lifted Pearl, buoyed by salt water, over a wave, and felt as if she were the strongest mermaid in the sea.

  Later Coral and Pearl traced the boy’s footsteps along the sandy cliff the storms had uncovered. Whenever they saw a bright or iridescent shell among the mussels, they collected it in a purple bucket of their own — mermaid treasure. Then Coral saw a flash of green. She picked it up — a cloudy oblong, smooth to the touch. A mermaid emerald.

  “Let me see,” said Pearl. She grabbed it and ran back to the umbrella. “Look, Mom! We’re rich.”

  Their mother put her paperback book over the arm of her beach chair to look.

  “It’s sea glass,” she said. “Broken glass worn smooth by the sand and waves.”

  “So it’s trash,” said Coral.

  “But it’s pretty,” said Pearl.

  “If it’s pretty, it’s not trash,” their mother said. “People collect it. Funny, you used to see it all the time, but not as much since people started recycling. But that hurricane stirred everything up — dragged things from land and stirred up the bottom of the sea. Now you never know what you’ll find on the beach.”

  By the next day, they had a plastic sieve full of glass — mostly clear, some amber and green, and one little sliver of blue, which their mother told them was rarest. Coral thought she saw another, bent to retrieve it, but a wave yanked it away.

  “What you got?” a voice said behind her.

  She looked up. It was the blond boy from the day before, lugging his bucket again.

  “Nothing,” Coral said. “I thought it was blue sea glass. It’s the rarest.”

  “Ought to be,” he said, snickering. “The blue’s from old milk of magnesia bottles. My granddad takes that when he’s got the runs.”

  Coral straightened, feeling her face going hot.

  “So what are you collecting?” she said.

  He put the bucket down and pointed, inviting her to peer inside. His bucket was not a sand toy but a big utility bucket like the janitor had at school, and inside were creatures — a black spider crab hugging the edges, and a sea star as big as her hand. A jellyfish floated, half suspended and nearly invisible in the gleaming water. The boy sloshed the bucket, uncovered a few little white clams that each stuck out a foot and buried themselves under the layer of sand at the bottom.

  Pearl ran up, pushing Coral aside to peer in the bucket.

  “It’s like an aquarium,” she said, smiling up at the boy.

  “More like fish prison,” Coral said. “You should let them go.”

  The boy grinned wider, and Coral didn’t trust him.

  “These I will. They’re from the tide pools at the jetty. But most of the time, when you find something washed up on the beach, it’s not going to make it. You can’t save it."

  “You can give it a chance to live,” Coral said.  

  “Things from the water stay there if they have any chance to live,” he said, then turned to the little girl. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Pearl,” she said, her eyes flicking to her sister slyly. Coral knew she ought to correct her, but the strange boy didn’t need to know their real names. “And that’s Coral.”

  “I’m Colum,” he said. “Pearl and Coral, do you want to help me let these little guys go?”

  Coral hesitated, then waved to her mother behind them, who barely looked up from her book. Pearl was already halfway down the beach with the boy.

  The next day when Coral and Pearl were playing in the water, Colum dove in beside them as if they were expecting him.

  “Colum!” Pearl said. “Play mermaids with us. You can be the mermaid king.”

  He wrinkled his nose. Coral felt like sinking under the waves. No way would an 12-year-old boy play mermaids. It was bad enough for her to do it, even if she could pretend it was for her little sister.

  “You can be a pirate then,” Pearl said. “Or a fisherman who falls under the mermaids’ spell.”

  “I already am a fisherman,” he said.

  “For real?” Pearl said, looking impressed, and Coral knew what she was thinking — that fishermen were something from fairy tales, like shoemakers, fairy godmothers, and mermaids — things that didn’t exist anymore, if they ever did.

  Colum puffed up his chest. “Of course for real! I’m a fisherman like my dad and my granddad. Or I will be when I’m old enough. Run a boat out of Point Pleasant going after scallops.” He dove under a big wave, Coral and Pearl floating over, the crest nearly breaking on their heads.

  “Maybe I’ll catch you when I'm out on the boat, Pearl,” he said, shaking off water. “My granddad says he caught a mermaid in his net once.”

  “Was she pretty?” Pearl said, widening her eyes, then narrowing them if she wasn’t sure whether to believe.

  “Nah. Granddad
said she was the ugliest thing he ever saw — threw her back just to be sure she didn’t end up as my new grandma.”

  Pearl didn’t laugh.

  “You’re just teasing,” Coral said.

  “My granddad said it – not me,” Colum said. “But my granddad is the world’s biggest liar.”

  He swam away, then lumbered out of the surf. He picked up the bucket that was resting on the sand and sauntered down the beach, as casually as a person could when weighed down on one side by a bucket of water. The crooked walk made him look like a pirate, actually.

  Wednesday Colum called them over to look at a horseshoe crab. Pearl shrank from the huge helmet-shaped crab, which brandished a vicious-looking spike like a sword

  “That’s just the tail,” he said as if he knew everything. “It can’t hurt you.” He flipped the crab over they could see the jointed legs waving harmlessly underneath.

  Thursday Colum came up to them, a predatory grin on his face, something hidden behind his back. He threw it in the water in front of Coral — a long familiar shape with a curved fin on top.

  “Think fast!” he said.

  “Shark!” she yelled, throwing herself between the predator and her little sister. Pearl just shrieked.

  Colum laughed and picked up the shark, working its jaw like a puppet, menacing them with the jagged teeth.

  Coral could see flat dull eye. The shark was dead.

  “That’s not funny! What’s wrong with you?”

  “You’d think it was funny if you could’ve seen your faces,” he said, laughing until he noticed Pearl clinging to her big sister. “Hey, I’m sorry. It’s just a little sand shark. It couldn’t hurt you even if it was alive.”

  He held it out, gentler now. “I thought you’d want to see it. See, Pearl?”

  She moved out from behind her sister.

  “Do you want to touch it?” Pearl reached