Things Happen to Those Who Remain Watchful Annie stayed quiet. Annie always stayed quiet. She tried very hard not to make things happen, but to let things happen on their own. Life had more possibilities if you weren't always trying to decide the next thing. And if the girlfriend got angry and left, that meant the universe would give her something else instead. The next feathers grew in stiff patches across her back. The girlfriend used her clippers to shave them off, because there were too many to pluck without hurting Annie. "If you get any more of these, babe, you're gonna have to learn to fly, 'cause it'll get too hard to hide under a t-shirt." Annie knew her girlfriend's pretend-joking voice, and knew she would pack her clippers and go soon. Annie said nothing. She didn't want the feathers to stop coming to make the girlfriend feel better. The world had a lot of girlfriends, but comparatively few feathers. The next feathers grew in strong and proud. The girlfriend bought a new luggage set and a Greyhound ticket to her mother in Missouri. Annie believed her whole life's passiveness had been readying her for one decision. She would climb something tall and jump. On a sunny morning, the girlfriend left. Annie, because she never, ever had any hard feelings, dropped the girlfriend at the bus depot on her way to the town's water tower. She parked her Buick in the shade beside the rickety ladder and climbed. As she climbed higher, the air she breathed felt fuller. At the top, Annie stood on the precipice behind the railing. The field underneath the water tower stretched on forever, divided only by the grid of country roads. Annie took off her shirt and dropped it over the side of the railing. She watched as it caught on a breeze and wafted a bit before landing softly in the grass. The wind at the top of the tower lifted the feathers from her back. She stepped over the railing and into the sun, realizing just before she let go that she'd never been that high off the ground before. When She Was of the Water The first nick came from carelessness, from wanton flipping in and out of the wild wake made by a yacht, the richness of the owners apparent in the multitude of waters the craft bore evidence of traveling through. Her uncut mermaid hair streamed and swirled behind her. Frolicking with her eyes closed, she did not expect the rudder to come sharply at her head, and she missed impact only by coming back to herself in the moment the water shifted around her. But her hair tangled around that rudder, yanking her into the keel. The soft flesh of her shoulder split around it. She flapped away unevenly, drawing confused sharks to her side. Normally cautious as well as lithe, mermaids do not often bleed. She did not learn her lesson and did not return to her family, and she continued to chase the boats long after she shed her first tail and was ready to mate. She adorned her neck and collarbone with a seaweed shawl that hid her poorly healed scar. The hulls of these human ships, each with their own grain of wood or steel, slippage or scratchiness, excited her in a way the familiar smooth skin and cool scales of a merman never could. Every boat was a new body with an ingrained history she could absorb through her own cool casing, and her wound vibrated with every touch. The second accident was not a nick. She had listened to the fable of the supertanker whispered among her people as a child, and she had felt the sailboats' fear of encountering an unknown enormous entity. But she did not right away know the shadow she'd followed until she saw it in the distance as a black surface that covered the ocean for knots, blocking the sun. She poked her head above water, and it rose for stories and stories like its own inverted ocean. What did it feel like, this enormous hulking thing from which even the clownfish cringed? The mermaid glided toward the supertanker, letting the massive hull glide toward her as well, so they could meet head-on. The water churned between them, the froth stilling her with its thousands of tiny bubbles. Whether the hull slid over her or she slid under the hull is irrelevant now. The space under the supertanker was the coldest, darkest space in the ocean, she was positive. In this moment, she did another thing she had never done before: she righted herself and touched the underside of the ship with her fingers, trailing them along the supertanker's unreadable surface. Still, she felt no history down there in the dark, as if the supertanker had materialized right there in that stretch of ocean and would disappear before accumulating a memory of the place. She skated along the bottom, keeping her course against the direction of the ship. The tarry substance oozing through the steel skin coated the filigree webbing of her tailfin, making her fanning jerky and strange. Finally, she felt herself being pulled along by an insistent current that became stronger and stronger. A colossal propeller, each blade thrice the length of her body, sucked at the water and spewed it out the other side. The roiling stream pulled her in, too, as if she was no more consequential than the water which carried her. The propeller blades slashed at her, spun her, and threw her out the other side. The last thing she saw before she closed her eyes was the receding stern of the supertanker, already withdrawing like it had never been. She bobbed on the surface of the waves for a long sleep. The saltwater licked her superficial wounds clean but could not put her mangled tail back together. She washed up on shore, split down the middle and soft where she once had scales. And when she awoke in the sunlight and looked at herself, she knew she could never return to the water because she could not swim or glide or swirl again. Her proud tail that had once kept time to the engines of ships would never again fan or flap. She would have to become a land dweller, adapt her tail stumps to moving her weighty body through air. She crawled and stumped and hobbled on her split-down-the-middle tail until she could walk upright. As she walked, she felt the tops of her fingers hardening over. She pressed her nails, scale-like into her palms, to remind herself of the waters she knew. A dock worker saw and pitied and wanted the naked girl with strange skin and streaming hair. He took her home and dressed her in his dead wife's nightgown, her ocean-colored eyes drowning all the places in him that were not ships. When he put his hands on her skin, she felt his life and the boats those hands had touched and the places those boats had been. She ran her fingernails through his hair and down his back so he would know the memory of her scales. When he asked her if she was happy with him, she clicked porpoise and whistled whale to him. When he asked her where she came from, she hummed engine and breathed sail. She would not speak their too-loud language, but she would trail these men like she once swam after the ships. They, in turn, would pass her from house to house, taking care that she was always gently handled. She makes you forget, they whispered reverently. The sea gave her to us to thank us for our work. The young dock workers had soft hands and knew few boats, but they loved those boats more than the older hands that touched many and became calloused and weary. When the young dock workers took her home, she was struck by their shyness. Their hands reminded her of sailboats manned by nervous and ecstatic couples getting their first taste of the ocean. Of coastal fisherman who still made their own nets and varnished their wooden skiffs to keep too much ocean from taking their boats. She let her fingernails grow long for them so she could stroke their cheeks with ocean coolness. When the older men took her to their homes, their hands told stories of sadness and loss, like freighters once polished white let to rust as they thanklessly carried their burdens across the seas for faceless crews. For them, she painted her fingernails the color of sky, to become that point on the horizon where blue melts together, where ships disappear off the edge of the earth. When she touched the older men, she felt the countless ships that passed under these men's hands, like she had passed under ships when she was still of the water. Before she knew that knowing boats meant that she would never be known back. |