riverrun Vol. 47

Only her mother, nosing through a paperback on the sofa, sees the lingering
shine around the girl’s mouth before her backpack slaps the floor. She smiles
with a glint that matches the jewels of her earrings and the polish of her nails.
“Oh!” Her mother’s eyebrows elevate. She nudges the spine of her book up
against her nose. “Hello.”
The girl toes off her shoes and lobs them at the little embroidered rug in the corner
to land on top of her mother’s scuffed loafers. Her mother’s mouth crinkles;
she punctures her paperback with a cardinal patterned bookmark.
“Honey, can—”
“I’ll be at the beach.” She rips her shirt hem out from her skirt, fidgets with the
buttons.
“It’s all right. Do you want to talk about anything?” her mother pokes, her lips a
little perked. She’s looking at the girl’s mouth.
The girl’s face simmers; she stomps away.
Shoving herself into shorts and sandals, she escapes down the dip of the hill to
the beach. Her mermaid is waiting. Its tail, curled and bundled inside the crumbling
tube of the drainpipe, looks less pretty with some of its scales torn out.
There’s wet pink flesh inside, gross and glistening, and she thinks of the lunchmeat
her mother buys at the grocery. (“One pound, shaved thin.”) Its tooth crown
lies scattered, its necklace melted away into slime, its shell hoard stolen away in
the surf. Its eyes glisten milky and pink like two huge beads of rose quartz; its
hair slithers across the sand.
Real princesses need servants and jewels. But mostly they need crowns, so the
girl sets to collecting shells, dunking her hands into the water in chase of swirly
conches and violet mussels.
Watching the water, she spots pointed black fins slicing through the froth; another,
another. They whorl and dunk, eddying. The girl thinks about the size of
something attached underneath—thrashing tail tips, a wreath of gleaming white
teeth poking through snarling gums. Those same teeth shearing through the
mermaid’s softening flesh, shredding through scales and choking down hair.
From the shoreline she sprints between the licking surf, bare toes flicking sand.
She tugs poking sticks out of the sand dunes, and plucks up stones. Her arm
cracks down, flinging them at the fins—the rocks erupting into foam on impact,
the sticks spinning.
“Go away!” she shrieks. Tears tickle at the top of her throat, bubbling up.
Her throat boils, tears glowing hot in her sinuses, the heat itching at her eyes.
The fins corkscrew and splash, circling in a whirlpool. She spots dozens without
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