You wouldn’t think it, not if you were smart, but mermen are real. They swim freely in the greenest and sweetest oceans. They kiss each other. They splash merrily with the dolphins, and orcas, and ancient turtles. But there are, as is perhaps more shocking to the human imagination, no mermaids. Merring is a man’s game, and the mermen do it well. They don’t, most of them at least, imagine that there are women out there. They are content, and they do often wrestle. It’s not every day that a girl like me meets a merman, in fact most days are not like that at all, but one fine summer Sunday, such a fate was allowed to run through me like a group of wild horses, barrelling through the desert. Kicking up dust.
I was studying coral then. A university girl, I was hoping to get into bio-engineering as a career. My mother was a lunch lady at the old rotting high school at the top of the hill, and so inside me I had always had a hardened egg, right about where my heart was, of pure desire. I wanted to be big and important, and if possible, as beautiful as I could be smart. And I wasn’t so smart, but I was smart enough. My dissertation was on receding coral. I wanted to give that spiky, pink and yellow network of hard, latticed sea-tube some way to get harder, bigger, more powerful. So I swam out in black neoprene to run a series of diagnostic tests on the tendrils. I must’ve looked like an alien. Slick, segmented, coated in tubes.
It wasn’t eventful or difficult, except for the fact that a man emerged from a pocket in the coral as I was dusting the outermost branches. He swam out like a curious goldfish, and I noticed that he had a tail very much like a tuna, gently silvery in vertical slivers that grew in stripes up to his torso. He shimmered in the dappled light of the ocean there, smooth scales peppering what looked more like skin underneath. His face looked eerily human, like a Ken doll come to life. He had the white veneer teeth of a regular Tom Cruise, and he smiled widely at me. I stared at him through my goggles. That’s a fucking merman.
Every time I came back to the coral I’d see him again, and it was always the same. He’d swim out from the center of the spikes like an angel, and he’d watch me work, letting his teeth out in excitement. He seemed to like it, as far as I could tell. Together we floated, silent, curious. It became comforting, to have this pristine fish man by my side.
One day he came out with another, and the second merman looked exactly like him. He lead this other man by the hand, and together they watched me. The second grinned wide and earnest as the first had, and they seemed to talk with each other in glances. This new one swam over to me, closer, until his face could press against my goggles and gear. Then I heard the strangest sound all of a sudden, a ghostly soft bubbling that seemed to make words.
“You are, so pretty” said the bubbles.
The merman’s mouth hadn’t moved, but his eyes shifted slightly as we looked at each other. He must’ve said it, he must’ve. And I knew that he was right.
