Baubles From Bones: Issue 7
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Here We Are,
There We Went

Elissa Hunter
1500 words

"Of course there’s a mermaid in the Gowanus,” Shelby said, barely looking up from her phone. “It has gonorrhea in it, for god’s sake; why not a mermaid?”

Maia shushed her roommate and stood on the tips of her toes, trying to spot the creature beyond the gawkers and news crews, but all she could see was the stagnant, murky sludge of Brooklyn’s much-maligned Superfund site. No mermaid, not even a hint of fin or a ripple in the canal’s water on this cold, windless night. Maia wondered if the mermaid’s fin was coated in cancer-causing slime, or had garbage hanging from its tip, or if mermaids could get gonorrhea from a body of water, or at all.

Shelby dropped her phone into her purse and grabbed Maia’s arm, steering her away from the crowd. “This is boring. Let’s go drink.”

They walked to a bar that smelled like smoke and mint, full of hipsters and finance bros pretending to be hipsters. Maia ordered a drink that tasted like an apple pie sitting in an ashtray; Shelby got something the color of congealed blood that matched her lipstick with a cornucopia of fruit stuck on a toothpick. Maia stared at her rocks glass and tried not to think about her bank balance, and how she hadn’t found a job since she’d been laid off two months ago, and how her unemployment would run out soon, and how she shouldn’t be spending eighteen dollars on alcohol no matter how much it dulled her senses. She took a big gulp to chase her thoughts away and sat back as the cocktail spread warmth through her stomach and cheeks. Shelby started talking about her job at a PR agency that specialized in TikTok stars, how some prepubescent boy had started a prank war with another prepubescent boy that ended up involving the police in three different cities in Arizona. It wouldn’t make sense to anyone over the age of fourteen unless they, like Shelby, were being paid to care. Maia made noises so that she appeared to be listening and swirled the ice cubes in her glass.

Once Shelby got bored with talking about her life, she switched to the mermaid. “No way it’s real. The guy who says he saw it probably just started it as a prank and doesn’t want to admit it.”

Maia shrugged. “Weirder things have happened. Dolphins show up in there occasionally.”

“Dolphins are real. Mermaids aren’t.” Shelby puckered her mouth just as her boyfriend, Brett, walked up to the table. They kissed for an uncomfortable amount of time while Maia stared at the scar-riddled table. When they finally broke apart, Brett asked them about the mermaid. “I couldn’t see anything,” Maia said. A bead of condensation crawled down the side of her glass. She put her fingernail on the drop and watched it slide onto her chipped purple nail polish. The lights of the bar made it look like a puddle of starlight.

***

She’d had too much to drink. That was the only thing Maia was certain of at that moment. She said goodbye to Shelby and Brett and wobbled down the street next to the bar, gulping down air. Wandering led her back to the canal, farther north of the spot where the crowd, lighter now, was still waiting, hoping to spot the creature. She walked to the edge and laid down on her stomach, head hovering over the water. The cars passing by sounded distant.

Alcohol sloshed inside her. She was so busy staring at her rippling reflection that she almost missed the fin out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head and looked. Yup, there it was, splashing just above the surface before disappearing again. An “ooh” stretched out of her lips, then she held her breath. The water churned and a face emerged.

“Oooh.” The scaly, hairless thing was like nothing she’d read about or seen in Disney films. It was pale, with milky, opalescent eyes and a thin slit for a mouth, more of a medical anomaly than a siren of the sea.

“Whoa,” she said, tasting the way the word felt in her mouth, thick and viscous. In the back of her mind was the thought that she could be one of the first people to see a real mermaid. What would her parents and friends say about that? She dangled her right hand, waggling her fingers. The mermaid cocked its head and moved closer. Maia brought her left arm to meet her right and swung them back and forth. “Hi,” she whispered across the water. The creature looked up at Maia, blinking while it cocked its head.

She should have said something meaningful. A carefully considered verse that would live on in eternity. What she said was, “I don’t know what to do.” Then she started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” she said, watching her tears drip off her nose and fall in the water.

The mermaid stared at her for a second, then backflipped into the water and swam away. Maia watched the water until she sobered up enough to go home.

***

The night brought dreams of drowning, icy tendrils of seaweed wrapping around her elbows and ankles until she clawed her way back into reality.

Pounding headache. Dry throat. She felt bile coming up and ran for the bathroom, barely managing to make it to the toilet. At the other end of the apartment, Shelby and Brett laughed at the TV. She managed to pull herself up into a standing position and rinse her mouth before stumbling back into bed.

More dreams. More drowning. Waking up gasping for air, her comforter tangled around her neck. The third time she woke up, it was late afternoon, and after taking a few steadying breaths she went to grab a bagel from the bodega around the corner.

***

The next day, Maia hunkered down in the coffee shop a few blocks away from her apartment. She sat for hours, nursing the second-cheapest drink on the menu, refreshing job search pages and her email, periodically checking her resume to make sure she had put the correct contact information on it, trying not to let the wave of panic that sat in her stomach rise up as nothing came in.

When she got home, Shelby and Brett were watching TV in the living room. They both looked at her, strained smiles on their faces. She spit out, “I forgot something,” and left, pulling her wool hat further down her forehead and heading toward Gowanus.

She tried to go back to the spot she had seen the mermaid, but it had been overrun by people, including an influencer doing an entire mermaid-themed photoshoot, complete with a rubber tail. Maia went farther upstream and sat for hours, watching and waiting.

***

Going to the canal every night became a habit. On the fourth and fifth nights, she saw the mermaid again. It rose out of the water and stared, its eyes unreadable.

The second time she saw it, Maia tossed down a couple of pieces of a sandwich she’d had for dinner. The mermaid sniffed at them and then swam away, and she cursed silently for wasting the food.

The third time it appeared, Maia told it, “You need to leave here. The water... It’s not good. And there are people looking for you, probably to capture you and experiment on you or something.”

The mermaid said nothing, just bobbed its head above the surface of the water. Maia threw a rock at it; it disappeared under the surface. “What do you want?” she screamed into the night.

***

Shelby traced a small circle on the kitchen table. “So, Brett and I decided to move in together, and since he’d need an office, and you’re not on the lease...”

Maia looked down at her lap, fingernails digging into her palms. “Ah.”

“So, yeah. You’ll need to find another place by the end of the month.” Shelby examined her nails, picking at them, a sign that they were done talking.

Maia mumbled her agreement, grabbed her coat, and walked to Gowanus. She could find another place, somewhere farther out of the city. Or with more roommates. Or she could admit failure, go back to her parents’ home in Missouri with her tail between her legs, incapable of being even the smallest fish in a big pond, doomed to spend the rest of her life talking about the two years she spent in the Big Apple, knowing it was the only thing that made her slightly interesting.

“I will drown in the sadness you once draped over me,” she whispered to the water. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but it sounded poetic. Nothing moved.

***

The mermaid was found dead on the following Friday. Maia read about it on Twitter first, but didn’t believe it until it had been picked up by the Times. The picture they used was of a medical team pushing a stretcher, the end of a fin peeking out beneath the sheet, with the backdrop of the canal, lifeless and gray. She spent the evening drinking Beefeater straight from the bottle and making snow angels in Shelby’s shag rug, only feeling a little terrible when she puked on it. Then she called a Lyft, grabbed her two suitcases, and rode out into the darkness of Brooklyn, the twinkling lights of the city reflected in the river.

Baubles From Bones: Issue 7
​Available for purchase:
Physical (NA)
Digital
Subscribe

Elissa Hunter

Elissa Hunter is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her poetry has been published in Last Girls' Club​.

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