Another Mermaid Book?

So . . . posting now what could be the beginning of another possible novel.  Or a subplot of the one I published yesterday.

Dad and I didn’t talk a lot, even on our boat, The Mermaid.  I’d learned most of the work he let me do by the time I was ten, so usually he left me alone.  I really didn’t mind it going out, even if it meant I couldn’t spend much time hanging out with my best friend, Luis, and had to deal with the stink and all the fish eyes looking at me like a bunch of shiny marbles.  I liked losing myself in the fog that hung like a gray curtain around us and in the slap of water on the hull of the boat.

The gulls flew in and out of the fog curtain, white-feathered rats looking for easy pickings. Sometimes with a good haul we let them have a few fish. Every few minutes, there was the low bellow of the lighthouse, and there was the constant clink of the chains, plus the softer staccato of the radio from Dad’s “office.”

The name of our boat was The Mermaid, though there was nothing feminine about it.  When I was at school, Aunt Mae worked on it with Dad.  She had an affinity for flannel shirts and overalls and was proud of the two gold teeth in her mouth.  She was ten years older than Dad, never married, and took care of him ever since their mother died, so long ago I don’t even know when it was.  Long before my mother arrived on the scene.

That’s what Aunt Mae told me more than once when Dad wasn’t around. “When your mother arrived on the scene, Charlie went nuts for a few years.” One day Luis said that by “nuts” Aunt Mae means Dad fell in love and that my mother was so beautiful that Aunt Mae resented her.  He said my mother was probably too high-strung to be around beer drinking, fish hauling folks like my family.

“But what about me?” I asked.  We were sitting on the porch swing drinking Cokes.  Our freshman year was about to start, and the day was one of the rare hot ones we had in the summer.

Luis didn’t answer me.  Instead, he started talking about film school, three more years of living in Garcia Point and then he’d be out of here.  When I got the chance, I turned back to my question because I’d been asking it myself too many times.  “Why didn’t she take me with her, Luis?”

He stretched, considering his answer, looking out at the weeds in my yard as we swung back and forth a few more times.

“She was an artist. Or a poet.  She was incredibly sensitive and her soul was dying because she couldn’t do what she needed in Garcia Point.”

“You’re describing the mother you want to have,” I told him.

Camille, Luis’ mom, was one of the two English teachers at school.  Her grandparents settled in Garcia Point in 1917, three years after they left Mexico because of the revolution down there.  Aunt Mae, of course, humphs at the notion they’re now an “old” family.  Our family’s been here practically since the Russians built Fort Ross, according to her. Luis was frustrated because Camille did leave town once and was gone for five or six years.  After college, she’d done a little TV work in L.A., but said she missed her life here too much.

“What she really missed was my father,” Luis told me.  “She got pregnant the first month she was back.”

“She’s never said that she regrets coming home,” I reminded him.

“She doesn’t have to say it, Marisa.  After the great Juan Diaz drowned, she didn’t have any reason to stay.  She says she did because of me, but I wish she’d just taken me back to L.A.  I hate this town, all the rednecks in it, and you know what?  She does, too.  I hear her talking to my father about it.”

I had trouble believing this. Camille was one of the kindest people I’d ever met, though she was a strict teacher.  Most of the kids pretended to hate her.  I’d never heard her put down Garcia Point even once.

Luis was on a roll, though, and wouldn’t stop talking.  “I hate the taste of fish and the mildew in my closet and I hate the Pacific Ocean.”   We rocked for about a half a minute, and then he added, almost under his breath.  “Maybe if Juan hadn’t drowned the two of them would have gotten me out of here.”

Camille did the sensible thing. She got a job teaching and married the football coach.  They had two daughters, and Luis told me that when he was little they were happy enough.

“But then Mom started to see the merman.”

I stopped rocking and the swing stopped with a jolt. “What?”

“She swears she sees my real dad, and he’s part fish.”

There had been friction between Camille and Frank ever since I could remember, but I’d known Luis how many years?  He never said anything about this before.  I only knew that once or twice a year his parents had these huge fights that exploded like they had tripped land minds under their carpet, but I never knew exactly what they fought about.

“She goes out on those walks of hers along the beach.  Every so often she comes back to the house upset,” Luis said.  “She says she sees my real dad, out there on the waves, a friggin’ merman.  He just floats along and never talks to her.”

I knew Luis wouldn’t lie to me, but I just couldn’t think of Camille who stood in her sensible shoes in front of the room and talked about John Milton as being crazy, even a little bit.

“My dad’s so jealous,” Luis said. He was talking about Frank, now, the man he knew as his father. “He tells her that she’s never let go of Juan, and that he was her second choice for a husband. Then she says it’s not like this at all, that she really doesn’t want to be seeing mermen, and that she wishes that both of them would just leave her alone. Then he asks her why she goes out to the beach if she isn’t looking for her long-lost love. By this time, the fight’s gotten really ugly, and both of my sisters are crying in their rooms.”

I never asked Luis what ugly looks like in his home, though I’d been there one morning after one of these fights.  The backside of ugly was very, very quiet.

Listening to Luis, I realized the one reason he’d never considered.  If his mother had stayed and became an artist in Laguna Beach, or a poet in San Francisco, or had gone Hollywood, or whatever Luis wishes she’d done, he wouldn’t have been born.  And the thing Aunt Mae never thought of when she talked about my mother?  If Dad had never set eyes on her, I wouldn’t have been born either.  The two of us became the destination from what screwed up in our parents’ lives.

Meet Marie: Nympho Mermaid

A bit of a warning: this is a bit more than PG. There is mer-sex below. Title is a bit gratuitous. Sorry.  I’m nervous about posting because I’m not sending this out for any other reason than I think it may be a good piece of writing.  The novel itself won’t be “erotic,” just working on a beginning that will make readers want to read.  There will be flashbacks to Marie’s life in Fort Ross as a disgruntled wife of a Russian officers . . . maybe she’ll be a mistress . . . don’t know . . . but please be polite when you respond!!! I won’t post any comments that aren’t.

I’m beginning to search my files for the next novel I want to write. This one definitely would not be for kids or young adults.  Might be fun to write strictly for grown-ups.  I also have a young-adult book that I could do about mermaids.  Or combine them into one longer novel.

Legends say merpeople lure humans to our sea homes to drown in Neptune’s depths, but I tell you this, no one really comes this way unwillingly. There is always a desire  for death, or passion, or to become part of a myth. I’ve often thought we are the ones who are never satisfied. We long for both worlds, the sweet troubled existence of our short human lives and the myth that we create for ourselves once we have our metamorphosis.

This is how I found Marie. I’d followed her, and that is why I died. I don’t think she’d even noticed me until I had swum beyond the rocks. Her hair shown electric in the water, phosphorus red, the deepest coral, long like you’d expect a mermaid’s hair.

You’d be surprised how many of us don’t fit into the stereotype at all. There are merpeople as dull as accountants are, and, as on land, we come in all shapes and sizes. There are more of us than you’d imagine who are introverts and who prefer to stay on our side of the world reading (yes, there are books) or studying the secrets of life that the ocean has locked up in its cells.

There are others, of course, who prefer to play, and Marie was one of these. Marie had been a beautiful during her life on land, though, and now she was knockout as a mermaid, curious about everyone and everything. She wasn’t a mermaid to be trusted, as I later found out, but I’ll never forget the first sight I had of her. She seemed to have a pitying look upon her face as she watched me thrash as my tail grew around me. It had to have been clear to her that I wasn’t some hunky merman specimen. As soon as I stopped fighting death I knew what I had become.

There was no fear. Just grief over leaving Emily alone. I was uneasy that I had lost my prescription mask, but though the water was dark like liquid tar, I realized I could see.  I was no longer cold. She swam around me, flicking her tail flirtatiously. I let myself drift and let the water massage me as I watched her. We were still close to the surface and the water was aquamarine with bits of flotsam passing by us. I’ve worn a pony tail since my early twenties and she swooped past my head and undid the leather tie I bound it with. I felt my hair float up around me and I wondered if I’d have a receding hairline for all eternity or if by some sea magic I could go back twenty years, hair-wise at least.

My eyes strayed from her tail to her breasts to her face and then back again. It was iridescent red, much like her hair, but the scales sparkled with the deepest shade of blue, so deep it was clearly defined against the water. Her tail, her head, her skin, glittered as though she’d been dipped in a gold wash and was being lit by the sun, and not by a coastal current. I liked this new world very much. I looked above me at the sunlight soaking through, how pure it was, and then looking down to the darker water and the rocks below where a cluster of pink sea anemones swayed, their silky arms scavenging for the mitochondria floating pass.

Emily would love this. She tried to catch these colors in her paintings, but she was afraid to swim in the ocean and, though I never told her, I always thought that this first hand experience was what her paintings needed to really come alive. Izzy hadn’t been afraid before she had gotten sick, and now look at where her work was going. She was keeping her memories alive by her brush. Another rush of grief hit my stomach. And guilt.

But Marie, not liking that I was ignoring her, swam so close to me I felt her breasts tickle my back. Then she was in front of me, holding me close. “Why do you think of them?” I heard her ask.

Telepathy, of course, the next evolution after smart phones, merpeole just a little ahead of their slower landlubber cousins.

Her arms went around my neck and she pressed herself closer. I couldn’t help but be curious and saw that I had a pouch, much like a codpiece of old, that she didn’t have one, and from mine emerged the pink head of my merman cock. She took hold of it, and I shut my eyes as she gently squeezed.

“Your thoughts are so much on the surface anyone could read them. You’ll have to learn to dig down with your mind, how to ink them out like an octopus, if you’re going to have any privacy.” She squeezed again, harder this time, and then pushed herself down until her mouth found me.

I sucked in water and began to choke.

She looked up. “Breathe through your gills,” she commanded, halfway agitated. She waited until I found a rhythm with my breathing and then began again.

The last part of me stopped fighting death. I gave my body to the ocean and let it take us where it willed. She slowly crawled up my body and took hold of my cock in her hand and slipped it inside of her.

“Yes, there are other ways to do this,” she said, reading my thoughts. My hands finally touched her breasts. I flicked each nipple and her eyes closed, her head tilted back and her hair flared out around us like flames. I felt her shudder, then again a few minutes later.

“Don’t hold back,” she said. I let go and forgot about everything.

The Mermaid Lucia

A picture I drew long ago and a poem that went with it.  For some reason wanted to share them tonight.

The Mermaid Lucia

 We are in Italy, two priests stand behind us.

On the bridge, the farmer and his sons

pull the yoke of an ox unwilling to cross over water.

 A dog barks somewhere in the distance.

Painters captured us with wavy lines

that stream from brushes.

 

 

 They formed me leaning against you.

 I’ve stretched my legs from beneath my dress

so that the sun can warm them.

You said nothing and handed me a pink petal.

 

 

The petal became a ruby,

and you read to me from The Inferno.

I didn’t understand Italian, but I wanted to.

That night we stood naked beneath the moon

and called to the gods. The moon floated

because the oceans had filled up.

 

 I wondered if I would dissolve  like a pane of sugar glass,

or if my name had become Lucia. There was silver in the trees.

This was the moment I became the mermaid.

Moon rays flicked off me like scales from fins.

 

 

The bridge is still there, and if we ever

saw it again,  it would snag us, pull us to the past. 

Remember how the dog ran up to us?  And the lowing of the ox?

How the priests murmured about something political? 

There was a song bird whose name I wanted to know.

 

 

Lucia became a witch and burned sage

in abalone shells.  Rocks were particularly potent.

She sought dakinis in clouds and claimed

the color indigo, Both of her lives are here on canvas.

 

 

By day Lucia’s fins are feet split apart. She conjured them

to walk with ease. At night she swims in the sea,

her legs meld into a tail flicking at the sound of dreams.