When I was a child, I was always fascinated by the water. My mom tells me that even as far back as when I was a baby, that I would stare, transfixed, into the swirling reflective liquid. Occasionally I even reached out my chubby little baby hand to touch the water, swirling it around and making eddies that rippled away to the other end of the bathtub. But, to my child self, the most captivating thing about this mysterious substance was not what it was, but what it did to me.

 

I discovered this strange occurrence when I was about five. My mom had just plopped me in the tub to become clean after a hard day of playing outside with my friends. After a while I looked down at my hands, submerged in the warm bubbly water. They looked strange, so I pulled them out of the water, dripping wet, and brought them up to my face. I inspected them, and found that my fingertips looked like the little raisins I hated eating. My mom said that they were healthy, and tried disguising them with peanut butter on a piece of celery, saying that it was just ants on a log, but I knew better. Those were just gross raisins.

“Mommy!” I called, “what’s wrong with my fingers?” I shoved them in front of her face, causing water droplets to fly everywhere.

“That always happens, sweetie. If you stay in the water too long, your fingers will get all wrinkly.”

“But why mommy?” I asked.

She thought silently for a moment, trying to come up with a good answer.

“Well… some people think that it’s because if we stay in the water too long we will turn into mermaids. It starts with your fingertips, which is why they get all wrinkly.”

Thinking back on this conversation many years later, I realize that she just wanted to be a good mother and answer my question as best she could, but those words would haunt me for a long time; always at the back of my mind, what if I can become a mermaid?

 

It had been nearly seven years since that day. I still found the water as fascinating as ever. After many years of begging, assorted powerpoint presentations, and taking some babysitting jobs to get money to help with the cost, my mom had finally caved and bought me a swimming pool. Nothing fancy, just your basic outdoor swimming pool. I have so many fond memories of that dirty blue pool. I didn’t have very many friends, but the few that I had would always come over to hang out and splash around in the pool with me. I would always ask them to play pretend, and make believe that we were beautiful mermaids that would help out sealife and clear trash from the oceans. I lost a few friends that way. They said that they were too old for those baby games, and that it was embarrassing. So instead we played marco polo and then they left. They wouldn’t talk to me very much after that. So I learned to play by myself, and it was okay,  because when I was in the water all of my worries melted away.

 

On one particularly hot day in the middle of summer my mom came into my room and started shouting at me. Her breath smelled of wine. I knew what was going to happen. “Bailey!”

“Yes mom?” I tried to stay calm, usually it worked.

“What do you think you’re doing in here?”

“Reading.”

“Well what about homework? You probably have tons of it that you haven’t done. You are probably gonna fail all of your classes and never get to college and live in my basement and work in a McDonalds and leach off of me all your life because no one will want to marry you. You’ll never get anywhere in life!” At this point my mom’s words started to slur. Whenever something reminds her of dad she gets drunk out of her mind and takes out her anger on me. I know she doesn’t mean any of it, and most of it is nonsense anyway, but it still hurts.

“Mom, why don’t you go lay down; you look tired,” Sometimes this trick works but by the look on Mom’s face, I don’t think it’ll work this time.

“Oh so now you think you can tell me what to do, huh? You hate me. You think that I’m a failure. Well guess what? I’m still your mother!” She starts to swing her right fist at my face, but I dodge it enough to get a glancing blow to the cheek. My mom looks at her fist, and chokes back a sob.

“Oh my god! What have I done? Baby, come here.” She tried to hug me but I pushed her away. She starts to cry. I lead her back to her room and lay her on the bed. In a few minutes she stops crying and blacks out. I look at her night stand. Vodka. I hide it in the kitchen. My cheek hurts and I can feel a bruise forming.

I run to my room and change into my bathing suit and grab a towel. I needed to get out of the house. I run outside and dive into the pool, causing an explosion of water to splatter all over the dying grass that surrounds the pool. The cold water feels wonderful against my bruising skin. I start to swim laps, my legs slicing through the silky water. My mind is only ever able to relax when I’m in the water. I have caused some pretty expensive bills from taking hour long showers so that I could settle my mind; mom was not very happy about that.

Being in the water is where I feel closest to dad. I don’t remember him much, he drowned when I was six, but he was the first person to introduce me to the ocean and foster my love of the water. He would always take me on “secret missions” to explore the shore and see the ocean waves. Mom never approved, but she dealt with it. One day, my dad decided that he wanted a sailboat, so he bought one without consulting mom. He named it the Bailey, after me. Mom was very angry about it and wanted to get rid of it, but dad refused. After weeks of fighting, dad won and got to keep the boat. However, he was not allowed to take me on it because mom said that the Bailey was too unsafe. I guess one day dad was feeling stressed, so he took out the boat and went sailing. He never checked the weather. That day it stormed harder than I had ever seen before, and the boat capsized with dad in it, drowning him. A few days later, the wreckage washed up on shore and mom and I both cried. Dad had meant a lot to both of us; he balanced out my mom and was the only one that could ever get me to do anything. That was when mom started drinking. Now, the water is my only escape.

 

After a few hours, my mind was at peace, my churning emotions having been calmed. I looked down and noticed that my hands were getting increasingly wrinkly. Usually I’m not in the water this long, but today I needed it. Then and there, I decided to indulge in the thought in the back of my mind, and I stayed in the water for the rest of the day. Mom would be blacked out for a while yet, so what was there to lose?

 

It was well past dark when I felt it. My skin was crawling as if I were covered in ants. Just like that day when I was five, I raised my hands up to my face. The natural webbing that is between everyone’s fingers had grown, and my skin looked dry, almost scaly. But, as soon as my hands were out of the water, the crawling sensation stopped. I plunged them back in and the feeling returned. My mind was racing. Mom had been right! I am turning into a mermaid! This is so exciting! How can this be happening to me? Wait, will the government abduct me to cut me open and see what happened?

Quickly making up my mind, I dived down under the water, engulfing my entire body in it. Taking a risk, I opened my eyes, but the chlorine burned. Still determined, I kept my eyes open, hoping they would change too. And slowly, they did. It seemed as if a clear film developed over them, almost like a second eyelid, protecting my eyes from the burning chlorine and improving my underwater vision.

Only then did I realize that I had been underwater for at least ten minutes, and I wasn’t even short of breath! I raised my hands to my face again and saw that the space between my fingers had completely webbed over, and my hands had turned tough and scaly. I looked down at my feet. Thick webbing, like that between my fingers, had joined my legs together. But it looked like a deformation, not the beautiful tail like that of the pictures of mermaids that the media has portrayed. Fins had developed along my calves, and were growing by the minute. My toes were very heavily webbed over, almost like fins, but not quite. Once again, it looked like a disfigurement. Scales were forming all over my body, though they were larger and tougher on my conjoined legs and feet. More fins were growing on my arms. I looked upwards, at the surface of the water, hoping to see a reflection of my face. When I saw it, I gasped, sucking in water, although it didn’t seem to affect me at all. My nose was gone, giving my face an almost Voldemort-esque look. My ears were gone as well, replaced by gaping holes covered over by a small film. Gills had formed on my neck. But most creepy of all, my eyes had become a shocking green, flecked with a deep blue, unlike their normal boring brown color. My hair had grown in length, and had the texture of seaweed, and it was an ugly greenish-brown color. My face was also covered in tiny scales. What had I done to myself?

I tried to swim around the pool, but found it difficult because I couldn’t kick my legs to propel my body forward. Adopting an approach similar to the one I used when I pretended to be a mermaid, I flicked my heavy tail, if you could even call it that, and sent myself flying across the pool, almost smashing into the wall. I modified my approach, now gently flicking my tail and cupping the water in my webbed hands before I let it go, which gave me more control of where I wanted to swim. I did twenty five laps around the pool in under a minute, my body now adapted to its watery environment. While horrified at what I had become, I was amazed at how easily I could swim. I wished that I was in the ocean, I felt that if I could be there that I could swim to the other side of the world in a day if I wanted, or explore the Marianas Trench, or even just swim to the bottom and find new species of fish; the possibilities were endless. And yet, I was stuck in this tiny pool. At the thought of fish, I wondered how long it had been since I’d last eaten. At least since breakfast, and now the sky was just starting to hint at becoming morning. Mom would be waking up soon enough, and would need caring for. She tended to get awful hangovers.

 

I poked my head out of the water and almost choked on air. I started to panic. How was I supposed to change back? I can’t be a mermaid forever! Getting an idea, I fought back my panic, and submerged my head again. I stuck my arm up, out of the water, and waited. I waited like that for 10 minutes, but it soon became apparent that my arm would become incredibly sore before that worked. Instead, I turned my face towards the bottom of the pool and allowed my body to float upwards. This allowed me to still be able to breath but also be somewhat out of the water. After another ten minutes I found that my back wasn’t quite so scaly anymore. I poked my head up out of the water again. It was somewhat easier to hold my breath, or should I say water, in, and slowly I could feel the crawling sensation again, which hopefully meant that I would be back to normal soon. I inhaled experimentally, and found that I could breathe again. Hoisting myself out of the water, I sat on the edge of the pool. The crawling feeling intensified and it almost felt like I was covered in fire ants, biting everywhere. I stifled I scream. To distract myself, I looked at how my mermaid adaptation was regressing. The scales were receding, and the webbing was dissolving into my newly returned skin. I touched my face, and found that my nose had returned. The burning was slowly ending, and it ended right at my fingertips, which were now all wrinkly.

 

I left the pool and went in the house to find my mom. As soon as I got in the door, I was ambushed with a hug. “I’m so sorry for what I said Bailey. As soon as I woke up I went to find you, and I couldn’t until I saw you in the pool. I didn’t believe that it was you until now.”

“Are you feeling okay? Any hangover?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine. But I think we should get you to the ocean.” Mom smiled at me.

“But you hate the ocean!”

“But it’s where you belong. I think you need to really experience it.” So we went to the ocean that morning. I waited all day in the surf, and the transformation restarted. It was faster this time. I waved at my mom, and swam off. I went to the place where dad and the Bailey capsized. A flicker of movement caught my eye. It was probably just a fish, but I turned to investigate anyways. It was better than a fish. It was my dad, a mermaid like myself.

 

That was the day that changed my life. Mom stopped drinking. We bought a new house on the shore, so that we could see dad whenever we wanted. Because he almost drowned as a mermaid, he can’t change back into a human, but that’s okay. I made some new friends, who were always happy to play mermaids, probably because that is what they were. Mom also bought the Bailey II, and we go sailing all the time. She doesn’t hate the water anymore, and that is perfectly okay with me.

 

By: Rebecca Dorsey