Mermaids in Paradise by Lydia Millet (debian ebook reader .txt) 📕

alongside and the floating objects that, I guess, had been dumped out when we were overturned (my eyes fixed, while I was getting my breath back, on a two-liter soda bottle, its brown syrupy liquid sloshing inside; a white first-aid kit with the telltale red cross on it; and a large running shoe). There was still the overwhelming racket of the cable grinding, too.

Was Gina OK? Miyoko? The others? I looked around, called out, sputtering. But I was too low in the water, all I could see was the churning froth itself, right around me—I had to have a better vantage point. With more scraping of elbows and knees I hoisted myself up onto the upside-down boat, I found a rope to hold on to and hauled myself onto its bottom, which had ridges, almost shelves along it that made it easy to get a grip on, once I was up there. For whatever reason I was the first of all of us to clamber back on.

The whales were surfacing again. It was a blue whale, of course, that had come up right beneath us—I realized it only when I saw them, it took me that long to get a clue why we’d capsized. The whales were rising from the depths, and there were a fair number of them—too many for me to count, given their size. The only thing that made them seem less than frighteningly huge was the fact that you didn’t see their whole bodies at once, only sections as they arched out of the water and then under it again, sliding along like sea serpents in movies. They had risen. They rose still.

And the mermaids were with them.

They’d dived down by themselves and come up with mermaids.

The first two I saw were clinging to a dorsal fin, really far back on the whale—those dorsal fins were pretty small, considering how massive the whales’ bodies were. That whale dove briefly and the mermaids went under; then he/she rose and they were visible again. And so it went. Whales surfaced, then dipped under, with a few mermaids holding fast to those lone fins but most of them grabbing onto the great white armatures of barnacles across the whales’ massive backs. For a mermaid, I guess, those crusted, razor-sharp crustaceans weren’t too lethal to grab onto. There were whole rows of mermaids arrayed along the whales’ backs and sides, like so many kids in a full school bus.

I’d left my cell phone in my bag, on the Coast Guard ship, but Rick had brought his, and bizarrely enough it hadn’t gotten completely waterlogged/ruined.

Later, turning the sight over in my mind, I’d figure the mermaids had to hold on somewhere; they weren’t big on sitting, being half-fish and all. You don’t see a fish in a chair often. Maybe they could sometimes manage on a stable base, say a pile of rocks or a coral outcropping, to brush their hair and sing seductive ditties to sailors, but not on a moving whale. They didn’t have asses. It was that simple.

I barely noticed as the others joined me on the capsized boat, scrambling atop it one by one—there was Gina, there was Miyoko, then Ellis, with one limp arm that seemed to be bothering him—and we stared as the whales came up, one after another. After a bit we understood that they were heading out into the open ocean. The whales were moving away from the armada and the nets, and with them went the mermaids.

I watched a pair near me, one particular whale and one mermaid—my whale and my mermaid, as I thought of them afterward, though the mermaid wasn’t the same one I’d seen before. She was a different mermaid, younger and prettier. I saw her shining tail hanging along the side of the whale’s great, flattened head, the whale curves I didn’t understand anatomically (nostrils? ears? blowholes?). Sun glanced off the scales on her tail and the mermaid’s long, light hair was plastered down her back and sides. There were others like her on that whale, but she was the one near me.

There were far more mermaids than we’d seen before and far more whales than we’d seen before, too. I couldn’t count them, it was too fast and too multiple for that—it was like a storm or a battle, a frenzy of movement, a confusion of images and sliding, foaming water. Struggling to stay on the overturned boat as the last stragglers climbed on, rocking it as they clambered, and at the same time watching the whales in a daze, I had no time to draw conclusions, right then. I vaguely registered some discord about organizing—whether we should jump off the boat again and work together to turn it right side up—but I ignored the shouts, tuned out the argument, I wanted it to stop. I was laser-focused.

In the sound and the noise, grasping at the hard plastic ridges as I slipped back and forth on the bottom of the Zodiac, I watched the whales recede, watched them dip and surface, dip and surface again in a graceful motion (Sam said later it wasn’t the usual way whales swam but more the way dolphins did—possibly for the benefit of the mermaids). They quickly put a good distance between us, eventually a great distance, and I was just beginning to shiver and feel the sting of the cuts and scrapes on my leg and elbows when they grew indistinct. Soon they were nothing but ripples in the plain of ocean beneath the horizon line.

And finally they disappeared from my field of view and I knew I’d never see those whales or mermaids again. I’d never see another blue whale, the vastest creature ever to live on earth, and I’d never see a mermaid again, either.

They’d taken our mythological creatures, the blue whales had. They’d come to the rescue as the nets were closing in and the hordes were descending with their burning swords. They’d come to claim