Ice

by M.S Watson

  Chapter Six

  ‘Everything you can imagine is real.’

  Pablo Picasso

  When I finally came to, I was underwater, alone and lying against the sea floor as morning rays of sunshine passed through the murkiness and lit the scales along my tail.

  In a single moment, the previous evening’s occurrences replayed through my hazy mind and clarity pierced my head, leaving it throbbing with an instant migraine. It was obvious to me that whatever had happened, it was supernatural and entirely impossible. Before me, my tail told me another story. First of all, mythology was no longer a debatable issue for me. I had witnessed it first hand and although waking would have led me to doubt it, waking with a tail convinced me altogether.

  There were so many questions I would have liked to have asked her. Why did I grow a tail? How could I breathe under the surface, when I obviously had no gills? In hindsight, neither had she but that didn’t mean anything really when I had met a real, living and breathing finned woman that I only ever accepted having been in fairy tales. Did that mean other fishermen tales were based on truth? I had no idea, but I knew I would try my hardest in order to find out.

  First things first though.

  I bit my lip when I looked down at my tail, twitching a little to observe how it would react to my internal commands. It moved just fine and I found myself able to move it fairly easily, but it was obvious that it would be increasingly difficult to move the more I used it. Still, it appeared to be powerful and large enough to move me with little trouble at all. With my hands braced against the coral and stones beneath me, I pressed until only my hands touched the bottom and I moved my tail to propel myself through the water. I struggled at first, finding it difficult to move with both the bulk weight of my tail and the concept of using my body in a single unit, rather than the split use of using both legs separately.

  The first few times that I tried, I scraped my back against the sea floor and spread sand through my blonde hair. It helped that it was daylight above, but at least having passed out the previous night, I had rejuvenated a large portion of the energy I had lost. The violet glitter was long gone, replaced by a fine blue mist that seemed to emanate from my tail whenever I gained enough power in it to keep me from drifting to the sea floor again. I clenched my hands, digging my nails into my skin for a moment before finally delving into my knowledge base of swimming. I cupped my hands much like I did when I was swimming freestyle and used their momentum to help keep my body from drifting down. In the same movement, I thrashed my tail and finally settled into a simultaneous movement of arms and tail, propelling my way toward the surface.

  When I finally broke through the thin barrier between water and air, I gasped and took in gulps of air. There simply wasn’t enough that I could fill my lungs with at any one time, and I found myself coughing up water, leaving my throat cracked and raw from the saltiness. My lungs turned the water blood-red, but I finally stopped coughing up liquid and knew that it was all gone. Swiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I finally turned my gaze to the land and surrounding boats. I breathed deeply as I observed them.

  The dawn had only begun to break the horizon, and already boats were heading out for their daily catch. I ducked below the surface as one came close, knowing that they would lift me inside to save me and notice my new addition. I couldn’t afford that. I had grown up in this town, and the amount of fishermen that would have love to have reaped the rewards of a scientific discovery were great in number and equally in amount of greed. They each would give their best catch just for a five minute mention on the local news station and bragging rights over every other fishermen. The local bait store was simply laden with yellowed newspaper snippets and photographs of apparent ‘sightings’.

  I avoided a fishing boat - the one I’d heard passing by - and headed in the direction of the docks. The weathered wood pillars were easily identifiable, cutting through the water and unmoving against the gentle waves that lapped below it. I noticed Macy’s with hardly any effort, unsurprised to find the dark blue underbelly of her water café. With a tight grip of the closest pillar to her boat, I pulled myself up cautiously toward the surface once again and raised my head out high enough to scan for onlookers. The fishermen were gone, leaving the docks completely abandoned. Macy wasn’t around - it was too early for her to even be awake, let alone on the boat.

  With this knowledge in mind, I braced myself against a loose coil of rope that was attached to the top of my pillar. I pulled on it, yanking enough to test whether my weight would hold considering how frayed and weathered it appeared. When I was satisfied, I was finally able to pull myself out of the water for the first time since I’d fallen in the previous night, finding that I was close enough to the wooden walkway in order to prop myself completely out of the water. My dress was soaked through and clung to me uncomfortably but I was relieved to be out and away from the finned women. Away from mythology and things that couldn’t possibly be real - but were.

  As the sun rose higher, it gained in heat and I began to dry out, my hair turning straw-like while my legs began to replace the fins. They began were my dress ended, gradually disappearing until they returned to two separate entities with ten wiggling and wrinkled toes. In disbelief, I ran my now-no longer webbed fingers over my legs, surprised by their softness and the pleasure I experienced as the remaining water trickled down my skin and finally dropped back into the ocean. I sat like that for a long while, enchanted by the feeling and the magic I had witnessed before me. I was magic.

  I stayed until the sun was finally high above me and I felt it begin to burn my skin, the water droplets long gone and I heard footfalls on the dock adjacent to me. Macy was finally here, whistling as she stepped aboard and fiddled with her keys. I made sure to sneak past, keeping low and quiet so she wouldn’t see me. When I was finally free of her sight, my feet caused the wooden boards to creak as I bolted back down the street in the direction of my house. When I approached, I was appalled by the state of the house and immediate vicinity. Trash had been strewn along the roads and sidewalks, the neighbouring yards littered with empty cans of drink, sleeping teenagers that had never made it home that night and flower beds of puke. Judging by the stench I could smell from such a long distance away, I doubted they would ever be able to regenerate any form of life in them again.

  I kept to the sidewalk across the road from my house, scanning for the spot where I had been pushed into the sea and changed into a finned woman. My shoes were still there, surrounded by empty beer bottles but otherwise untouched by last nights party goers. I spotted Starden’s best friend passed out on the front porch, resting lazily in the white deck chair and a male’s genitals drawn in thick black marker across his face. With shoes in hand, I crossed the street and skirted the house, knowing that the back door made the least amount of noise as opposed to the front. As I tip-toed inside, I smelt the mustiness of spilled drinks, vomit and aged body odour before I even got past the kitchen.

  There was no surprise that there were bodies strewn throughout the lower floor of the house as I approached the stairs, but I was certainly more than surprised when I spotted Ryker and Isabella passed out together on the couch. I sighed. Lainie would be having none of this when she finally woke up and came downstairs. I could just imagine her shrieks as she would shoo them from the house and slam the door shut, followed by a long string of curses and, later, loud sobs of heart break. I just wished that she would get over him already. Desperate was an understatement when it came to Lainie and Ryker.

  With a shake of my head, I turned away from the sleeping couple and avoided treading in untold piles of muck and grit, before finally making it to my bedroom. That was when I heard the slight creak of a nearby door and I unlocked my room just in time to avoid being spotted. I kept it open slightly, peeking through the crack to find Starden stretching and Lainie giggling as she followed him. He was in boxers, whilst my sister was wrapped in his baggy t-shirt and sporting ruffled hair. Obviously th
ey’d had a night they’d never forget, judging simply by their attire and the grins that stretched from ear to ear. I shut the door quickly, avoiding the visuals as I heard snippets of their muffled flirtations.

  At least she knows she can’t say much to Ryker and Isabella when she notices.

  With my attention turned elsewhere and my bedroom door locked to avoid intrusion, I finally allowed myself to be a little louder and move through the house without stealth. I opened my broken window and the balcony French doors, thriving in the cool breeze that blew through and alerted my senses, if only for a couple of minutes. I lifted the covers of my bed to reveal my pyjamas, neatly folded where Nevada had left them the previous morning after she had completed the load of washing. With a sigh and a strike of guilt, I realised how tough I had been on both Nevada and Chris the previous day. It really wasn’t their fault that my sister and I were unwanted at birth. They had taken us in, given us a home. They gave us something that our original parents had never been able to.

  Then again, they had lied to us. They had told us lies, both great and small, in order to falsely lead us to the conclusion that they were our biological relations. They didn’t know how to communicate the fact that they were simply strangers who had taken two girls in when no one else wanted them. My body felt so confused as it battled between annoyance, guilt, anger and love. I wondered for a brief moment how my sister felt about the entire situation, but then I remembered who she was and how shallow she was. She would have used last night with Starden as her own personal therapy, just as a man whore would in a one night stand. Anger coursed through me, followed by sadness for Starden. I wondered if she really did love him, on some level. Maybe…

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING HERE!’

  I cringed. Yes, she had found them. I was briefly aware of the sounds of crashing, followed by slamming doors and shouting obscenities. Usually my sister would never even dream of being rough and discourteous in the presence of Ryker but Isabella was apparently her Achilles heel. Her shrieks continued, almost completely drowning out the sound of Ryker’s and Isabella’s footfalls as they fled. Lainie would probably never forgive herself, but then I simply recalled the guilt I felt as part of being a bystander, watching her pull the ruse relationship she had with Starden. It was well deserved, her lack of self-forgiveness, when I justified it. Still, I couldn’t help but feel guilt as my sister broke herself to pieces downstairs.

  Poor Starden, I thought to myself. He certainly has his work cut out for him.

  Despite my guilt, I didn’t think of her for long. Instantly, my mind reverted to last night, the woman and other finned creatures I had seen under the surface. What had happened? It was so confusing and disorienting, it brought a horrible ache to my head. I sighed, rubbing my forehead as I made my way towards my small ensuite. I kept the light off, preferring instead the natural light that streamed into my bedroom and coincidentally into the ensuite. The silver glittered walls shone with their own luminescence and I could hardly wait until I was finally in the shower, positioned towards the balcony with a glass barrier to keep the water from spraying out. The floor was tiled in ice white, matching those that formed the floor of the shower.

  A small, modern hand basin sat above a set of long drawers. Above it hung a modern mirror, circular in shape, that revealed to me how truly exhausted I was. The confusion and disorientation started in my eyes, leaving them glistening with unanswered questions. My hair was a mass of straw-like knots atop my head and when I tried to smile, it looked more like a grimace. I shrugged, moving towards the shower quickly as I shoved off the thick material of the dress and my undergarments. With the water freezing in temperature, my body shook and goosebumps formed even before I stepped into the raging torrent.

  At first, everything was fine as I focused on the water running over my body. Water-wrinkled fingers pushed the haystack of hair back from my face, my eyes shutting calmly. The sound of the ocean was completely lost in the sound of the cold shower, my feet tingling slightly as a reminder of what they could do. Then it all truly hit me, the force of realisation like a freight truck running me down. I doubled over, my legs giving way and my knees hitting the shower floor with jarring effect. Mermaids. Fins. Underwater. Flashes of that night wouldn’t leave me alone, wracking against my inner mind like butterflies being trapped. My head wouldn’t stop aching and I groaned in pain as I gently laid it against the tiles, the effect ringing through my skull.

  What am I?

  The shaking grew gradually worse, all of my inner emotions colliding with one another in such a way that I wasn’t able to move or speak. Had I been able to, I probably wouldn’t have. Even with the shower running and my head against the floor, I could hear my sister and her fury. Shouting her way up the stairs, I cringed as her shrieks rang through my head. If I had ever experienced a hangover, this is what I would imagine it to be like. The door to Lainie’s room slammed shut, leaving me shocked to find the house still standing. As it was, the shower shook above me from the shock, spraying water droplets wayward. My hands clawed at my head, trying to contain the agony of so much conflict. How was it even humanly possible to endure so many at one time?

  Finally, I broke.

  At first it came as a small sob, that quickly emerged into a heart-wrenching onslaught of tears and bloody tracks that my nails drew against my forearms. I was blinded by the pain of enduring so much at one time, shock leaving me breathless as I struggled to keep myself together. Years ago, before my sister and I were introduced to high school, I would have called out to her, hugged her tightly as she aided me in placing all the pieces of my shocked soul back together again. Now, though, I would only earn shrieks of anger for not paying attention to the ‘important’ things, like her failed attempts of seducing Ryker.

  ‘What does she see in him anyway?’ I whispered to no one. I’d never asked myself that before, oddly enough. I sighed. Why was life so damn difficult? My sister and her ruse relationship were annoying at the best of times, but after last night? Irritation clawed at my skin, tearing through the migraine that was devastatingly painful to my entire body. I gritted my teeth and tried hard not to scream at my sister for being so shallow and manipulative. How could Starden not know that she would be ready and willing to leave him at the drop of a hat if Ryker ever so much as winked an eye at her. He never winked at her. So why was she so focused on giving up everything to be with him?