of an older woman. I did it because I had heard that her right foot was flattened like a flipper. I thought that she might be a mermaid too, and I thought it would be a good job because I could ask her questions. I had to help her get into and out of the bath, and on the first day of work she told me, “Nudity is more painful to me than loneliness,” as if to explain what was about to happen, as if to explain her defeat in having to hire me. She was propped up against her sink. I was seated on the toilet tank when she said this. Her dress was loose, with two small clasps at the neck which she herself released. Her naked body was horrible, like bulbed growths on trees. Her flipper foot was twice as wide and long as her other foot. The bones in the flipper foot lifted up out of the surface and the deformed skeleton was visible underneath the skin that clung to it. I stared and stared to get used to the foot and the other lumps of her unusual body. I never did get used to her abnormalities, but began to appreciate that perhaps the roundness of her deformities was filled with the collected wonder of views from the cliff, high above where most people lived.
“Did you ever have a husband?” was my first question for her.
“No. I never married,” she said. “Which is probably no surprise. I am not agreeable.” This answer was what I feared. I have heard all the things people have said about mermaids. Jude won’t marry me and I’ll never be able to kill him and so I’ll never be able to go back to the ocean, and who knows what will happen to me without a husband? My mermaid parts will start creeping out over time, like the woman’s sickening foot.
“I’ve never even had a lover,” she said. “Once I wrote a letter to the university requesting a team of scientists make a study of me. However, they did not. Which I’ve always thought was a terrible waste.”
She let the water out of the drain herself and stretched her arms towards me, above her, waiting to be picked up.
“Are you a mermaid?” I finally asked her, and she lowered her arms, stared straight ahead at the drain lever, and said nothing, as though she hadn’t considered that before and was stumped, or as though that was a sad topic and she had almost forgotten it and wished I hadn’t mentioned it.
My mother works part-time for the public school. There is one deaf child in our town and so the school employs my mother as a part-time interpreter. Karen, that’s the little deaf girl’s name, spends a lot of time with my mother outside of school, too, and some days when I find my mother and Karen signing away in our kitchen, sometimes I feel jealous and I make the one sign I know, my raised middle finger, at Karen behind her back. The public school job does not pay much at all and so my mother sometimes works with me chambermaiding at the tourist motels, or we take on shifts at the sardine factory. They call us when they need us. At the factory, by 4 o’clock our hands are silver and slick from scales and soya oil. If I knit my fingers together my hands become odd fish themselves. They even try to swim away but I catch them.
The factory only hires women, even the foreman is a woman. I work at the end of my line, which is fine because the conveyor belt makes it difficult to hear. There is little possibility for conversation. I talk to the fish, “What’d you do last night?” I ask as they fly past on the machinery. I imagine them swimming in schools, in the deep sea, out for a good time until—swoop—the net closed in. The sardines look up at me with a haughty, empty eye, so I cut their heads off and stuff them into a coated tin. Or else some days, when Jude is on my mind, I can grow inordinately attached to one beautiful sardine. I put it in the front pocket of my apron. Then I grind myself against the conveyor belt, pretending the sardine is Jude. I push it close to me.
The woman who works beside me has been at the factory for 35 years. She
“Did you ever have a husband?” was my first question for her.
“No. I never married,” she said. “Which is probably no surprise. I am not agreeable.” This answer was what I feared. I have heard all the things people have said about mermaids. Jude won’t marry me and I’ll never be able to kill him and so I’ll never be able to go back to the ocean, and who knows what will happen to me without a husband? My mermaid parts will start creeping out over time, like the woman’s sickening foot.
“I’ve never even had a lover,” she said. “Once I wrote a letter to the university requesting a team of scientists make a study of me. However, they did not. Which I’ve always thought was a terrible waste.”
She let the water out of the drain herself and stretched her arms towards me, above her, waiting to be picked up.
“Are you a mermaid?” I finally asked her, and she lowered her arms, stared straight ahead at the drain lever, and said nothing, as though she hadn’t considered that before and was stumped, or as though that was a sad topic and she had almost forgotten it and wished I hadn’t mentioned it.
My mother works part-time for the public school. There is one deaf child in our town and so the school employs my mother as a part-time interpreter. Karen, that’s the little deaf girl’s name, spends a lot of time with my mother outside of school, too, and some days when I find my mother and Karen signing away in our kitchen, sometimes I feel jealous and I make the one sign I know, my raised middle finger, at Karen behind her back. The public school job does not pay much at all and so my mother sometimes works with me chambermaiding at the tourist motels, or we take on shifts at the sardine factory. They call us when they need us. At the factory, by 4 o’clock our hands are silver and slick from scales and soya oil. If I knit my fingers together my hands become odd fish themselves. They even try to swim away but I catch them.
The factory only hires women, even the foreman is a woman. I work at the end of my line, which is fine because the conveyor belt makes it difficult to hear. There is little possibility for conversation. I talk to the fish, “What’d you do last night?” I ask as they fly past on the machinery. I imagine them swimming in schools, in the deep sea, out for a good time until—swoop—the net closed in. The sardines look up at me with a haughty, empty eye, so I cut their heads off and stuff them into a coated tin. Or else some days, when Jude is on my mind, I can grow inordinately attached to one beautiful sardine. I put it in the front pocket of my apron. Then I grind myself against the conveyor belt, pretending the sardine is Jude. I push it close to me.
The woman who works beside me has been at the factory for 35 years. She
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