Storm Drain Mermaid

When we were little, my twin sister made me watch "The Little Mermaid" with her all the time. It was her favorite Disney movie ever, even more than that one with the pretty girl and the monster. She loved all those singing sea animals and worshipped that redheaded fish-babe Ariel. She went as her every Halloween for four years, till finally our dog Pound Puppy tore it up in a rabid fit. We had him put to sleep after that 'cause everyone was afraid he'd try to hurt one of us. She never forgave that dog.

--

At age 14, my sister found out the real ending to the story, how the mermaid couldn't marry her prince and died, becoming a daughter of the air. She told me there was something more realistic about that, and that she actually liked that ending better.

"People forget happily ever afters," she said," but tragedy lasts forever."

She was already turning into something of a goth by then, opening her heart and drowning her ears to Marilyn Manson ("and the Spooky Kids, Brian", she always reminded me), Jack Off Jill, and The Smashing Pumpkins. Her new favorite movies were things like "Creature from the Black Lagoon", "Romeo and Juliet" (the Zeffirelli version), and that flick with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as vampires. I didn't really understand the change in her, but then again, I was the one who lived with Mom.

--

When we would meet up with each other and go walking around (still too young for cars), she would sometimes point out this storm drain to me, like it was some magic thing hidden right in plain sight in our dumb little boring town.

"You ever wonder about what's down there?" she asked me once.

"I dunno. Shit and sewage water, I guess."

"No, I mean like..." she trailed off.

"You mean like C.H.U.D. or something?" I laughed.

"Sorta-not-really. Like, something secret down there. People who can live underwater, maybe, who use the sewers to get from one place to another instead of going on land."

"What kind of people?"

She smiled shyly. "Merpeople?"

I shook my head. "Again with that fuckin' movie."

"What? I like them."

"You're crazy."

"Well, I like to believe that some of the things we pretend are real when we're little really are real. And if that makes me crazy, then find some psych ward to lock me up in, buddy."

"Follow me," I joked, and we went on our way.

--

Senior year in high school, she had it bad for this guy named Riley Harrow. He wasn't anything special, just another brooding girly-boy narcissist "musician" in fishnets and black leather, but to her he was a big deal. She kept quiet about it for a long time, until she came crying to me one night about how she had gone to tell him she was in love with him and had caught him getting head from her best friend.

"What's wrong with me?" she'd asked. I told her that nothing was wrong, that her friend and that guy were losers and that she should just try and move on.

One of Dad's maids found her the next afternoon, a bottle of sleeping pills and a glass of stale water on her dresser. Both were half-empty.

For a whole week after the funeral there wasn't a day that went by that I didn't watch that dorky movie she giggled over so much as a kid. Sometimes I cried so hard that the whole movie would go by while I tried to get ahold of myself.

When I went back to school I found Harrow and beat the shit out of him, left him bloody and broken in the bathroom stall. I almost got expelled, even arrested, for it, but I didn't care. Nothing was really important with my sister gone. There was only half a world now without her.

Some nights all I would do is read and re-read the note she left--for me and me alone. There was one line especially that stayed with me for some reason. It was a quote from Andersen's original "The Little Mermaid";

"'After three hundred years, thus shall we float into the kingdom of heaven'."

My sister was now a daughter of the air. Or so she had believed she would be.

--

I went to the coast a lot at dawn. I didn't expect anything, but somehow it made me feel like I was close to her. In a kind of corny way of keeping her memory, I tried to be as good a person as I knew how to be, since I felt that maybe that would hasten her ascension into the heaven she wanted to go to.

--

Graduation came and I left. The first year of college was a blur, but I managed. When summer came I went back home to visit.

It was sometime in the evening when a few friends and I were driving aimlessly around town. Or maybe we were on our way to a movie or a party or something like that. I know I felt aimless, anyway.

When I stopped the car at a red light, I let my mind wander. I realized that this was the street where, a few years before, my sister had pointed out that storm drain. I searched half-heartedly for it and found it easily enough on the left side of the street, just a little behind the car. There had, in fact, been an early morning shower and as I stared at the damp aftermath of rainwater on the ground, I gazed into the drain and remembered my sister's odd question...

Whoever was in the passenger's seat nudged me and told me that the light had changed. I looked back at the road ahead of me and hit the pedal, turned onto the next street. I didn't have time to ever check again, but for a brief moment, I thought I'd caught a glimpse of a red-haired young woman and then a fishlike tail down in that storm drain.