Full Fathom Five

Full fathom five thy father lies

Of his bones are coral made

And those are pearls that were his eyes

And nothing of him that doth change

But that doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange. –The Tempest, Shakespeare

Zane dug his toes into the sliding sand, shaped by the lapping water tugging it away from the shore. Fluidly it moved around his foot, between his toes, as though gently absorbing him into its constantly changing embrace.

The sun hung like a pink pearl, gently coloring the grey expanse of ocean, and the air was cool and misty, smelling like sand and salty spray. Seagulls cried, some echoing in the distance, some overhead.

Briefly he glanced back at his cottage, quiet and unobtrusive—almost part of the shoreline. Amazing how something so unnatural can become part of the environment like that, over time.

He paused briefly to roll up one of the legs of his khaki pants. So it wasn’t typical beach wear. He wasn’t a typical beach wear kind of guy. He wore button-down shirts—maybe not completely button down on the weekend—and loafers, even when he wasn’t at work. Shorts, tee-shirts, blue-jeans—they just weren’t his thing. He’d stopped wearing shorts after being teased about his bird legs in high school. It was just habit now.

When he looked up again, he thought he saw something bobbing gently in the tide a few hundred yards down the shoreline. It was a soft blue, like sky through dissipating rain clouds

Curious, he made his way across the shifting shore. The closer he got, the more he began to wonder if what he’d seen had actually been blue, and when he got close enough he saw that it was actually flesh-colored—must of have been a mirage or something. And it was actually a she—a conspicuously unclothed she, except for a few tangles of seaweed.

He pulled off his navy windbreaker.

“I need help.” She sat up, and Zane held the jacket out to her, staring politely in another direction. “Maybe you could give me a place to stay?”

“Are you alright?” Momentarily forgetting the situation, he turned to look at her as he spoke. Fortunately she had already shrugged into the windbreaker. “What happened?”

“I—” She looked down. Brown hair hung in long tangled strands that hid her face. “—got caught. In a current. I was swimming down here…somewhere…I don’t remember now.”
His brow wrinkled, but he reached down to help her up. She looked hesitantly at his outstretched hand.

“I’m sorry—?”

“Let me help you up.”
She looked at her legs. Zane noticed that they were pale and slender but had almost no definition—like they hadn’t been used for a long time. “I’m not sure if I can.”

“What do you mean? Are you hurt?”

When she looked up at him, he saw that her eyes were large and expressive, like a child’s, but they glinted intelligently. In them was a vulnerability and a fearfulness that stopped him short for a moment.

Then he reached down and lifted her up by the shoulders. The windbreaker crinkled under his touch. When she was upright, she slid his shoulder under her arm for support.

She shuddered suddenly, looking back at the water.

“You alright?”

Closing her eyes briefly, she pulled the sleeves down over her hands. “Yeah. I think I’m sick, or something.”

“Probably a cold. Considering that was the Atlantic you were swimming in. Naked. In late fall.”

She couldn’t seem to figure out where to put her feet as they walked, and her legs kept collapsing at odd intervals. After a while he noticed that she kept her gaze on her legs as he walked, as though trying to figure out how he did it.

They were approaching a small, comfortable-looking structure. After a moment of reflection, Azrela realized that it must have been a house. Apparently they protected sand people from the sky and the seasons. Azrela didn’t fully grasp this idea yet, but she understood that normally people lived further from the shore than this. “You live here? Next to the sea?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s wonderful.”

He smiled slightly. “I have some clothes that might fit you. They used to be my sister’s.”

“Aren’t they hers anymore?”

“She died a few years ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

The sand moved in around his feet as he stopped walking for a moment. She looked at him curiously. His expression was quiet—not painful or sad. Just thoughtful.

She’d watched sand people a great deal in preparation for surfacing. In fact, she’d watched more than most sea people did. Condolence was an odd practice, but then, death was different here. Instead of letting people alone when the sea reclaimed them, as was customary and right in the sea, sand people insisted on staring at their empty shells, speaking words over them, and surrounding them with flowers before putting them into the dark earth. It was odd, but odd in a way she’d grown to understand.

“Just come inside,” he said. “I think you could use some dry clothes.”

His sister’s clothes provided a comfort Azrela hadn’t realized she needed. They had a similar feel to her blue sea skin—which she’d lost shortly after surfacing. Compassion had worked into the threads of the flowing skirts and soft tops—the warmth of love where it touched skin, and the cool flowing beauty of the sea where it billowed away from her.

After a few weeks, though, he suggested that she try wearing different clothes. She wondered if seeing a stranger dressed as his sister pained him.

The clothes he gave her were different. They were clder—no feeling of a previous owner’s nature in them. He called them “new”. It meant that no one had worn them before. She wondered if that was how things usually went.

They looked different, also—dipping and draping in places that felt very unlike

his sister’s clothes. But she didn’t concern herself with it.

Azrela had considered herself well versed in sand people’s culture. But there were a few subtle things she had missed—and in retrospect, she wondered if her knowledge had held any meaning at all, in a place where all things were determined by subtleties.

She didn’t understood what happened when she went into town to pick up a prescription when Zane had tonsillitis.

She’d approached the counter at the pharmacy, already tense and uncertain that she was doing the right things. Zane said the doctor had called in the prescription, and all she had to do was pick it up for him. He’d told them she was coming. But there was always the possibility that there was a fine detail that he’d missed—and she hated the way people looked at her when she didn’t understand.

“I need the medicine for Zane,” she said as confidently as she could. As an afterthought, she added, “Zane Abernathy.” Sand people liked detail, because in many ways so many things were alike on the surface. Including people.

The woman behind the counter—leather-skinned, and brightly painted around her eyes and lips—gave her a long look before looking down at the cash register and pressing a few keys. Azrela didn’t even look at it—there were so many things here that she didn’t understand, and she was tired of discovering new ones.

“Lorraine? Could you grab Zane’s prescription?” Her voice was tired. She tucked a pouf of teased, dark brown hair behind her ear. “Back there, hon. Next to Bradley’s… There.”

Azrela took the white paper bag, and wordlessly handed over the money Zane had given her.

“Receipt’s in the bag. Have a nice day, hon.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

As Azrela left, another woman approached the counter. She had a leathery face also, but it wasn’t colored and her hair hung smooth and gray to her chin, with a few wiry flyaways. She leaned over the counter and struck up a conversation with the woman behind the counter.

There was a rack of greeting cards in the aisle that caught Azrela’s attention. She picked up a card out of the section labeled “Anniversary”. It had a picture of a bottle of wine on the front. The inside said “Vintage 19” in script, and, in small print at the bottom, “Stronger with time.” The words seemed stark and small on the white page.

“…thought he was a decent guy. I always liked Zane… didn’t think he was the type…”

Azrela put down the card and stopped to listen.

“That little foreign whore of his just came in here. Did you see her?”

“Yeah, that was her leaving, wasn’t it? That stuff he puts her in…fetish, I guess… it’s sad, actually, don’t you think? She must have no mind of her own…”

“That’s how those mail-order-bride-types are. That’s why men like them, I suppose. They’re really still just boys, in so many ways…”

Azrela kept pretty calm until she was outside. Then she rushed into the nearest alley and violently retched.

There were a lot of things she didn’t understand about the sand people’s world. But she’d understood most of the exchange between those women. And she understood that their world was a filthy, cold place that trampled on innocence, assumed the worst on sight, and only showed compassion when it could be turned into profit. She understood that there was no love, no selflessness, no goodness. And she understood that she was stupid and naïve and, thus, deserved everything that had happened to her—according to their reasoning.

She thought she had understood Zane. But that proved to be what she understood least of all.

The medicine helped. Zane was feeling better after about a week.

Azrela wished she could swallow something to rid herself of the hate and despair that was creeping through her body.

She wore only his sister’s clothes after the incident at the pharmacy. Zane didn’t comment for the entire span of his illness.

But one day she awoke to find the sister’s clothes gone from the bureau drawers where they were normally kept. In their place were the clothes he had bought her—in their brassy, whorish glory.

Fury roiled inside her. How dare he assume that she would accept this? Did he think she’d just forgotten where he kept these vestments of prostitution? But another part of her mind quietly suggested, perhaps this is all I’m worth, all I deserve.

Her mouth set furiously. She had been on the surface too long. She was absorbing their beliefs.

Zane had gone to work. She spent the morning quietly, calmly turning the house inside out, looking for the sister’s clothes.

Finally she discovered an alcove in the wall behind his bedside table. In it, neatly folded, were the clothes she’d been given the day he found her. She buried her fingers in their folds, eager for the sister’s compassion and love of the sea.

Folds of fabric. Nothing more.

A cold stone dropped into her chest.

Silently she pulled the clothes out of the alcove. Her hands shook as she undressed and put them on. Cold, salty ocean drops tumbled down her cheeks.

If she was losing her ability to feel this—it could be too late.

Ellis had a thing about going boating alone. He made sure his dinghy could carry more than one person, and he dragged Bridget along any time he wanted to go out. She was usually only too happy to go—she’d been the one that introduced him to it, after all.

And here he’d been thinking there was nothing good about the Atlantic seaboard.

But this—the cool salty spray, the deep blue waves, gently pulling his boat into the rhythm of the ocean as he rowed, the frigid September morning—he felt connected with something deeper than people, deeper than nature, than death or life or anything.

He watched Bridget’s blonde hair stirring gently in the wind.

“I wish everything was always like this,” he said without thinking.

“Like what?” Her bright eyes jumped to his face. She was drumming her fingers again the hull.

“Rhythmic. Deep. Powerful. I dunno.” He stopped rowing for a second, letting the waves determine his motion. “Feels like I’m—part of it.” He shrugged.

She ran her fingers along a strand of hair, pulling it away from her head. Then she tucked it behind her ear and said,

“If it were always like this, it wouldn’t be as special. Or important.”

“I guess.” He could understand that. But he could also understand how this connection would never get old, just different. Like being married a long time to someone you really loved.

He didn’t know if Bridget could understand that.

Lost in thought, he didn’t realize that she’d said something else.

“Sorry?”
“I said that I heard someone say something about you the…” She trailed off. “Do you see that?”

“See what?”

“That! Look! Is there someone—in the water—?”

He blinked. “You mean over there?”

“Yeah.”

Wordlessly he began rowing in that direction.

The figure—which he now saw was a girl, probably his age, maybe a little older—didn’t seem to be thrashing or sinking. Just keeping above the water—moving only minimally.

“Hey.” Ellis leaned over the side of the boat. Bridget craned for a better look. “The water’s kinda cold. You need help?”

When she looked up at him, he felt a pang at the deep hopelessness he saw in her expression. “You can’t help me.”

“I can get you out of the water.”

“That’s not what I need.”

He didn’t think. Before she could react, he’d reached down and grabbed her arms. She flinched almost imperceptibly at his touch, but he heaved her halfway over the side. Bridget helped him drag her in the rest of the way.

“Do we have a blanket or something?”

“Jacket.” Bridget pulled her hoodie off and draped it over her shaking shoulders. “It’s the best we can do for now.”

Ellis shrugged out of his own jacket, wrapping it around her legs, which were plastered with a long, sky-blue skirt.

“Okay. Maybe we should take you someplace warm…” he murmured—half to himself, half to the girl.

“I’d really rather be in the water.”

Ellis squinted. “I’m sorry—did you want to die?”

“I wanted—” She closed her eyes. “I was trying to go back underneath. The water.” The more she spoke, the more she seemed sorry that she hadn’t stopped.

“Go back underneath?” Bridget shook her head. “What are you—”
“You’re the mermaid.”

The other two swiveled to look at Ellis, who seemed not to see either of them for a moment as he tried to contain his excitement. Bridget looked thoroughly confused.

“What?”

“I saw her—I saw her coming out of the water. She was—you were blue, weren’t you—look!”

He pointed to her exposed foot. It was a soft blue—and the color seemed to have been creeping up her leg.

Bridget remained bemused. But the girl was almost trembling—whether from excitement or cold, Ellis wasn’t sure.

“Sea skin.” She stared at her foot, eyes glittering happily. “It’s not too late. Oh, let me back in!” Suddenly she was trying to scramble over the side again.

“Stop!” Ellis locked his arms around her. “You’ll get hypothermia!”

Bridget blinked, nonplussed. “Why didn’t you mention that you’d seen a mermaid?”

“I didn’t really know if I had.” He shrugged. The girl continued to struggle in his grip. “Could have been a jellyfish.”

“Right. Well. That’s… Let’s get back to shore, shall we?”

Experience taught Azrela a few things.

It taught her that, initial repulsion aside, there was a differece in the way Zane helped her up and the way Ellis helped her out of the water. His grip on her arms wasn’t dominating, and it didn’t linger. It was forceful because he was determined to get her out of danger. She could feel the difference now—another good sign that she was gaining the sea’s acceptance again.

Experience also taught her that experience doesn’t mean a whole lot if you encounter something entirely new.

And that’s what this feeling seemed to be, when she and Ellis were out on the ocean together, and she discovered the beauty and power where they were, where the sky met the ocean, where the wind ruffled the waves the way he ruffled her hair—which was turning blue on the ends.

Ellis, the ocean, and the wind were all one to her in moments like this—an endless comfort, a reminder that there was a chance that maybe the surface wasn’t the cold place she thought it was.