“Hey. I brought you this.”

The picture is wrinkled, but the stars are still clearly visible in it—three constellations, labeled in tiny, white letters: Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Andromeda. I press it up against the aquarium glass, smoothing it out so that she can see the whole picture, unbroken—almost as if it’s real, a little window to the Milky Way. The minute I let go, it wrinkles up again, drifting to the floor between the railing and the side of the tank. I peer down—it has landed so that, if she lay on her stomach, she could see the stars pressed up to the glass.

“Whatever. You can keep it,” I say.

She catches my eyes, and presses her hand against the glass like it could melt through. Her fingertips are candle-wax, luminous and faintly violet, webbed across with skin. I don’t understand what she’s trying to say, but I move to match my palm to hers. My hand curls and hesitates before resting on the surface. I do not press, as if I’m afraid the glass might break. Of course, these aquariums hold up to two hundred tons of water pressure on a daily basis, and the mermaid’s tank is particularly reinforced—I wouldn’t be able to crack it if I tried. But maybe the reason I’m hesitating is because I’m scared that I might. Try to break it, I mean. As if maybe I could.

But I wouldn’t, of course. I wouldn’t risk her like that. There is a plaque on the wall that details how very delicate she is: how easily her bones could snap, how oil sticks to and stains her, and how she looks like she’s always swimming under ultraviolet light—not by an accident of pigment, but because her skin is so fly-wing fragile that the blue of her veins shows through it. It is a map to her weak hinges, a chart detailing how very possible it is to unravel her. She wouldn’t survive five minutes out of water. But sometimes, even knowing that—even knowing that I know better—

I imagine the great thunderbolt crack of the glass. I imagine the jagged shards buckling, the water in a shuddering rush; her tail, limp on the soggy crimson carpet, her eyes blinking in the pale light. I imagine that she doesn’t choke on the air, that her tail isn’t shredded as her scales scrape off, that she doesn’t mind it, the way the air slips and clings to her skin.

In my best daydreams, I pretend that I am strong enough to crack the glass, that the flood of aquarium-water could carry her right out to the clean sea, and a beach where I could go visit her on weekends. In my best daydreams, we grow old that way—I spend my Saturdays talking to her, asking questions, and reading her answers in the tilt of her shoulders and curl of her tail as she peers up from the water. Sometimes she gives me shells in those dreams—great, rococo things, with curling spines and skeletal patterns—or she presses a piece of water-softened sea-glass into my palm, and we talk in this way, her through objects and me through sound.

But those are just daydreams, at the end of it all.

What would actually happen is this: her delicate gills would clog with pollutants in her first sluggish gasp of breath, and she would choke on dust and particulates long before a rescue crew could even begin to think about arriving. I try to stop imagining it there, but my brain continues without me, following the scene to its inevitable conclusion, the choking and the coughing and the pale, bloated face of her. Before I know what’s happening, my eyes have been tear-blurred and my face is flushed with the sadness of something that hasn’t even happened. I keep my hand gentle on the glass, brush the shadow of hers, feather-light, and hope she understands it isn’t because I don’t care.

(Sometimes, I catch her staring at the painted fish on the back of her tank, tracing them with her hands, looking lost and confused and a little bit frustrated. She has scratched away the paint around several of them, leaving their painted fins intact, as if she’s trying to excavate them from the wall. As if they’re trapped, too, and she’s trying to scoop them from the cement and set them free, but it doesn’t matter what she does. They don’t move. They just sit there.

They keep staring.)

Of course, I’m never going to be able to convince the aquarium to let her go; after the amount of revenue she drew in last year alone, I’m not sure anyone could. They have so many excuses:

“Mermaids,” they say, “are un-evolved creatures. They are an ancient link in our evolutionary chain, and as such, they are vestiges of a bygone time. They don’t build, they don’t make tools, they show no capacity for reason or understanding, and they don’t even seem to have a concept of language.” As if that’s that—if they don’t have a language, after all, they’re hardly real, are they? They can’t be intelligent, not if they don’t do things the way we do.

I mean, it’s not like I don’t wish I could talk to her, sometimes. It would be easier than talking at her. That’s what I do, really. I come to the aquarium, and I talk at the mermaid. I’m sure most of the security guards have long-since dismissed me as a harmless nutcase, as I sit there, breath fogging on the glass, whispering about the woman who made fun of me at work, or about how the aquariums must look at night, like separate universes boiling blue and cold through the cracks in our own. Sometimes I read poetry, or mutter through a chapter of a book, or whisper her an article about the sea.

I don’t even know if she listens, or if she just likes having a recognizable face sitting here day after day, if she’s as fascinated by me as I am by her. If she even understands why I care, or that I care, or what caring is. It’s hard to be friends with someone who may have no concept of friendship.

Sometimes that’s what gets me the most—the horrible vagueness of it all. Certainly, she likes my corner of the tank better than the other ones, but it could be mere coincidence. Certainly, her eyes follow me. (She stares like chemicals burn.) But that could be a vacant stare, for all I know, perhaps she always looks like that. Sometimes I read way too much into these things. In any case, I lean in, pressing my forehead against the glass, too, as if somehow that could let me connect to what she’s thinking, like I could feel some connection if only I listened hard enough. As if somehow I could tell her, “I’m on your side.”

“Hey,” I whisper.

“Ma’am.” I look up. It’s Jared—one of the more polite security guards.

“Please don’t touch the glass,” he says.

“Right,” I say. “Sorry.” I take my hand away, slowly. The mermaid doesn’t. She keeps reaching, her one palm pressed like a bruise to the side of the tank. Her brow is faintly creased, with worry or annoyance or maybe with some mermaid-emotion I can’t name or fathom—and I feel like maybe she understands. Her tail weaves slight- ly above her, ragged silk in a manufactured current, keeping her in place. If she presses any harder, I will see the bones of her hand through her skin.

It isn’t the first time she’s done this. God knows it won’t be the last. I just . . .

I wish I knew what she was trying to say. She frowns, and concentrates, and starts moving her fingers deliberately, tilting her nails inward so they scrape against the glass. The sound is muted, but I still hear the faint scriiiiiiiiitch of it. Her hands are hieroglyphs, and stare as I might, I can’t decipher them. Of course, this doesn’t make any sense. Surely, if she has any reason at all, she knows, by now, that the glass is too thick to break through. Surely she sees . . .

And suddenly I feel like an idiot, because it’s not her I’m thinking about, of course it’s not. So I mute my thoughts, because it’s not fair, it really isn’t, to be blaming her for my own inability to stop wishing. I just watch.