The MagicLand Chronicles
The Cesspool Mermaid
She was living in a small shallow pond full of toxic waste. New Fiction from Charles Bastille
She looked at me with a battered, peeling face that expressed such forlornness that the treachery of sadness was crushing my heart.
“I’m not from here,” she said. “I’m just some psycho’s invention.”
She was a mermaid. And when she looked up as she said this, I knew where the psycho lived. What had given birth to her.
Genetically engineered, no doubt. Did she have a soul? Her eyes told me yes.
Whoever created her had to have done it at least a hundred years ago. That was how long it had been since anybody had claimed to have had any contact with the people in the cylindrical moon.
The people who lived there had been silent for at least that long. They had treated Earth as a living experiment, dropping their little DNA projects onto the surface of the planet like little genetic bombs.
And then, suddenly, nothing. It’s not like they had been sending emissaries down or anything. They wanted nothing to do with either magicians or The Gath on this planet. To them, Earth was just a lab. Contact was generally an accident. The diminishment of…
