Mermaids | quintessence of dust
Lucy took her little daughter on a walk along a track by the sea, dotted with pines curved and battered by the seaward wind.
Lucy was born without feet.But that fact hardly affected her friendship with Owen, the fisherman’s boy. They took walks together along that great breach just at the end of the track, where the tall pines were bend from the seaward wind. A set of wheel-tracks were always easy to find along another line of footprints.
She yearned for fins. From what Owen described, Lucy felt as if she belonged to the ocean; with the undertows and the riptides and the great clamour of waves dragged out against sand. She thought of the merfolk Owen’s father sometimes talked about, with their flowing hair and sweeping tails, singing under the moon.
Owen liked Lucy. She liked him too. But the waves came year by year and took off chunks of the cliffside. And his mind crumbled beneath his studies, the Hegel, the Goethe, the Virgil. Then one day, he left her for the big city. Lucy woke find a little trinket on her windowsill — a carved wooden mermaid tied with a red ribbon. Lucy wept and wept; a few hundred miles away on a rickety bus, Owen finally closed his weary eyes.
They drifted apart like driftwood in a wind, bound for seperate shores. But all parted currents eventually merge. The oldest pine along the shore stumbled in a storm, and fell. She heard the crash even from her room. She resumed her knitting. Thunder rumbled, Owen looked out of his Paris window: a little ferry glided lazily across the Seine, mallard-ducks made a ruckus in the shadow of the reeds. He turned his gaze back to his papers. Lucy buried her mother, and then her husband. Owen’s hands grew shaky, his eyes grew blurred.
One day by chance, he took a bus away from the bustle of the urbs. He didn’t know where the bus took him, but he was too tired to care. Yes, he’ll finally settle down somewhere. Yes, somewhere with pines and a beach. He yawned. He slipped the driver a tip. Owen shuffled off the bus, and looked out to the ocean cliff.
Lucy took her little daughter on a walk along a track by the sea, dotted with pines curved and battered by the seaward wind. Soon, the mother and daughter saw a figure. It was a smudge, then a pine, then an old, old man almost as bent as a pine.
There they stood for a bit, the three strangers, until the wind blew his hat off his head. Carol ran to the hat and handed it back to its owner. The strange man ran his hair across the familiar leather — but there was something else.
Coarse grains of wood, and a faded ribbon.
Lucy smiled a little. Owen laughed. He reached out to return it. She would take it in her hands, but it was of no use anymore. Lucy threw the carving out and into the waves far below.
A shudder, then a roar — a shoal of mermaids reared out from the waves, incandescent and gleaming, tousled glimmering hair— all of them fighting for that wooden trinket.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
- T. S. Eliot, Prufrock
