Excerpt of Fish out of Water

 

The house is strangely silent when we walk inside. Of course, the only occupants are now the silent soldiers guiding me up the stairs with all the gentleness as a caretaker might use to tend the corral reef.

Finally, I find myself getting tucked into yet another bed, this one my borrowed one here that I haven’t made much use of.

“Rest up,” James says, placing a bell by my counter. “And if you need anything, ring this and one of us will come running.”

I nod, not sure if I’m tired again after all that walking or too awake after all my previous sleeping as I watch them leave.

The next moment, I have my answer as I find myself startling awake, someone sitting on the foot of my bed.

“Shh, it’s just me,” Brandon says. “I’m just coming to check on you.”

I stare at where he’s settled in. “You seem to be getting fairly comfortable for just a check-up.”

“What, you can sneak into my room, and I can’t sneak into yours?”

Giving him a weak smile, I lie more heavily on my pillow. “There’s so much I wish I could tell you.”

“Then why don’t you?”

“Because I… can’t.”

“Can’t?” He grunts. “More like won’t.”

Suddenly, I find I’m not exhausted anymore. What I need is to be free. Away from him, away from land, and away from this curse.

I need the sea. Or, at the very least, water.

“I’m going to bathe,” I tell him before stumbling into the room they reserved for their time with the water and slam the divider- door- between him and me.

A moment later, my borrowed clothes are on the floor and I’m sitting down in the tub that becomes a miniature sea, if the seawater lacked salt, and let the water pour onto me.

As the tub fills, I feel my fins begin to return to me, twisting my new legs together; binding them.

Once the initial pain is gone, I lean back and let the tension leave my body as I enjoy being myself again, even if it is in this restraining pool of water. But it’s something.

Not something fitting for the Queen of Merfolk, though. Calypso has driven me to this state of having to enjoy only a fraction of what I once knew.

Time passes before I know it, and I’m startled back to my current reality by a pounding on the door.

“Astrid?” Brandon calls from the other side. “Are you all right in there?”

“I’m fine.” The water has gone cold, and I awkwardly move around my fin to take out the plug so the water can escape.

Reaching over the tub, I pluck up the cloth humans use to dry themselves of water, since it must always know its place in their realm.

But I must have left the cloth a little further out than I expected, because I keep reaching with no contact.

Then, the moment my fingers brush that cloth, I find myself falling forward, my skin and scales hitting cold linoleum. “Oh!”

“Astrid? Are you sure you’re fine?”

“I’ve only fallen-”

That appears to be the wrong thing to say, because then the door bursts open and Brandon rushes in.

I hold the terry cloth up to my neck, covering one part of me before remembering too late that another secret is behind me.

Still, I try. Reaching my hand not clutching the cloth to my chest up, I grab hold of a matching one on the hook and tug it down so that it falls over my backside as my tail begins to revert back.

Brandon stands frozen, and I know I’m too late to erase what he said. “What? How? Who?”

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