Dreams Underfoot

Katrina had moved closer to the shore and was holding her arms out to the women. As their shapes moved closer, Amy’s heartbeat drummed into overtime for she realized that they had no legs. They were propelling themselves through the water with scaled fish tails. There was no mistaking the shape of them as the long tail fins broke the surface of the water.

Mermaids, Amy thought, no longer able to breathe. They were mermaids.

It wasn’t possible. How could it be possible?

And what did it make Katrina?

The sight of them blurred. For a moment she was looking through a veil, then it was like looking through a doublepaned window at an angle, images all duplicated and laid over each other.

She blinked hard. She started to lift her hand to rub at her eyes, but she was suddenly so weak it was all she could do to just crouch beside the pole and not tumble over into the weeds.

The women in the river drew closer as Katrina stepped to the very edge of the water. Katrina lifted her hair, then let it drop in a clouding fall. She pointed at the women.

“Cut away and gone,” one of the women said.

“All gone.”

“We gave it to Maraghreen.”

“For you, sister.”

“We traded, gold for silver.”

Amy pressed her face against the pole as the mermaids spoke. Through her dizziness, their voices seemed preternaturally enhanced. They chorused, one beginning where another ended, words molten, belllike, sweet as honey, and so very, very pure.

“She gave us this.”

The foremost of the women in the river reached up out of the water. Something glimmered silver and bright in her hand. A knife. “Pierce his heart.”

“Bathe in his blood.”

“Your legs will grow together once more.”

“You’ll come back to us.”

“Oh, sister.”

Katrina went down on her knees at the water’s edge. She took the knife from the mermaid’s hand and laid it gingerly on her lap. “He doesn’t love you.”

“He will never love you.”

The women all drew close. They reached out of the water, stroking Katrina’s arms and her face with gentling hands.

“You must do it—before the first dawn light follows tomorrow night.”

“Or foam you’ll be.”

“Sister, please.”

“Return to those who love you.”

Katrina bowed her head, making no response. One by one the women dove into the river deeps and were gone. From her hiding place, Amy tried to rise she knew Katrina would be coming back soon, coming back this way, and she didn’t want to be caught—but she couldn’t manage it, even with the help of the pole beside her. Then Katrina stepped away from the river and walked towards her, the knife held gingerly in one hand.

As their gazes met, another wave of dizziness rose in Amy, this one a tsunami, and in its wake she felt the ground tremble underfoot, but it was only herself, tumbling into the dirt and weeds. She closed her eyes and let the darkness take her away.

It was late afternoon when Amy awoke on the sofa in Lucia’s loft. Her surroundings and the wrong angle of the afternoon light left her disoriented and confused, but no longer feeling sick. It must have been one of those 24- hour viruses, she thought as she swung her legs to the floor, then leaned back against the sofa’s cushions.

Lucia looked up from the magazine she was reading at the kitchen table. Laying it down she walked over and joined Amy on the sofa.

“I was tres surprised to find you sleeping here when I got in last night,” she said. “Katrina said you got sick, so she put you to bed on the sofa and slept on the floor herself How’re you feeling now, ma cherie?”

Amy worked through what Lucia had just said. None of it quite jibed with her own muddled memory of the previous evening.

“Okay ... I guess,” she said finally. She looked around the loft. “Where’s Katrina?”

“She borrowed the bus money from me and went to Hartnett’s Point after all. True love wins over all, n’estce pas?”

Amy thought of mermaids swimming in the Kickaha River, of Katrina kneeling by the water, of the silver knife.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

Amy didn’t know what to say. What she’d seen hadn’t made any sense. She’d been sick, dizzy, probably delirious. But it had seemed so real.

Pierce his heart ... bathe in his blood ....

She shook her head. None of it could have happened. There were no such things as mermaids. But what if there were? What if Katrina was carrying that silver knife as she made her way to Matt’s gig?

What if she did just what those ... mermaids had told her ...

You must do it—before thefirst dawn light thatfollows tomorrow night ...

What if

Or foam you’ll be ...

—it was real?

She bent down and looked for her shoes, found them pressed up against one of the coffee table’s crate supports. She put them on and rose from the sofa.

“I’ve got to go,” she told Lucia.

“Go where? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have time to explain. I’ll tell you later.” Lucia followed her across the loft to the door. “Amy, you’re acting really weird.”

“I’m fine,” Amy said. “Honest.”

Though she still didn’t feel quite normal. She was weak and didn’t want to look in a mirror for fear of seeing the white ghost of her own face looking back at her. But she didn’t feel that she had any choice. If what she’d seen last night had been real ...

Lucia shook her head uncertainly. “Are you sure you’re—” Amy paused long enough to give her friend a quick peck on the cheek, then she was out the door.

Borrowing a car was easy. Her brother Pete had two and was used to her sudden requests for transportational needs, relieved that he wasn’t required to provide a chauffeur service along with it. She was on the road by seven, tooling west along the old lakeside highway in a gasguzzling Chev, stopping for a meal at a truck stop that marked the halfway point and arriving at Harnett’s Point just as Matt would be starting his first set.

She pulled in beside his VW van—a positive antique by now, she liked to tease him—and parked.

The building that housed Murphy’s Bar where Matt had his gig was a ramshackle affair, log walls here in back, plaster on cement walls in front. The bar sat on the edge of the point from which the village got its name, with a long pier out behind the building, running into the lake. The water around the pier was thick with moored boats.

She went around front to where the neon sign spelling the name of the bar crackled and spat an orange glow and stepped inside to the familiar sound of Matt singing Leon Rosselson’s “World Turned Upside Down.” The audience, surprisingly enough for a backwoods establishment such as this, was actually paying attention to the music. Amy thought that only a third of them were probably even aware of the socialist message the song espoused.

The patrons were evenly divided between the backto-theearth hippies who tended organic farms west of the village, all jeans and unbleached cotton, long hair and flowerprint dresses; the locals who’d grown up in the area