courtyard and to the unruly thicket of rosebushes that concealed loose bricks. She got her hair snagged up in thorns but managed to escape Rothgutt’s unnoticed by the young nun who manned, up in the turret, night security with an archer’s bow and a narcotizing-tipped arrow.
About a mile away, in an open pasture overrun with musk thistle and cocklebur, stood a tree perfect for lynchings — one thick branch extended, leafless and sturdy, at a height that allowed for the knots of a noose, and yet prevented anyone who dangled there from gaining purchase with their toes tippied. At the base of the tree were the bones of many accused and convicted men and women, but also the bones of the mermaid who’d hung herself there only months ago. Her body had decayed quickly, plucked apart by the carrion that found her exotic flesh a delicacy. Whenever Desiree pricked the tip of her finger on the sharp end of a rib bone of the mermaid’s skeleton, and a drop of blood bubbled up, the mermaid’s ghost would appear among the many nooses that still lined the branch.
“Speak to me,” Desiree said as the mermaid appeared again, swinging and mute — a misty apparition. Desiree wrapped her arms around the tree, its black bark tearing at the rotted lace of her dress. She pressed her cheek against it. She looked closely at the ghost and noticed, for the first time, that the mermaid’s lips moved and trembled with words.
Desiree climbed the tree and eased out onto the branch, dangling down from it, walking herself over with her hands until she was next to the mermaid. In life, the mermaid’s tongue had been cut out, but in death she could speak in a hush that sounded like the froth of a breaking wave. It was while hanging there, in her stolen wedding gown, next to the ghost, that Desiree learned the story, the truth of what had happened between the mermaid and Axel, the boy Desiree was to marry at midnight.
Much of the story Desiree already knew, having been there the night Axel found the mermaid, a girl he called Z, shortened from Zel, which he’d shortened from Rapunzel, which he’d called her first because of the wavy hair that rippled long down her back, down past the bottom of her fin.
It had been the first night of the Mermaid Parade at Mudpuddle Beach, the resort town that jingled and rang with the rickety calliopes of slug-machine parlors and where kids could buy every flavor of the razor-blade candy that was illegal in forty-six states, and where peep-show tattooed ladies unlaced their bikinis behind glass and subjected themselves to electrical shocks, and where wobble-legged rickshaws with ratty parasols clackety-clacked across the slats of the boardwalk — all the festive alliteration immortalized in that number-one hit song that Gideon Godley sang about working as a gigolo in a sailor suit in the dime-a-dance hall of the dilapidated but historic Hotel Mudpuddle (in a room of which Gideon Godley would, ironically or not, eventually croak, overdosed on angel’s tit, the deadliest of trendy drug concoctions).
Many mermaids washed up each year on the shore of Mudpuddle Beach, the ocean air too thick for most of them to breathe, slowly choking them as if they were swallowing, inch by inch, a magician’s endless rope of handkerchiefs. It would feel, at first, like just a gentle catch at the back of their throats, one they’d barely notice, as they were often transfixed by the overstimulation — strings of Christmas lights strung along the eaves of the oxygen dens, and the racket of the bands that trumpeted old favorites off-key in the gardens where people got drunk on prohibited liquors and danced dirty all night. But often before they were even spotted by a fisherman or a yacht party, before they’d even reached the sand castles abandoned on the beach, they’d breathe their last, strangled by the very air that brought the elderly and infirm to the beach for its clean, restorative properties.
And the most beautiful of the dead mermaids were collected and prepared for the Mermaid Parade. The city museum’s art restorer, in her laboratory, would delicately bleed the mermaids, hanging them from their fins above a porcelain basin. After, in a claw-foot tub, she’d pump into their collapsing veins a solution of wax and plastic. Art students would then bend the stiffening mermaids into provocative poses, manipulating the girls’ faces into expressions of rapture, and they’d pinken the trout-colored skin with a dye concocted from boiled sugar beets, syringed just beneath the flesh. The mermaids were ultimately floated in formaldehyde, in fishbowls the size of paddy wagons, which were then positioned atop carts bedecked with roses and wreaths.
The girls of Rothgutt’s were allowed to attend the Mermaid Parade on condition they peddle the bicycles that pulled the fishbowls along Seaweed Boulevard, their legs strapped together in fins of muslin and green sequins, their cheeks glittered, their false eyelashes as leggy as spiders. They wore coconut-shell bras and a magnetic bracelet that, when activated by the invisible security fence electrified around the beach, would shoot a medicated spike into the vein, temporarily paralyzing the attempted-escapee for forty-five days.
Desiree’s mermaid had red hair and green eyes and, as with all the other mermaids, she’d been denied any article of clothing. The art students had bent her fingers around a plum, one tiny bite bitten through the plum’s black skin. They’d made her look peaceful, at least, having rolled her eyes just slightly heavenward and having parted her lips as if she’d just pulled away from a kiss. Not all the dead mermaids had been so lucky — Miranda’s, for example, had been fashioned into death throes, mid-thrash and wide-eyed, as if paused in the act of drowning.
Desiree breathed against the glass of the bowl then wiped away the fog with the lace shawl she wore across her naked shoulders, polishing away smears on the glass. She named her mermaid after herself.
A whistle blasted with a frenetic tweeting, the parade captains marching about, smacking the girls with their batons, calling for order. Desiree stabbed at Miranda’s fin with a shiv of broken windowpane, tearing at the costume, allowing Miranda’s legs release for better peddling. She did the same for the other girls and, their fins trailing them like the trains of gowns, they all took their places on the bicycles and set off for the beach, jostling the mermaids in their formaldehyde swim. Seaweed Boulevard was lined with spectators, including the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, a faction of nuns in aquamarine habits that protested the Mermaid Parade each year. The nuns pelted the girls of Rothgutt’s with a bumper crop of tomatoes they allowed to rot on the vine every late summer for this very purpose.
Not every mermaid that ever entered the atmosphere perished. One became a famous bawdy-house chanteuse, carried out onstage in a cardboard half-shell by four muscular bald men in handlebar mustaches and tight, striped swimsuits. Another became an intellectual, palled around with expatriates, and wrote, well into her eighties, feminist utopian novels. But most mermaid survivors were relegated to the carnival circuit or, worse yet, prostitution, though it was illegal to have sex with a mermaid, even without the exchange of cash; legislators considered it bestiality.
And still other mermaids were taken in by the Sisterhood of Poseidon’s Daughters, a convent so radical it was considered by some a cult. It never failed that at every Mermaid Parade at least one nun would come under arrest for disrupting the procession in some manner — taking a hatchet to a fishbowl, for example, or sticking a broomstick into the spokes of one of the Rothgutt’s girls’ bicycle tires. Some of the mermaids the nuns rescued took the vows themselves, and could often become the most combative among them. One mermaid nun once famously set fire to herself.
As Desiree peddled down the parade path, she eyeballed the crowd for her true love, Axel, for the peppermint-striped jacket and knee breeches of his school uniform, but her fake lashes were nearly too heavy for her lids to lift. Axel attended the Starkwhip Academy of Breathtakingly Exceptional Young Men, the verdant campus of which, with its miles of sports fields and agrarian experiments, its ivy-overrun cathedrals, and its lecture halls of imported stone, was just on the other side of the wall from Rothgutt’s, but might as well have been across the ocean. Desiree had met Axel on the beach following the Mermaid Parade of the summer before, collecting shells as the boys of Starkwhip Academy skinny-dipped and frolicked under the overprotective eyes of the professors shading themselves with umbrellas and pretending to read relevant texts.
The boys’ parents paid such exorbitant tuition to keep their sons away from girls that the boys often fell in love with each other. When Desiree first saw Axel that one summer, he had been napping naked in the scrawny arms of a schoolmate, the boys’ skin burning red as if marked by God as devilish. Desiree, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence that separated the public beach from the private had whistled into her cupped fists to trill out a melodic birdcall. Immodestly he’d stepped to the fence still naked, running his fingers through his sweaty blond locks, and had accepted Desiree’s offer of a puff on her cigarette of dried corn silk. They had compared scars then, Desiree dropping the strap of her bikini to show the burn of a janitor’s cigar. She’d lowered her bikini bottom a fraction of an inch to show him the clawing from a feral tom, and she’d lifted her chin and stretched her neck to show the nick from the kitchen knife when Cookie, the Rothgutt dietitian, punished her for spilling the milk. She’d kept the rest of her scars hidden from him, wanting to save some for her wedding night. Axel had had only two scars: one on his penis from his circumcision by his nervous doctor (his father), and one on his ankle from the
