sky above the ocean, far in the distance.
“It’s past midnight already,” Miranda said, “but if he truly loves you, he’ll still be waiting.”
“I need a doctor,” Desiree said. Her leg felt like her elbow felt whenever she banged her funny bone, but one hundred times worse.
“Shhhh, there’s no time to talk,” Miranda said, though it was at least a half hour’s walk to the beach. Desiree closed her eyes and longed for sleep so she could dream dreams of Axel, so handsome in those days before he saved the mermaid from drowning.
It must have been only a week or two after Rapunzel’s death that Desiree had found a note from Axel in their crack in the wall, which she had still visited every morning before going to the hives to collect the honey. She would run her fingertips through the break in the brick, hoping to scratch her skin on the edge of paper.
Dear Desiree, Are you still on the other side of this wall? Love, Axel.
Dear Axel, Yes. Love, Desiree.
Axel had returned to Starkwhip Academy, but not as a student. He now worked for the boys he had so adored, and for the professors and the deans. No one recognized him, and certainly no one believed him when he told them he was Axel. He became known only as Nine Fingers due to his missing pinkie, and whenever anything was stolen, he was blamed. You’ve been nine-fingered, the boys would say to one another when even so much as a single tooth of an old plastic comb turned up gone.
Every day he crawled through their crawlspaces and pipes with a hard-wire bristle-brush, dusting their chimneys and ducts — polishing every ventricle of the black lungs of the ancient halls in which the boys studied listlessly. In the basement, he stirred their laundry around with an oar in a kettle of boiling water and lye, and sometimes, when he folded their clothes, he’d put on a boy’s uniform, skivvies and all, and fantasize about the life he’d once led. He’d lie back in a pile of quilts, rubbing his genitals through this other boy’s britches, smoking a damp cigarette that frequently fizzled out from the humidity of the laundry room. He’d press his fingers hard against his tender throat, and he’d swallow, approximating the strangled breaths Rapunzel must have struggled for in her final minutes of life. I’m worse than that pirate, he thought, thinking of her knifed-out tongue. How can I live with myself? He pressed harder on his throat and imagined it being hard enough to choke all life from him, and he pictured Axel dead, and Nine Fingers alive, Nine Fingers the criminal, the villain, and he proposed to Desiree among the clouds of angered bees, her face hidden by a heavy net draping down to her shoes from the broad brim of her hat of black velveteen. The ring was a ruby one he’d stolen the night before from the headmaster’s wife as she’d bathed; she’d safely tucked it away in an antique jewelry box with a pop-up ballerina that didn’t pop up anymore. He’d tried to fix the ballerina by monkeying with a cog, but then he’d heard the sexy rush of water as the headmaster’s wife had stood from her tub squeaky clean. “Don’t let the ring fall from your finger this time,” he told Desiree, either remembering the circumstances wrong, or hoping Desiree had forgotten how he’d fumbled his proposal on the Ferris wheel. She forgave him the little lie, the first of thousands of forgivenesses she could feel waiting to be granted, stuck in her teeth like an ache.
Though Desiree and Miranda arrived at the chapel long past midnight, Axel waited. He sat on the bumper of a rusted Volvo parked in front, beneath the pink of neon lovebirds, his legs crossed, the flood-level trousers of his tux revealing mismatched socks. He’d rented the tux, a dandelion yellow, from the chapel, fake shirt-ruffle and all.
“He mustn’t see me in this chair,” Desiree said, and Miranda rushed ahead, waving her arms, shooing.
“Bad luck!” Miranda yelled. “You can’t see the bride in her wedding dress! Go inside!”
And he did as he was told. He went to the pastor’s office to keep from seeing, and the pastor’s wife helped Desiree into the chapel as Miranda hid the chair in the peony bushes of the parking lot. The pastor’s wife seated Desiree in the front pew. “We usually charge a nickel to rent a bouquet,” the pastor’s wife said, pausing to allow for Desiree to offer a nickel, then she continued with, “but that’ll be my present to you.” She brought Desiree lilacs made of felt, their stems wrapped in an embroidered hankie.
Desiree took a deep breath and closed her eyes when she heard the pastor’s wife begin to play an almost- melodic song on the pump organ. She thought of all the weddings she’d ever devised growing up — she thought of her play-marriage to Ophelia Littlenought in the third grade, her nightgown knotted atop her head and training behind her like an antique veil, her bouquet nothing but morning glories. She and Ophelia had mock-kissed — their hands over their mouths — in a corner of the yard where the gardener had just drowned a toad in a bucket. She remembered how, when a little older, she had talked herself to sleep reciting the vows she would write for the pretty-faced prince who’d been in the news when his mother fell to her death from a balcony — If I ever stopped loving you for even a second, may the devil himself knock me over with a feather. She remembered all the flowers she’d ever considered holding at the altar — all the tall violet glads, the plain-faced daisies, the tiger lilies with their vulgar spots. She’d decided on yellow roses until reading in an old book of manners that yellow roses were symbolic of jealousy.
My groom will not ruin my wedding, she vowed as she sat in the pew of that dollar-a-service chapel, and indeed he didn’t. He was so beautiful in his suit that didn’t fit. His Adam’s apple up-and-downed with his sweet, nervous gulping, wiggling his bow tie that was knotted all wrong to begin with. She thanked God that he let Rapunzel die alone, and then she felt sick with guilt for thinking of Rapunzel at all.
“I do,” he said, and Desiree said it, too, when asked. And tucked into her palm, in her closed fist, was a bone as tiny as one you’d choke on in a restaurant. Within the skeleton of the mermaid, which had broken to pieces beneath the hanging branch of the tree, had been another skeleton, Rapunzel’s little part-boy part-fish, the first- born that never was. Desiree would hold onto this bone, keep it secret, until one terrible day in the future. Whenever she felt her husband might be drifting away for good — when the time came that he was completely lost to her — she would simply hold out this bone so small and white you could barely see it, and she would ruin him and she would bring him back.
A mermaid suicide figures in the plot of a fictional children’s book at the heart of my novel The Coffins of Little Hope. This fictional book, also called The Coffins of Little Hope, tells the tale of two wrongly accused sisters locked up in an all-girl criminal-orphan asylum, where fantastical threat lurks around every sharp corner. (This children’s book series within the novel inspires a slavish fandom and obsession among its readership that begins to reflect the dark and venal impulses of the series’ more despicable characters.) In fleshing out the story of the mermaid, I found myself drawn to the bride in the original Andersen tale — the girl the prince marries instead of the little mermaid. She’s innocent in the tale, yet we feel compelled to cast her as the story’s villain, due to her beauty and perfection, and the fact that she’s marrying the prince and the mermaid is not. I was also moved by Andersen’s portrait of the mermaid’s undersea luxury among lost treasures and its contrast to her mute servility on land. But the bride in my tale gets the prince only after his love for the mermaid has ruined him, leading to broken hearts for everyone.
KATHERINE VAZ. What the Conch Shell Sings When the Body Is Gone
IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO FILL THE ENORMOUS TANK IN THEIR LIVING room. Meredith dragged in the garden hose, and Ray adjusted the stepladder so that he could direct the water over the rim. Their rented Victorian on Divisadero featured cathedral ceilings. The tank was Plexiglas, fifteen feet tall and twelve feet wide, acquired through a phone call to his father’s company, a supplier of containers, whether to circuses, institutes of marine biology, or furniture conglomerates. Men used a gigantic dolly to convey the tank through the back garden and past the open French doors.
Meredith and Ray were water people. In their years together, they’d shared a fascination with anything aquatic. But they no longer went swimming, as they used to; they did not visit the ocean often, though it was a short drive away. She was afraid of scuba diving, and they enjoyed the fanciful notion that if they mastered the holding of their breaths, they could go lower than the snorkeling tourists and get to the stunning blue-lipped triggerfish in Hawaii, which they’d talked about visiting. And wouldn’t that be simply heaven.
But now they hardly talked at all.
