The Little Mermaid
“Nanny, how long will I live?”
“Three hundred years.”
“How about three hundred years and one day?”
“No, my dear.”
“Two hundred years, three hundred and sixty-four days?”
“No, my pet.”
“But why –“
“Hush now, my sweet.”
The old woman looked at her charge and felt that cloudy confusion that often accompanied the King’s youngest daughter. This young thing was not like the other six princesses. Her face was different. Often, her mouth would turn up at the corners and her eyes would shine, glisten, like she knew a secret. It was haunting. Something about it turned her blood to ice, just for an instant.
“Nanny, how old am I?”
“You’re twelve.”
“How old are you?”
“Two hundred and sixty.”
“So you will die soon.”
“Yes, I will.”
The little mermaid’s expression darkened a fraction. It was her face that often disturbed the other folk. It would change, and change suddenly. It would twist and contort. It would evoke the shadow of a thing that the merfolk forgot they knew. It hurt them. And strangely, the little mermaid understood this and often would regulate her expression, and keep her mouth pursed and her eyes blank and her brow straight. She didn’t like the way the others looked at her.
“Nanny, why do we live so long and human beings so short?”
“Because of the Great Condition.”
“What is the Great Condition?”
“It is the disease that shortens human lives.”
“But what is it called?”
“It’s called heartbreak.”
A silence like a chasm lay between them.
“What’s heartbreak?” asked the mermaid, a little afraid.
“I don’t know,” replied her nanny.
After a time, the little mermaid grew bored and swam away. Her fat little tail stung in the salt water, and she didn’t like the way her hair always fell in her eyes. Clotted brown blood congealed along her silver fins, for she had had an accident a few days earlier. She just wasn’t as agile as her sisters. The currents kept on surprising her, ramming her into the seedy coral that formed the palace. But it was not a complete loss. Her broken scales had been carefully scraped off the walls and sold for one year’s supply of food. Her father had even thanked her. Then he’d made a comment that she alone had kept the royal family in luxury for the past twelve years. She didn’t understand. It made her feel deflated.
She was itching again. When she was alone, she often scratched at her gills with her fingernails, leaving her neck red and pulsating. Her nanny would often chide her for it, reminding her that it was not beautiful. However, the little mermaid often dreamed that they did not belong there. She was tired of beauty. She didn’t know why it exhausted her so much. Everywhere she looked, the world glittered and shone. There were lights all over the place. Even when she slept, lights flickered under her eyelids. She longed for darkness and drabness.
The distinct awareness that she was somehow less valuable than her sisters often hovered in the back of her mind. Their reflections in the looking-glass were different too. The little mermaid was too young yet to realise why, but she knew that she was not as pretty as they. They were radiant and cold, with skin so white you could see the black veins underneath. Every cell on their bodies glimmered in the lights, but their irises never fluctuated. Their posture was perfect, their bodies held erect always, their silver tails coiling against the current like Chinese serpents. Their hair was never in their eyes, and they never scraped their tails against coral. They were so beautiful that they parted crowds of common folk, and ventured nowhere without their guardians, who prevented the folk from reaching out to pluck a single strand of royal hair. It was said one strand could buy housing for the gypsy folk, who travelled in groups all over the ocean, causing strife and chaos.
She’d seen a gypsy once. He was lurking inside the palace gates, and she was watching from a window. She had just awoken from a nightmare and imagined she were still inside of it – for he was a sight unlike anything she had ever seen. His back was broken. His cancerous tail alone bore his slight weight, so cracked and dry it appeared, with many great growths all over. His hands were mere stumps, fingers long sawn off, the skin around the knuckles corroding with barnacles. His face was alarming – his head shorn with one lashless eye peering at her. It wasn’t long before the guardians came upon him and slit his throat. The blood drifted away from his lifeless body, thick like tar. She had remained in her chamber the next day, because she could not stop shuddering.
She was so disturbed that she summoned all her courage to encroach her sisters about it. They, in recent years, had taken a disliking to her questions and often did not answer them at all. They never explained why. They often looked at her with their great, empty eyes with something that could have been astonishment, if merfolk were capable of astonishment, that is.
“He wanted to kill you, of course,” said one sister.
“But why?”
The sisters looked at each other, examining each other, as if they answer lay between them. “Because you are beautiful.”
“You are so beautiful that your body could buy a whole kingdom. But they are ugly. They are so ugly that they are poor. They have nothing to eat. Not like us. We are so beautiful that we eat all day. We are so beautiful that one of our scales is worth one hundred million of theirs.”
“But they wanted to kill me. That’s wrong!” the little mermaid passionately exclaimed.
The sisters were confounded. “Wrong? Why is this wrong? He was hungry and had to eat. To eat, he had to kill you. This is not wrong, it is right.”
“I am so beautiful I could buy the whole world!” proclaimed the eldest princess, who did not notice how distraught the youngest sister had become.
Thus the little mermaid learned her world’s greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts. And she also remembered that even though her beauty could buy a kingdom, her sister’s could buy the whole world.
Today was a special day and even the currents were electric. It was the third princesses’ birthday and she was undertaking preparations to rise to the surface for the first time. It was tradition that the royal children behold the human world on their most momentous birthday. The sacred rite of passage must be endured alone, without protection. Thereafter, the mermaids could return to the surface as they pleased.
The common merfolk came and went from the water’s surface without limits. Some of the poorer children accompanied their mothers, riding on their backs, gleaning shrimp from amongst the froth. Idle folk frolicked in the waves, spying on sailors and mocking them. The unlucky ones were captured, some living short lives at the mercy of an oddities collector, travelling the land in tanks with such polluted water that they would quickly drown. Still others were mercilessly butchered and sold at high prices as delicacies to the rich, who questioned the fabled origins of the meat, but could not deny its sumptuous flavour.
The third princess need not have been apprehensive about the coming evening, for a unique and highly expensive spell had been purchased to fortify her. The Sea King himself had forged an alliance with the Finfolk, a subdued and artful race of merpeople that dwelt in the red caves close to the gorge. Currency and beauty they had not, and yet every part of their bodies remained intact, due to the old magic that was rumoured to dwell under the gorge. The potion had been brewed to perfection, and contained ingredients so horrible that they cannot be mentioned here. However, the Sea King himself asked no questions, and the princess swallowed it without second thought.