Chapter 11 Lir’s Myth
Lir’s Myth
Lir
I look out across her as she sits near the tide pool.
She mindlessly whittles away at a piece of driftwood.
Not to carve anything in particular, but to keep her nervous hands busy as she gazes diligently out across the horizon.
She is like me in that way, always looking out into what is just beyond her grasp.
She speaks to me as if I could be anybody.
As if she has had all these thoughts desperately growing with pressure inside, and now they must escape up through the crags of her heart like a blowhole in obsidian lava tubes.
She whispers out towards the sloshing tide, in a voice so low that I think it would be imperceptible to human men’s ears.
It is a secret that she wishes to bleed into the sound of the ocean.
“I desperately wish—that I could actually exist in the world without lying.”
“I have not heard you tell lies, Andrea.” I respond, even though I don’t think she is exactly speaking to me.
“I’m lying just by being here,” she says harshly.
The words just sharp air between her teeth.
“Lying to everyone, that I’m something that I’m not…
lying to myself that I want to be here in the first place.
What I want—” Her eyes catch the light and fill up with it so fully that even in profile I can see them sparkling with the color of a far off sunset that she is imagining to be traveling towards.
“I want to live, and not just be seen as a woman.” She clears her throat.
“I mean I am a woman, but—not seen just as a body who happens to have a head, that unfortunately has a brain. I want to be seen, not just as happenstance leftovers from the tragedy of a man dying. I want to be seen as who I am…”
Her voice carries in the same rhythm as her tiny pocket knife dragging across the wood.
Its sad cadence curls around us just like the slivers of wood shavings that fly into the air, another part of her being chipped away into the wind, and into the sea.
“I want to sail away. I want to board a ship and travel the world.” She looks at me, her hands still moving dangerously on their own.
“But as me, not just as some stowaway, but as wholly myself.” She turns back towards the ocean, exhaling a long while as she finishes her soliloquy.
The clouds move overhead in long languorous spiraling currents.
They move so slowly that it is impossible to follow them all the way to the horizon.
I watch their reflection in the tiny pools that are sprinkled all around us, the dried salt crystalline structures spiraling in the same infinite patterns as the trails in the sky.
I realize after we sit silently for a long time that I have never sat this still—ever before in my life, and I can feel, how time must move for her. How she must feel trapped within it.
My attention returns to Andrea, and after observing her carefully, I come to the conclusion that I do not see the pieces she has divided herself apart into. I see one body of water, of mostly water, as powerful as an ocean in her own right. That is what I see.
For a moment, I wonder if all humans are actually as fascinating as her. I’ve only really interacted with their men out on the sea, but perhaps their women are overall much better company. Would just any one of them hold my attention as she does now?
But, I shake my head. No, none other than her would come to live as far out remotely in my territory as her, and even if they did—none, not made of marble or flesh that I have previously encountered, have captivated me so.
She has immediately accepted me as real, not a superstitious chimera of man and fish. No, she has shone her beam of light out and seen me. I had not realized the importance of being accurately witnessed, until I met her. To her I want not to be a legend, I want to be simply Lir.
I look out at the same ocean she is lost in the motion of. Is returning to it all that I now wish for?
Trying to not look judgmental, I watch as her hands carve the worst shiv I’ve ever seen. Yet, I still find it beautiful. I still find it all beautiful.
Trying to get her attention, I run my fingers down the back of her coat, the weight of the waxed fabric giving way under my light graze.
The more time I spend with her, I realize it is not her that is odd, but everything around her.
I feel I could know her just by looking at her shadow or by the shape of her wet handprint on the rocks.
It is all the man-made things she has been surrounded with, including all her stiff clothing and all the cracked bricks of the lighthouse, which moves in a strange vibrating slow-motion when she walks towards me across the rocks.
They are the mirage I do not understand.
As she turns towards me now and exhales into my touch, I know that she is real, and that the human world which surrounds her is the strange myth.
“Lir, you’re doing it again.” I jolt awake from the dream I lost myself in, the one that so easily lulls me closer towards her. “You’re somewhere else, aren’t you?” She whispers.
“No, I’m right here. For once, I swear.” I can see our reflections in each other’s eyes, repeating into infinity as I focus on her.
“I’m not looking forward, into the leagues in front of me—that can go off so far into the distance of the water that I can see the curvature of the earth.
Just for once, I am looking at what is directly in front of me. ”
She tilts her head and the very edge of her lips turns upwards. “What you see must be truly fascinating then, if it is to be interesting to a mermaid.”
I clear my throat and Andrea crinkles her eyebrows as she nods, silently correcting herself.
My nail drags a little on that textured cloth shielding the lowest part of her back from my touch, “You’re lucky, Andrea.”
“Me? Lucky?” She scoffs.
“If I were human…and found you fascinating. Well, in my experience—I would have skinned, jarred or pinned you up.”
It grows silent between us as she stops breathing when I move close enough that she is all that fills my vision besides a halo of black rock in the background of her head. “You’re lucky, that I just want to stare at you. That I just want to—”
She crawls backwards a little bit, like a crab and I realize my mistake, “Oh, no. I’m sorry, I didn’t want to frighten you—” Now, I can see though how I must seem to her.
I’m halfway out of the water over her, a looming shadow on the land.
A terrifying creature which slides and crawls on its belly.
I recoil away—but then she reaches for me still.
As she wraps a striation of my hair around her fingers, she pulls me in closer, the smallest leash that she controls me so easily with, “How is it that you seem to know so much about humans, but I know so little about you?”
“I have been in this sea a long time, and in those many rotations around the sun have been hunted by all sorts of humans over and over. To not know you, to not understand you in any which way I can, would be idiotic.”
“Hm—” She frowns, before her expression softens slowly into a smile.
A smile that gives way to every mischievous thought she is having as they flash behind her eyes.
“So, I would be an idiot if I didn’t try to get to know you, Lir?
Is that what you’re saying, that I have almost no choice but to sit around talking to you all day?
” Her voice moves smoothly across my face and body, if my tail was the type to, for her I would want to wag it.
“If only—” I lay my cheek into her hand that twirls my hair and I can feel her heartbeat growing rapid through her skin. “You would be so kind as to add it to the list of things you wish for Andrea. Because that would be one that I could grant for you from this tide pool.”