Chapter 16 Lir’s Tide Pool
Lir’s Tide Pool
Lir
The crepuscular creature emerges from her tower, her eyes blinking against the diffused sunlight.
I follow her steps as much as I can from the pool, but she ignores us other than setting down a chipped mug of earl gray tea.
She does this all while not even looking at me, not even surprised a merman is in her wake.
I’ve become ingrained in her nonsensical routine.
The handle of the mug doesn’t quite fit my hands the way it fits her’s, but I hold it carefully albeit awkwardly.
Its glaze is cracked from the first time she brought it to me and I fumbled it from the heat against my webbing.
I don’t think she’s forgiven me, she said at least we can tell whose mug is who’s though.
There’s something about having my own dedicated item in her collection that makes it precious. Even with the chip.
A small laugh rises in my chest that I manage to hold in. The first time she brought some of this “tea” to me, I asked her wholeheartedly if it was poisoned. She in response asked me, “What the hell am I supposed to do with three-hundred pounds of dead poisoned fish!”
Ha! All she thinks about is her stomach. I watch her move towards me, how the curls of her hair fall across her tired face, over her pouting lips. Now I think, that I would actually like to know what she would like to do with a few hundred pounds of alive merman.
She continues looking around across the rocks.
Investigating quietly the new day which started hours ago.
She often calls it night even though it’s clearly been solaris, and her ‘day’ at work even though the moon is high in the sky.
I thought I knew human tongue well enough, but she never ceases to confuse me.
I rest back towards the rock closing my eyes, ignoring her rummaging, but as soon as my lids are comfortably shut her grating voice wakes me again.
Hoarse and out of tune but adorable she calls out to me, “Hey Lir, what’s this thing? ”
Like a bloodthirsty harpooneer, she probes a washed up marine oddity with a stick. A common occurrence it seems with her tool of choice. I’m lucky she doesn’t poke at me with a twig.
“That’s a jellyfish Andrea. It’s not a fish though, but just as delicious! Eat it up!” She looks at me disgusted. “It’s a delicacy!” I mime to her the slurping motion that I would do to consume it, but it does not change her pressed brow and down turned dropped jaw.
“You’re like a swimming garbage can!”
Hmph. I don't think that’s the sort of term of endearment I was hoping for.
Truthfully, I don’t know how I want her to treat me.
Guest or prisoner, siren or sailor. None seem to quite cover this familiarity growing between us—though it sometimes skirts along the coastline of animosity.
She often refuses my advice when it comes to cooking.
When she eats fish, it’s practically charred.
And don’t get me started on those crackers that I can’t believe she tolerates when she’s surrounded with delicious food.
I’m able to do some foraging in this tide pool, but I wish I could bring her a halibut, a tuna, or even a giant squid.
The largest fish in these tide pools are only sculpin, that are no larger than my palm.
They are almost only good for flossing your teeth on their spines.
I want to feed her, to spoil her—for some reason. Some godforsaken reason if she’d only let me—if I only could.
She’s kneeled down still messing with the jellyfish. “It’s sad it died, it’s so pretty.” She looks up at me, finally, “Isn’t it, Lir?”
I can’t even focus on what she’s saying.
There is always something in the way her lips say my name that pauses my brain of every thought I am trying to hold, instead redirecting all my impulses to the shape of her mouth.
She holds my gaze and listens to my every word even though I’m sure I am answering her with complete nonsense, but she nods approvingly all the same.
A little smile crests in the corners of her pink lips and whatever pleasing gibberish I’m spouting I thank the stars for.
The milky violet jellyfish lies wedged between two of the rocky protrusions.
Small pieces are torn from its gelatinous flesh which have already returned back to the sea with the outgoing tide.
Just like when I found Andrea pushed against the rocks, pinned so easily by that horrible barrel—it makes my stomach rumble with uneasiness.
Humans are so—and specifically her, she is so damn fragile.
I shouldn’t be one to complain since I’m the one who is stuck here after getting too close to the cliffside, but after observing her—and despite her muscular frame, I see within her strength, a human frailness.
It burns a hole in me, a desperate unknown feeling.
To steal her away, to protect her at all costs despite being stuck down here in this puddle.
The longer I look at her, the more sure I am that before coming here I had dreamt of her face, the curl of her hair, the deep brown of her eyes.
Along with the red that covers her lips, the tips of her cold fingers, as well as the peak of her breast through her sheer linen shirts.
A tone of warm pink which is normally absorbed away in the blue depths of the ocean, its wavelength had never met my cornea until she filled it.
I’m sure I dreamt of her laugh and her smile through the little beams of sunlight which dapple across this rock. All of it.
I came here as an answer to a call of a far off cry, but I have only been able to met with my own questions. A word without a name, that I have never had before. I stroke Little Bird’s head, dusting away little dew drops that drip over her waxy plumage.
“This human that rescued us is really something, isn’t she Little Bird?” I whisper to the little feathery puff ball, “Hm? What do you think of her?”
“Peep!”
Andrea looks up and walks over towards us.
I watch her with those awful rough canvas pants that separate her legs from both each other and from my touch.
It seems wrong to me that her thighs should be separated and the fabric itself cruel for keeping my head being directly in her warm lap.
My mind wanders up those foreign legs, wondering about the space that lies between them.
My hazy thoughts are interrupted by her upset face coming into focus.
“What are you two scheming?” she says in an accusatory gripe.
We huddle together and Little Bird chirps again, an innocent plea for the both of us.
I watch Andrea’s attention turn back towards the sea.
Her hair swishes behind her as she turns, catching the air and dusting upon the surface of the wind in the most tantalizing way.
A comet tail burning up with a subtle auburn hue that is heading straight for me.
I want to curl each strand in my fingers and knit them into a safety net around the two of us.
If only I had the words to tell her—Little Bird peeps commiserating with my thoughts. “Yes, exactly!” I agree with her.
Andrea turns back, “What are you two saying about me?” She grabs at her nearest insecurity.
Blushing and pulling her hair down around her, she tries to neaten the beautiful wild halo.
“I can’t help that it’s so windy here! That the salt makes it so coarse.
” Her voice trembles in an almost undetectable quake while she finger combs that star trail into conformity.
Though I hadn’t even mentioned her hair, I try and comfort her all the same. “Little Bird likes it!” I reassure her, “She says it makes her feel like home and I agree.” I hope she’ll be pleased and understand what I’m trying to say. Her eyes widen, her face red. Yes—blush for me Andrea.
Yet, her mouth turns into a tight frown.
“A bird’s nest?” She whispers a pause between every word before yelling, “A birds nest! You ass!” Her hair rising up as she releases it, fanning out around her head like an aggressive lionfish.
Swiftly turning on her heels, she goes back inside, slamming the door behind her.
Feeling every sharp edge, I push my face into the rock, dragging it in slow punishment as I bubble under the water. That did not go how I wanted. “Peep!” Little bird mocks me.
I am stuck down here at the bottom of this tower.
With no words, no light to flash to her to tell her even in code what I want to say to her—whatever it even is!
Whatever this feeling is that has been spreading across me like barnacles and weighs me down to the bottom of this pool.
The water above me shifts in foamy parabolic shapes, intricate frames I lose my thoughts within.
The tower twirls up into endless sky and heavy crushing clouds.
They roll in false gray waves which make me feel even more trapped than the barnacle and mussel covered walls around me.
This rock might as well be an asteroid which crash landed into—me!
And its single occupant has left behind a searing wound that aches and leaves me in cold sweats that I feel even beneath the water.
It is not the scars from the sharp rocks, but this empty hole that was only filled up by the sea before, it burns all around at its edges.
Now, I am forced to live on this foreign planet.
Which I have to watch the universe move on without me from, but yet—I have no desire to leave. No desire to be parted from her.
A longing so real that no human or mostly human creature can even think of denying it.
This feeling so wide in my chest, painfully expanding so quickly that it could span any land, and distance and across any body of water.
In my dreams I see her face, and I can only wish mine is reflected in that same transcendental mirror.
The dullness of it all, of being trapped in this tide pool, twists my thoughts into lonely nothingness.
That is until—I gasp, my gills flex in anticipation—a candle lights in a window and my muscles tighten.
I watch anxiously from the bottom of the pool.
Sitting still so the water won’t ripple and distort my view, watching that glass frame with all my focus.
Watching the little orange flame flicker, trying to decipher if there is any code she could be flashing to only me through its hypnotic dance on the sill.
A message not for sailors, ship captains, or fishermen; instead a completely unique language for her merman who awaits her call.
Passing by the window, she looks out at the sea. Her shoulders dropping as she exhales a long sigh. Then she pauses a moment, to softly smile down at only me—and my heart leaps.