OFF THE DEEP END ~ CHAPTER 3
ANEMONE & ENOMENA PART ONE
Mermaid Princess: First Day on the Job
Laika Pupkino 2016

Way back in another life---before I was kidnapped by pirates and jumped overboard in the dead of night and almost drowned but got turned into a mermaid by a genie from a bottle---my friend Pepper used to say how I was lucky to not have any siblings. Every visit, texting or phone call had at least one epic tale about the latest fight with her sister or how the little brat would borrow Pepper's things without asking, and then lose them or just leave them laying somewhere half wrecked...

But I could never quite believe that having a sister like Ginger wasn't good at least as often as it was bad. After being an only child for all my life, being twins with a mermaid princess was.... WoNDeRfuL!!!!

Maybe if Anemone and I had grown up together it wouldn't seem so special, but I was too new to this life to take any part of it for granted. It was hard to feel like there was anything worth fighting about when just brushing my long soft golden hair put me on a total high, if I wasn't already on one from having woke up in my clam shell bed that morning to discover: “Yep, still a princess!”

Anemone had been an only child until now too, and she was loving us being sisters as much as I was. We went everywhere and did everything together, and all the ocean's dolphins and whales and sea turtles, the fish, the stars, the shrimps and lobsters (but not so much the crabs...) and even the unbelievably stupid sponges were our friends.

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BEFORE DAWN, MONDAY AUGUST 25:
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Things could have gone very different for me as a mermaid, and for a while it seemed like it was touch and go, as I waited outside the door while Anemone broke the news to Queen Atlantea that she'd used her last genie-wish to create me.

Her mom was furious, and loud enough to hear from out in the corridor: “Your third wish was supposed to be kept for emergencies! What if there's a war with the South Atlantic? Or our village is discovered by humans? Or there's an oil spill like the one that brought all those Greasebowl refugees out here from the Gulf four years ago? That last wish might have meant our survival someday!”

“I know, I know, and I'm sorry! It was just a crazy impulse; I.... I was just so lonely,” crowed Anemone, sticking to our cover story.

“'Sorry' doesn't change anything!” the Queen's voice boomed, “I only hope you won't come to regret this, when you and your so-called sister are fleeing for your lives from something your Genie could have neutralized.”

“I know it doesn't help but I am sorry; and if you don't like me being sorry then I'm sorry for being sorry! And punish me if you have to, but don't punish Enee for my mistake. She's already lost her whole life as a sea cow, she's got nowhere else to go now. And she's nice, Mom! You should at least meet her...”

Which Queen Atlantea finally did, calling me into the room, where she had an instant change of heart; Or more likely she'd already decided to welcome me into their family before even setting eyes on me, but had also decided to yell at her daughter until it felt like she'd put her through just the right amount of grief and worry before letting her off the hook. Even our mom's outburst were usually purposeful and deliberate...
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)))========> THE END OF A ROUGH NIGHT
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We'd both had a long rough night, so after some mumbo-jumbo that officially made me a princess it was time for bed. My sister led me up through a confusion of halls and tube-things to her room. Bigger than my own bedroom but not by a whole lot, the room reminded me of a suite in some whimsical hotel.

There was a big circular picture window that took up most of one wall, with a nice view of the lit up gardens four stories below. This window didn't open, but one alongside of it that was barely big enough to stick your head out of did. Anemone saw me looking at it and said, “If you need to peepoo you stick the end of your tail out through that.”

Peepoo. So apparently pissing and pooping weren't separate functions for mermaids, but all our waste left us through a single process. Like fish. “So I just crap out the window? That seems kind of crude!”

“This high up the current dilutes it...”

For a moment I wondered why they hadn't just put a door there instead of making us swin all the way down to the first floor to enter or leave our home, until I remembered this was a castle. A single way in and a single way out was pretty much a defining feature of castles. I asked, “And if I'm outside, I just go... anywhere?”

“Sure, but use common sense. If you're around other people go off by yourself a ways. Preferably downcurrent.”

"Ah," I nodded, “like when you're camping.”

“I suppose,” shrugged Anemone. She took off her belt and calling conch, and opening the hatch of a gutted front-loading washing machine stuck them on one of the shelves inside. “You can use the bed tonight.”

“I'll just take the hammock,” I said because the clam-shell bed she was offering me looked kind of small. The hammock was human made, and it looked brand new. I asked, “Where did you get this?”

“Courtesy of Hurricane Bubba...”

“Bubba was a bad one,” I said. “Well not where we were, it skipped past us, but I remember how insane all the stores were, everyone trying to stock up on emergency supplies. We were lucky that time. So what's a hurricane like down here?”

“Not fun. It gets dark, the water gets cold and really salty and almost too dirty to breathe; and so rough it can kill fish and mess up the coral beds. We stay inside mostly. But afterwards you find all kinds of interesting land-people stuff.”

“Did it drag that washing machine all the way out here?”

“My dresser? I don't know where this came from, I've had it since I was little. Oh, and speaking of finding stuff, look at this!” she said, reaching into the washer and pulling out her conch-on-a-bootlace.

I nodded, smiled. It was a pretty shell. “I've seen it.”

“No you haven't. This is the one you saw,” she said, and pulled out another.

“My God, they're identical!”

“Almost. But when you look at them side by side you can see the bumps and stripes are a little different and this one's about a half a fingerwide longer,” she said, dangling the supposedly longer one in front of me on its leather loop, “Here!”

“For me?”

“I know it's only a seashell and not a tiara with jewels all over it, but it's something.”

“No, this is better than that old thing,” I said as I took it from her, ”Way better!”

That tiara had only been about being a 'princess'---like the play-acting of an odd little boy alone in his room with all his Disney crap. This was about being a sister, and it was REAL. (I guess my princess status was real too now, but compared to having Anee in my life it seemed about as big of a deal as having a job at McDonalds.) As I slipped it over my head and down around my neck I was just able to utter a garbled “Wow... thanks!” around the lump in my throat.

“When I found them lying right next to each other out in the kelp forest I thought it was just a weird coincidence, and pretty cool to have a new conch and a perfect spare one for it. But after the genie changed you last night, I'm thinking...”

“What? Like Fate or something?”

“Whatever you want to call it. Eris Hathor, our church's priestess says our Mother Ocean has a spirit and a purpose for everything within her. And with the way I found these, and then finding two big shoes with strings for both of them the very next day, just sitting side by side on the sea floor, I can believe that. You never find two shoes together like that!”

We tried to put up the hammock up but there wasn't really anything to hang it on in here so I just removed the two sticks that spread its ends out wide, folded it twice and laid it on the floor.

“Is that gonna be enough? You can have some of this bedding if you want,” she said, grabbing a handful of kelp from inside her clam bed.

“No, don't mess up your bed. This'll be fine for one night,” I said and stretched out on my hammock-mat, pretending to be more comfortable than I was.

“Then how about one of my pillows?” she asked, pulling out the dull yellow skeleton of a sponge the size of a soccer ball.

“Now that I can use, thanks,” I said and stuck the big soft ball of cellulose under my head. And clutching my conch shell to my chest with one hand I fell asleep before she'd even climbed into her bed and closed it up.
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)))========> GIRL FUN
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I assumed it was either my mom or my dad who was shaking my shoulder.

“Alright, alright, I'm up already!"

Opening my eyes I saw the rubbery translucent tail fin of some great big fish about an inch from my nose. I startled---WTF?!!!---and tried to push this weird thing that seriously did not belong here out of my bed.

Which I felt. Not just with my fingertips but with my tail. My tail?!!?

'Oh, that's right,' I remembered, 'I have one of these now...'

And along with it I had this new life, which even though it started out really scary and seemed to be right out of some loopy fantasy novel (Susan's Adventures Down the Crazy-Ass Whirlpool...) hadn't been entirely horrible.

“Good morning,” I said as I straightened out and rolled over, assuming it was my new sister who had shaken me awake.

The Queen was hovering in the water above me, peering down at me, “What are doing you sleeping on the floor?”

“We couldn't get this hammock hung up, and we didn't want to start knocking holes in the walls.”

“Well thank you for that,” she said, “But from now on you won't have to bed down in the dirt like some mangy wildmer.”

She told me there were two mermen out in the hall with a big clamshell bed, and I would need to pick out one of the castle's two hundred or so empty rooms for my bedroom, that these delivery guys would shlep my bed to, and which she'd let me decorate any way I wanted that wasn't insanely expensive to do.

“I kind of thought I'd be staying in here,” I said, but then realized how presumptuous this was. Of course Anemone would want her own space...

Except she didn't. She shoved the top of her bed open and sat up, saying, “Have them bring it in here. This is our room now.”

“Why don't we let Enomena make up her own mind? I know you had her created but she's not a play thing, some golem you can boss around. She's a person!”

I shook my head. “She's not being bossy. And I do want to stay here.”

“Why though?” asked the Queen, “We have so many unused rooms here.”

“I don't know, it just seems right. Because when me and her are together, it's like we have this...” I searched for a word that would describe the strong bond I'd felt with Anemone since the moment we became twins.

“It's like we have FUN!!!!” barked my sister, looking over at me with a goofy smile on her face.

“Yeah, fun,” I said.

Because fun was definitely part of it. A kind of fun I hadn't really got to enjoy much before I met her...

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==========>
Since about second grade I'd been compiling this mental list of all the “girl things” I was missing out on and would love to do someday. And having slumber parties with other girls my age was definitely up near the top of that list.

The closest I'd come to this had been a few nights one summer when I was invited over to Tommy Crenshaw's house to unroll sleeping bags in a pup tent in his back yard. And I can't say those were miserable times. We watched some good horror movies on his laptop in there, and we laughed a lot; but in the back of my mind as I told some gross out joke that I knew would crack Tommy up was the sense that I was halfway playing a role that was expected of me...

Just after sundown on our third camp-out together, I was looking out the open front flap of our tent and realized that from where we'd pitched it this time I could see into the window of the bedroom his kid sisters shared.

And even though they were dumb little five and six year olds and their play was kind of babyish for me, I wished I could be in there with the girls instead of bivouacking with Tommy and his collection of Sargent Rock comic books. You can only shine a flashlight on the tent's roof and bring your hand down over it so it looks like a giant hand descending on you and fake-scream “Aaaaaaaaah!” so many times before it loses its magic. Can only have so many discussions about whether Ant Man could beat up The Atom before your interest shrinks down to nothing...

Around 8:00 I'd gone into the house to use the bathroom (Tommy's parents had nixed his idea of digging a trench latrine) when Haley---the five year old---came out and held out her Barbie for me, and then her Barbie's head, which had come off, and wanted me to fix it for her. I was able to push the head back on hard enough that it slipped back over the rim of the neck. Then I had to rearrange Barbie's hair because it was all disheveled, and Barbie doesn't do disheveled well, and then kiss her to make it better, because it's a horrible thing to have your head come off. Then the girl grabbed onto my fingers and said we had to go meet Barbie's friends. And she was such an adorable little munchkin I had to say sure; and before I knew it I was sitting on the floor of their room with Haley and her sister, and they were piling their toys on me...

I think this was when being a babysitter went on my list of girl-things I'd like to do. Because although I wasn't playing their games with quite the same total lost-in-the-pretendingness that these kids were, it was still fun. It was a trip because they were such a trip!

We just had the tea set put out the way we wanted it and were eating the tiny rock-hard magic marshmallows out of a very stale box of Lucky Charms (“These are what the fairies eat!”) when that suspicious looking truck I'd been keeping my eye on turned into a Decepticon and tried to attack Cowgirl Jessie, but the Teddy Bear was fighting him off, and Haley and Annette were squealing and laughing and bouncing off the walls.... when Tommy came in to see what was keeping me so long.

And so what if I had a pair of bright pink Totally Barbie! sunglasses on and a few plastic hibiscus leis around my neck, and I'd been sprinkled with some magic glitter to keep the crocodiles away, because who wants those icky crocodiles crashing their tea party?

It would have done Tommy a world of good to play with his sisters like this once in a while. They adored him, and he was nothing but dismissive and insulting toward them. He gawked at me in utter horror, “Du-u-ude! What are you DOING?!!”

“We're Magic Sparkle Fairy Princesses!” squeaked Annette.

Tommy didn't come right out and call me a fag, even though it was becoming his favorite word in those days (and in junior high it would get much worse). And that moment didn't immediately kill our friendship, but we were both starting to realize that the last thing I wanted to become was the kind of teenager he would evolve into, with that Code of Dudeliness that forbid such things as straightforward expressions of affection, or even smiling if it came from any emotions outside of a ridiculously narrow “manly” range of them. It was an attitude and a posture that were as bizarre to me as my failing to embrace them was to him. Although to Tommy's credit he never did turn into a serious bully---even when he started posseying with a bunch that were---as we drifted apart, each seeking out friends we had more in common with.

So sharing a room with my mermaid sister was going be like making up for lost time when it came to slumber parties and girl-fun in general, and us being the same age and so weirdly on the same wavelength made it perfect...
==========>
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The Queen looked around the room, “Well it seems silly to me, when you could each have your own. But if this is what you want-”

“It is!” we said together.

“Fine then... In here, gentlemen!”

The mermen brought the bathtub-sized shell in and set it down alongside Anee's. They seemed relieved that they wouldn't have to lug it all over the castle while I acted like a princess: I'll take this room... No wait, that one! Or no, maybe there's a nice one up on the sixth floor...

“There ya go, Little Lady,” said the one who looked like Willie Nelson with a big smile and a wink. His strong non-Hatterian accent surprised me. I looked inquiringly at my sister.

“Gulfies,” she whispered, meaning they were some of those refugees who had moved here from the queendom of Lonstar after that big oil spill in 2010.

I told Mom, “And don't worry about Anee treating me like some Gollum she created. I can be pretty assertive for an ex-sea cow. If she ever starts bossing me around like the cruel slave driver we all know she is, I'll let you know...”

“Stop that! That's just vulgar!” snapped Atlantea when she saw my sister sticking her tongue out at me.

She didn't quite catch me doing it back at Anemone when her back was turned, but from the way her eyes narrowed at me I knew she suspected. “I think I'm going to have to keep an eye on you two. And if it looks like you're not getting enough sleep because you're up all night prattling and playing silly buggers I'll not only separate you, I'll put your rooms in opposite wings of the building...”
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)))========> CATS AND DOGS
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As she ushered the workmen out and down the hall I checked out my new bed. I opened it, it had hinges where its former occupant's openy/closey muscles had been, and like Anee's bed it had a nest of angel-hair kelp filling its bowl shaped bottom half; which measured about six feet by four. I said, “I've never seen a clam this big before.”

“And you won't, not around here. I guess they grow 'em big wherever they're from.”

“Wherever that is. Because I've seen what are supposed to be the biggest clam species in the world; clamus gigantus or something like that. We have one of them at the place where my mom works. My other mom. And his name is Barney, I guess because he's big and purple. The clam I mean, not my mom. Her name's Shannon, and she's not purple...”

“She works at a restaurant?”

“No, and she'd never work at one that served giant clams, they're super-endangered. She works... Well it's sort of a fish museum; where land people can go and look at what it's like in different oceans. Barney is in the Great Barrier Reef tank, with all the kinds of fish and coral you'd find there, the sea turtles, a whole lot of sharks. And everyone oohs and ahhhs over Barney being so huge, but he's only half the size of these guys and he's a totally different species. These look like clams from the supermarket that got all... Fukushima'd.”

“I don't think they're so fukashumie. They make nice beds.”

“But aren't they a just bit short for us? I know I could sleep in one just fine if I was still human, but we have these tails,” I said, stretching mine out to its full length.

“There's plenty of room in there when you sleep in a circle.”

“But I don't sleep like that.”

“Sure you do. All merpeople do. I saw you go into a circle about thirty seconds after you fell asleep last night...”

“Okay, I guess I did,” I said, remembering how I'd woke up staring at my tail. “So we sleep curled up like a cat.”

“I've never seen a cat. I saw a dog going by on a boat once, but when he saw me he didn't act very friendly at all.”

“Dogs are real friendly when they know you.”

“I think I like cats better. Are cats a good pet?”

“They're great too. We had one when I was little, an orange tabby named Hobbes. He used to sleep on my bed. He was such a sweet cat, real affectionate. I cried and cried when he died.”

“Did he get eaten?”

“Sort of,” I sighed. That bastard who hit him hadn't even slowed down...

“I wish I could have a cat.”

“That might be a problem. Cats don't like water, and they like being underwater even less,” I said, waving my hand around.

“He could live in the library dry room. Of course I'd have to keep the air in there fresh. Or a seal or a sea otter, some kind of mammal. I've had fish but they don't really make good pets. They just follow you around all day going 'Feed me! Feed me!'”

“I know what you mean. After Hobbes died and my mom's allergist said we couldn't have any more pets with fur on them we got a couple of big salt water tanks. There's some beautiful fish in there; but they're not a part of the family like a dog or cat is," I said, and then had an idea: "Hey! What about a dolphin?”

She laughed. “Own a dolphin? I'd like to see you try!”

I nodded. If Jasper was any example I could see what she meant. “So what time is it anyway?”

She peered at the blank sheet of green water beyond our room's porthole window and said, “A little before noon. So what do you wanna do today?”

“I don't know, but right now I would really like to eat something, if that's possible.”

“That's right! We never got around to raiding the kitchen last night. I'm starved too. Float tight, I'll go get us something...”
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)))========> PROPHECIES
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She came back with a plate of what they called crab cakes here, raw crab and seaweed pressed into patties. She set it on the edge of her bed where I could reach it from mine, and we demolished the whole big stack of them in about a minute, too focused on feeding to even talk. As Anemone set the plate over by the door I flopped back on my bed's padding. “Ahhhh! That was incredible.”

“Octavia's a wizard in the kitchen. When she started filling in there after Mr. and Mrs. Pescanova got deported we were looking to hire a new cook. Now I think we found one and we need a maid. It's not fair for her and Giselle to have to do both jobs now.”

“What I don't understand is how we can even talk with her. How an octopus can sound just like we do, only with better grammar and diction.”

“Even though it seems like you're talking with them you're not really,” she said, “It's more like telepathy. Well actually, it is telepathy. It's something us merpeople can do with sea creatures.”

"Cool! Like Aqualad."

"Who?" she asked, so I explained a little about what comic books were, and about Aquaman and Aqualad. She shook her head, "Humans sure come up with some imaginative stories! I wish I could do half of what these Aqua-guys can. But they got the telepathy-with-fish part sort of right..."

“Are we using telepathy now?” I asked. It still seemed strange that everyone here spoke English.

“No silly, we're talking. Once in a while two merpeople can graze minds, if they're close family. But it's not a thing you could ever count on. A long time ago there used to be real mer-to-mer telepaths, who could read your thoughts as easy as reading a book. A lot of them had important positions in the church or the royal court. But somehow the regular mers got the idea that these 'gifted ones' couldn't just do telepathy, they could put ideas into your head. Control your mind. They began to blame the telepaths for any bad thing that happened, then started hunting and killing them. And they did such a good job of it over the course of about a hundred years that the ability was pretty much eliminated from our gene pool."

"All of them? All over the world?!"

"Three thousand years ago there was no 'all over the world'; all the mermaids were living in one place. It was a horrible messed up time in history, but it might be just as well that we can't. I sure wouldn't want Mom to be able to read my thoughts!”

“Or mine. She'd banish me right off the planet!”

“I don't know. She is really fond of you. You bring out her maternal side.”

“Until she finds out I was a hew-monnnn...”

“I think she'll be able to get over that.”

“You think...”

“Nothing's 100% certain. But I'm sure enough to risk it, that it'll be safe to tell her the truth about all this by a week from today. But by safe I don't mean easy-safe. She'll be furious at us for lying to her, and it will suck like a lamprey to be us for at least a month after that. But whatever her punishment will be we can take it, and we'll have our whole lives after that to recover from it.”

“Our whole lives... I guess for mermaids that's pretty long time.”

“Compared to humans it is, but when my grandma was still around she used to tell me 'Don't just drift through life, make the most of every day. Because your ten or twelve score years will go by faster than you can believe is possible.'”

“Old humans say that too,” I said, “It's weird... Two days ago I had some idea about what my life would be like in five years, ten years or twenty; or at least had ideas about what I wanted. Transitioning, going to college, a job that means something, and hopefully finding a person I could love and wake up next to every morning."

"A boy person or a girl person?"

"I don't know. I think I like both..."

"Oh," she said, as if I was lucky to be so flexible, and that's all there was to me coming out as probably bisexual to my sister. Not a big deal at all.

I said, "But now my whole future is like this big blank. As much as I used to fantasize about it I have no idea what being mermaid really means, or what this life will be like for me...”

“Why don't we find out?” she asked.

“Huh?”

Smiling mysteriously she got up and went over to to the wall, which was made from panels of some shiny mother-of-pearl stuff, and fiddled with one of the panels until it pried free in her hands. Set it down. On the floor behind it was a big wad of purple crushed velvet. “Now here's a secret we're never going to tell Mom about. I mean never! This is a serious crime we're doing here...”

“What is it?” I asked, wondering just what kind of criminal I had for a sister. Some kind of weird mermaid drugs?

“Come here Enee, we're going to tamper with forces not meant for mere mortals.”

She took the parcel to her bed, which she on the edge of with her tail angled out onto the floor. I swam over and sat next to her. She put the thing on a sponge pillow between us and started unwrapping it, slowly, like it was a bomb that might go off. Saying, “This orb is a powerful divination device that I took from our library's Forbidden Room back in spring. I was hoping I could find Daddy with it; And it hasn't told me anything about him yet, but other stuff...”

It was a crystal ball. A cheap-looking one that you could find at any New Age bookstore for about $40.

“What? You're gonna read my future?”

“Don't laugh, this thing works. Like last month, when I saw two of me swimming side by side in it I thought my orb was busted or out of tune or something, but now that vision makes perfect sense. And last week I found a missing kid who everyone thought a shark had got. A rock had rolled down a slope and pinned him, in a spot where the searchers were going right past. Broke his tail---poor little fry---but he'll be up and swimming in a couple of months. Now be quiet, I need to concentrate,” she said, pressing two fingers against her temples on either side of head. Her eyes went all googly as she peered into it.

She was being so melodramatic and spooky about all this I thought she was kidding, and I went: “Eenie Meenie... Chilee Beany... Thee speerits are about to speeeeak!”

“Fine, if you don't want to do this,” she said irritably, and started to wrap it up.

“You mean you were serious?”

“What have I been telling you here?”

“Then I'm sorry, go ahead. I'll be quiet, I swear...”

“Here, give me your hands. I think it will work better if we do it this way.”

She held my hands along either side of the glass ball and gazed into it for a long time. Her expression really did look like she was making contact with something. Finally she spoke, in a slow deep voice, “You will meet... a tall... dark stranger...”

“Oh Man!” I laughed, yanking my hands away. What a gullible twit I was! She'd been playing me this whole time!

“Dammit, you messed it up! The crystal's shut down from all your negativity.”

“Look... a gag's a gag; and you got me! Okay? There's no need to keep going with it.”

“You thought I was joking?”

“'You will meet a tall dark stranger'? That's like the oldest, lamest fortune teller cliché there is!”

“Maybe it is where you come from but I never heard it. And it's what I saw!”

“Wait... Really?!”

“I wouldn't risk having this orb in my room just to play a joke.”

Well I'm sorry then,” I said, still expecting her to bust out laughing at any second about how she'd got me; but she didn't. My sister wasn't like my best-friend-until-yesterday Pepper, building those elaborate layer cakes of kidding/not kidding and expecting you to do the same. Anee wasn't some wimp, but her idea of fun and kidding around wasn't as aggressive as Pepper's. She started wrapping her crystal ball back up, saying, “It's okay. But I can sense that's it for this attempt...”

“Okay. And you really saw me meeting a 'tall dark stranger'? I mean really? No kidding?!”

“When I use this thing it's like... flashes. And feelings. And if I look long enough they come together into kind of a story. But all I got from that couple of seconds was you with this mer-boy, sitting somewhere above the surface talking. I said tall because he was tall next to you.”

“And dark...”

“He could have been from Amazonia or Mediterraneo or someplace,” she said, dropping the bundle back into its hiding space, “And looked to be around eighteen. Maybe twenty.”

“Cute?”

“I would say so, and you thought so; I sensed your emotions. He was saying something, you were laughing, and you liked him!” she said, pounding the panel back into place with her fist.

“Did he like me?”

“He was sure smiling like he did; but that's all I got. I was tuned into your future, not his. We'll have to try again tomorrow. Now what do you say we get out of here for a while?”

“You said there was a village near here. Could we go see that?” I asked.

“That's just what I was gonna suggest.”
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)))========> ACCESSORIES
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I would feel like an idiot if I got lost in my own house, so I paid careful attention to the way as she led me through corridors and down several ramptubes (how we got from one floor to the next, since staircases would be kind of pointless...) to the first floor.

As we passed the kitchen we heard Atlantea in there, talking and laughing with Octavia. From just listening you might think they were housewives or college professors or female pro wrestlers, but you would never guess it was an octopus and a Mermaid Queen. I said, “They sound like they're having a good time...”

“They do,” she said, and hollered, “We're going in to town for a bit! Bye Mom, bye 'Tave!”

“Wait! I have something for you.” Mom shouted, and came swimming out with a belt in her hand. “I was just about to bring this up to your room.”

It was one of those canvas canteen belts, army green with pairs of grommet holes every six inches all the way around. And I wouldn't have particularly liked it, except it was the same kind my sister had on, so I loved it. I cinched it around my waist, low, so that it rode right at the human-fish divide like Anemone was wearing hers, and said, “It's perfect!”

“It is,” agreed Anemone, grinning from ear to ear.

I've heard that after a certain age most pairs of identical twins start to think being dressed the same is stupid, or even creepy, as they grow into wanting to be recognized for the individuals they are. But Anee and I had been twins for less than a day and I could tell she was as into this looking-identical thing as I was. And Mom must have been getting a kick out of it too, because:

“I knew we had another one like hers somewhere, it took me half the morning to find it. And oh look... your conches match too!”

I slid my knife out of the sheath on my hip. It was a very fancy weapon, with a steel blade eight inches long and a handle that might have been solid gold from how heavy it was, shaped like a seahorse with real rubies for eyes. It looked ancient, like it could have been King Arthur's scuba diving knife. “It's beautiful...”

“It's one of my husband's. It's been in our family for five hundred years. But you can use it for now.”

“But I don't really need anything so fancy. If this is like an heirloom you should let Anee have it and just give me an old steak knife or something.”

“No Honey. A knife isn't just some ornament, or a toy. Since you've only been a mermaid a few hours and haven't had your sister's training I'd feel better knowing you were carrying the best one I could find when you're roaming around out there,” she said, pointing toward the Castle's big front door and the still-sleeping palace guard. “If you get caught in a net it'll slice through that nylon mesh like going through a jellyfish. And for sharks, well it's a good last resort if your club doesn't dissuade them.”

“Well thank you. I'll take good care of it. But I hope some day soon here I can give it back to King, uh...”

Crap! I'd completely spaced on the name of the man who was my father now.

“Uyehtah,” said Atlantea gently. “And we all hope that day comes.”

“Okay Mom, we'll be back in a few hours,” said Anemone, giving her mom a quick peck on the cheek.

I did the same and followed her toward the door, calling back, “And thank you! Thank you for everything!”

“Be careful out there, and take your clubs, both of you!”

“But we're just going to Shellcastle,” Anemone whined.

“I don't care. Take them.”

“Okay! Okay! Okay!”

Right next to the big double doors and the ever-vigilant Bassby was a barrel shaped oak umbrella stand with a half dozen different clubs poking up out of it.

“Which one is mine?” I asked.

“None of them, all of them,” she said as she grabbed one, “Just take one that you think you could hit a shark with."

I grabbed one that had been made from a baseball bat. Right where it was cut off it said:

LOUI
SLUG
Made in the U......

Anemone nodded approvingly. “That's a good one, and with that knob thing it won't fall out on you.”

She showed me how to twist the loop on my belt to hold it so that it was secure but could be pulled free quickly.

As we swam out through the door I pointed at the rubber grip of the obviously man-made hunting knife on her belt, “Our knives don't match.”

“I know,” she said, and grinned mischeviously, “We'll have to trade off. Keep 'em guessing...”

As we headed across the geometric gardens toward a wide green kelp covered hillside I hadn't noticed last night she asked me, “Do you know what they say the best way to defend yourself against a shark using a knife is?”

“I have no idea...”

“You stab the person next to you and swim away fast as you can! In other words always go for the club first.”

“Got it. Do you think we'll run into any sharks?”

“Nawwww... we're just going into town. They stay out of the populated areas. Well except for little trash eating sharks, and those are almost like pets. People give them names. If you started beating on one of those you'd have more to fear from the townies.”

“So do the townies like us okay? Or do they resent us for living for free in this big castle, sitting around eating crab cakes while they have to work in the fish mines or whatever they do...”

“I know what you're talking about; there was a revolution in a country way over on the Asia side of the Pacific. Very bloody, and they made sure that emperor they'd had was the last emperor. But all that class-warfare stuff never really caught on in the Atlantic, and here in Hatteria the people just love their Royal Family. We're almost like pets...”
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)))========> SHELLCASTLE, HATTERIA
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My sister led me to the village that lie a short ways past the top of the little bowl valley our castle sat in. A bustling little town full of merpeople that once again made me feel like I'd been dropped into the middle of a cartoon...

Shellcastle's shopping district that had stores selling everything from spear guns, knives and shark clubs (POSIDEARMS) to musical instruments (LYRE, LYRE) and junk food (SEAS CANDY), and the kelp-paper scrolls they use for books down here (DEEP SUBJECTS). None of the walls of these quaint shops seemed to meet at ninety degrees, and they took a lot of unnecessary zigs + zags on their way to meet up with each other.

The narrow streets between them were paved with all different color sea shells set in the ground like cobblestones. Like the limestone paths that crisscrossed our castle's garden they were pretty to look at, but since no one actually walked on these streets I decided they were more of a decorative thing than anything practical. That is until I saw a mermaid swimming down an alley pulling a cart full of big rocks by a pair of rickshaw handles.

To let in as much of the daylight filtering down from above as possible the buildings here had pyramid and trapezoid-shaped roofs made from thick panes of this glass-like stuff that was blurry like the door of a shower. It seemed to be made of sand and some gluelike substance pressed together, and I don’t think it was blurry to protect people’s privacy- it just didn’t come in an unblurry kind. This was probably why the shopfront windows just had shutters that they closed at night, and netting across them to keep the fish out and to prevent thieves from just reaching in and grabbing something.

Our town had no night life to speak of, since everyone went to bed at sundown or not long after. Even the chew houses (where adult merpeople chewed on fermented sea-weed to get the alcohol out then spit the pulp into spittoons) didn't stay open past eight or nine, but they were supposed to be dark inside anyway. They did use a type of bio-luminous lantern here, but once activated they just ran until they ran down, sort of like a cold indoor highway flare, and these were kept around mostly for emergencies. And even at our castle---with its mysterious lighting system as good as anything humans had---we tended to turn in early because everyone else did.

Anemone gave me half of the bills she had in her belt, and said I could pay her back later when I got my own allowance. I looked at the little rectangles of flimsy plastic. They appeared to have been cut from grocery bags and had pictures of Mom on them. “Is this a lot of money?”

“Not really,” she said, “You could buy a hat or something. A cheap romance scroll, or whatever you're into reading.”

Unlike the simplicity of our measuring system (5 fingerwides made a handwide, 5 of those made a cubit; then a quintacubit, which was the length of the average mermaid...) the money here was ridiculously complicated. I did what most dumb tourists do in a foreign land, gave the clerk a big one and hoped they were giving me back the right change.

But luckily we never had to buy much. Everywhere we went the merfolk your-highnessed us and blessed us in the name of the Sea Gods, and kept trying to give us treats. It kind of spooked me when people would bow to me and act all humble---If you were floating side by side with them they always made sure they were floating a bit lower than you, looking up---but I guess all this went with being a royal. (Those childhood princess fantasies I've mention had never contained a lot of kowtowing from other people. In fact they never had many other people in them, usually just a talking wolf sidekick or something, so I'm not sure what I was imagining myself being the princess of...)

If we ate everything that somebody tried to feed us we would of wound up a couple of real whales, but we just couldn't turn down the roe-cones Mr. Krakenov brought out from his store CAVIAR EMPTOR. We ate them sitting at a table that was sitting out in the Town Square, a round steel thing that was obviously built on land, with four oval seats attached and a hole in the middle where you would stick a shade umbrella.

As much as the merpeople disliked and mistrusted humans none of them had any qualms about using human stuff that had been dragged out here by storms or found on a sunken boat. Although they didn't always use things for what they'd started out being. When I first saw that toilet seat that had been made into a picture frame and hung on the wall in the castle's foyer I bust out laughing. But I didn't want to explain what was so funny about this, so it looked like I'd gone into hysterics over a portrait of this very ordinary looking merman, some duke or somebody wearing the top from a wetsuit with a bunch of medals pinned to it. Which made Octavia mutter, “Such a strange girl...”

Strange Girl. Maybe that should have been my name...
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)))========> THE VILLAGE IDIOT
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One thing I was noticing was that once the folks we met figured out which sister was which they would talk to Anemone normally, but with me they spoke slowly and very loud, like they wanted to make sure I understood them.

I asked her, “Why is everyone treating me like I'm brain damaged?”.

“Oh you noticed that, huh?”

“It would be kind of hard to miss.”

“From what I'm seeing here today I think word has got around that you used to be a sea cow; and the stories about that sort of took on a life of their own, with everyone embellishing them a little more each time they get retold. It seems you have a reputation, Sis!” she said, clearly amused by this.

“So the whole queendom thinks I'm an idiot? But how?! I've been here like half a day and have met maybe a whole dozen people. And they're just gonna decide what I'm like without even seeing me? And how did they even hear about the sea cow story anyway?”

“I have no idea.”

“Jasper?”

“I really doubt that. But you know what they say: The only thing that can spread through the ocean faster than a tsunami is a rumor. Don't worry about it. Just be yourself and don't act dumb and they'll figure out it's not true.”

“I hope so...”
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)))========> ANEMONE THE HERO
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It felt weird to be right out in this village square with no clothes on. As quaint and old-timey as the place was it felt like we were sitting in the middle of some theme park stark naked- something that would probably get you in a whole lot of trouble real quick if you did it. But in every direction I looked the other merpeople were all naked too; if you didn't count bracelets and scarves and some piercings (like the woman who had a whole row of gold hoops along the end of her tailfin, which I thought was pretty cool...); and quite a few human-made baseball caps that must have been lost by fishermen.

But what really seemed weird was how everyone we saw was either an adult or under the age of four. I asked my sister, “Why aren't there any teenagers here besides us? Or are they in school?”

“I'm afraid not. There's exactly three teenagers in this whole town, and we're two of them. Fluke---who's a year older than us---is the third. There's a reason for this, and it's damned scary! I was the last merchild to be hatched around here for a really long time. By the time I came along fewer and fewer babies had been hatching, and the ones that did were so sick and weird looking they didn't last long after they were born...”

“That's horrible!” I said, “What was causing it?”

She frowned at the caviar cone in her hand like she'd lost her appetite, and tossed it to one of the stray nurse sharks that hung around town, eating whatever garbage they could find. The little shark caught it on the fly and was gone in a flash.

“It's technical, I don't want to bore you with it. But if I hadn't found that genie bottle on my eleventh birthday it would have meant the end of us. In a few decades mermaids really would be a myth, just like the crawlers- excuse me, like the landpeople all think. But that was my first wish; That we could get our population back up to what it was during the Golden Age and stay there. And as you can see we're off to a good start,” she said, pointing toward the corner of the plaza and the mermaid that was swimming across it.

The woman had a spherical bulge larger than a bowling ball halfway down her tail, which made her swimming slow and awkward. And this wasn't the most brilliant thing I've ever said, but it wasn't the her belly that was swollen, so at first glance it looked like an injury. I winced: “Ow! What happened? Did she sprain her knee or something?”

When my sister finally stopped laughing she was able to say, “First of all, we don't have 'knees'. And second-” she collapsed into into helpless giggling again, waving her hand around limply.

“Okay, she's pregnant,” I said, “But hey, I have a reputation to live up to. And I'm sure you'd say some ignorant stuff if we were on land together.”

“I know! And I'm not laughing at you-” she managed to say before she started laughing at me again. By way of apology she leaned over and hugged me. Anee loves her idiot sister.

During my time in this Queendom I would notice quite a few other mermaids with Swollen Knee Syndrome, or carrying just-hatched babies on their backs in little papoose sacks. It was a wonderful thing to see. We had a future...

And everyone here had somehow known who to thank for that. So it was no wonder they all loved Anemone. She had singlehandedly kept merkind from going extinct; And not just here but eventually all over the world, this magic cure spreading like some benevolent virus. The genie might have made it possible, but he wouldn't have been able to lift a finger to save them without a specific command to do so.

She said, “But what I can't figure out is how they even found out it was me who did it...”

She had made her wish way far from town, out in the Great Kelp Forest where she thought no one could see it. But when babies started being hatched again everyone seemed to know who to thank for this miracle.

Anemone shrugged, “I guess it's true what Finius says in his Ode To The Unfathomable: 'The Sea alone decides which secrets she will keep...'”
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)))========> THE LITTLE LOST CRAB
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“I'm gonna go see if Fluke can take a break and join us out here.” Anemone said, swimming up out of her seat, “His shop's just around the corner there.”

“That would be great, I want to meet him. I'll be sitting right here.” I said as she swam off.

I sat there watching this bustling little village bustle, thinking about what an amazing place I had wound up living in, and trying not to think about the places that my new body had forced me to leave behind, and the people who probably right at this very moment were freaking out over my disappearance.

In a large imposing Greek-temple-looking structure across the square I could hear a bunch of merpeople singing a hymn of some kind. The soaring voices of the mermaids---which are so dangerously mesmerizing to male humans---were pretty mind-blowing even to me. You could get lost in voices like that.

Looking down I noticed a small crab crawling across the paving shells. He was a cute little thing; well, cute for a crustacean, and he seemed disoriented, going a few steps this way and then that way like he wasn't sure where he was.

I leaned down and asked, “What's the matter little bug? You lost?”

I've always talked to animals like that, but had never heard one say anything back until I came to Hatteria. And I was still new enough here that it sort of surprised me when in a tiny little pathetic voice he answered, “Yeah... lost...”

“Well where is it you were trying to go?”

“Lost... lost...” he murmured, waving his little claws around, and then said something I didn't catch.

I swam out of my seat and let myself settle right on the ground, up on my elbows over him, which in this eat-or-be-eaten world made him cower in fear, so I said as gently as I could, “Awwwwww, don't be scared. Maybe I can help?”

“I scared... help?” he mewled, and then said something else too faint to hear.

I leaned in even closer, “What is it? What do you want?”

“I want... I want... THAT!” he shouted, thrusting his open claw up at my face.

“GAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!! MY NOSE!!!!!!!!!!”
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TO BE CONTINUED...
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ANY KIND OF COMMENT WILL MAKE ME DELERIOULY HAPPY,
HUGS, LAIKA
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Author's note: I bought this today, yay! (hurry UPS):
http://oldtimesigns.net/beach-surf/dancing-mermaid/