Through the Lens: The Mermaid in the Snowbank

 

Welcome to The Spot Writers. The prompt for this month is to write a story that is told through a camera. It can be any type of camera in any circumstance.

This time, it’s Cathy MacKenzie’s turn. Her writings have been published in almost 400 print and online publications. Check out her website (www.writingwicket.wordpress.com) for further information on her works.

Cathy is continuing with more tales about the Grimes family (another novel in the future).

 

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Through the Lens: The Mermaid in the Snowbank

Cathy MacKenzie

 

Jimmy stared through the camera lens. The sight confused him. When did mermaids appear out of snowbanks?

He pinched his arm. He touched his chest, feeling the thumping through the thin fabric of his jacket. Yep, still kicking! And he wasn’t in a dream.

It was warm for March, the large snowbanks slowly melting. It had been a brutal winter. Many school days had been cancelled, some even the night before school was to start the next day. Days he was stuck in the house with his mother—always an unpleasant experience, even worse if his father wasn’t at work. He couldn’t wait to finish growing up and leave home. Start his own life. He wasn’t interested in girls, not yet. Still didn’t have a girlfriend. But that was okay.

He peered through the lens again. He shook his head, ensuring again he wasn’t in a dream. Nope. He wasn’t in bed. He was outside, trying to get some neat winter photographs with the camera his parents had given him for Christmas. He might like to be a photographer when he left home. That would be an easy career.

He shivered at the sight of the mermaid, who was sitting in the snowbank the way a person sits in a bathtub: slightly leaning back, arms propped on the sides. Her tail, a deep iridescent green, had disappeared into the snow. Seaweed weaved throughout her long hair.

Jimmy moved the camera to the left. To the right. The street was empty. It was 7:25 on a Thursday morning, and apparently, he was the only person in the entire city who had noticed the mermaid.

He turned the camera back at her. She was looking back at him.

He raised one hand in a small, uncertain wave.

She tilted her head. Then she raised one hand and waved back, copying him exactly as if she were his reflection and the snowbank the mirror. She wasn’t the same mermaid he’d seen during the summer.

Jimmy considered his options. He could keep walking to the bus stop, pretend this hadn’t happened, and spend the rest of his life knowing he’d walked past a mermaid in a snowbank. Or he could stay and talk to her.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hello,” she said. Her voice was normal—disappointingly normal as if a substitute teacher talking to a student.

“Are you—” He gestured at the snowbank, at her general situation.

“Stuck? Yes. The snow is melting but not fast enough.”

“How did you get here?”

“That little causeway going to the park flooded. Remember when we had that heavy rain and the snow started to melt?”

“Yeah, I remember.” He remembered the rains and then how it snowed again for another couple of days, bringing back more snow as if it had never disappeared. Everyone had thought spring was on the way until that last downfall.

“I went farther than I intended.” She glanced down at the snowbank. “Much farther.”

“The causeway’s down the road.” He pointed. “Or did you come from behind the house, from the lake?”

“I’m aware of the location of the causeway. I somehow ended up in the pond. And then here.” A pause. “It was a very unusual February.”

Jimmy stood on the sidewalk and continued to stare at her through the lens. She stared back at him. Neither of them seemed to know whose turn it was.

“I’m Jimmy,” he finally said.

“I don’t have a name,” she said. “Not one you could pronounce. You’d need gills.”

“I could try.”

She made a sound. Like someone dropping a handful of marbles into a fish tank while gargling.

His nose started running. He swiped at his face with his free hand. “I’ll call you—I don’t know. Something.”

“People have called me Peggy before. Or Margaret.”

“You don’t look like a Peggy or a Margaret—oh, did you come from Peggy’s Cove originally?”

“Peggy’s Cove? No. Where’s that?”

“Never mind.” He didn’t want to get into a discussion of Peggy of the Cove. Much too long a story.

She seemed unoffended. “What do I look like, then? What name would you give me?”

He pondered for a few minutes. Had the mermaid he’d seen that one summer have a name? He wondered if she were still alive. “Anita,” he finally said.

“Anita,” she repeated, testing it. “That’s a terrible name.”

“It’s a great name.”

“It sounds like a sneeze.”

“Agnes sounds more like sneeze-name. Do you like that one better?” Jimmy asked.

She looked at him for a long moment. “No, Anita’s better.”

Jimmy stepped closer. Up close, the seaweed situation was more complex than it had first appeared. There were also two small crabs in her hair. He decided not to mention them.

“So,” he said, “what happens when the snow melts?”

“I go back to the water, presumably.”

“And until then?”

Anita looked around.

Jimmy moved the camera, viewing through the peephole what she saw: the empty street, the two rows of almost identical houses, the ice and snow, the grey March sky.

“I wait, I suppose.” She seemed perfectly comfortable with this answer. “I’ve waited in worse places.”

“Are you cold?”

“I’m a fish.”

“Half fish.”

“I suppose.”

Jimmy thought about the crabs in her hair, whether they were alive. He thought about being late to school, which didn’t seem to matter anymore, and about his parents, who definitely couldn’t know about this, and that he was standing on a public sidewalk having a conversation with a mermaid named Anita, who was sitting in a snowbank and did not seem to find any of this particularly remarkable.

“Do you want anything?” he asked. “While you wait. Are you hungry?”

“Do you have fish?”

“Not on me.”

“What do you have?”

He thought for a moment. What did he have?

He shrugged off his backpack and carefully set down the camera.

“Let’s see,” he said, rooting through his bag. “I have a peanut butter sandwich, an apple, and a little bag of Goldfish crackers.” He held up the bag of crackers. “You’d probably like these. They’re in the shape of fish.”

Anita stared at them for a long moment.

“They’re not real fish,” Jimmy said quickly.

“I know what a Goldfish cracker is,” she said. “I’ve been in this lake system for a long time and see a lot of things.” She held out her hand.

He poured some into her palm. He picked up his backpack and carefully put the opened bag of crackers into one of the smaller pockets so the contents wouldn’t spill out. After repositioning the backpack on his back, he picked up the camera and peered through the lens.

She had eaten most of the crackers by this time. “They taste a bit like cheese,” she said finally.

“Yeah,” Jimmy agreed. “A bit. Fake cheese, I think.”

He glanced down the street when he heard the bus. “I’m going to miss the bus,” he said.

“You should go.”

“Yeah, I should.” He didn’t move. But one of the crabs in her hair shifted position. He adjusted the lens so the object was magnified. It looked huge—and dangerous.

He crouched down. The bus didn’t come down this way, but someone might see him when it reached the corner.

“Do you do this a lot?” Anita asked.

“What? Finding mermaids in snowbanks?”

“No, skipping school.”

What to say? He didn’t like admitting bad things he did. “No, not really.”

“So you do!”

“Well, I did a couple of times.” He thought about his life: his parents, his small room, the walk to the bus stop five mornings a week. Meeting the same kids waiting for transportation to another boring, dull day in the classroom. Where was his real life?

Anita nodded. “You kids always do.”

He adjusted the lens back to normal and aimed the camera back at her. She was looking down the street. The sun was getting warmer. He figured some of the snow would be gone by the end of day. The snow around her tail was definitely softer now.

How had he forgotten to take pictures? He needed some sort of proof this morning had happened. What better than a photo?

He snapped. She didn’t seem to notice.

He pointed the camera to his watch, sighed, and sat at the curb.

“Tell me about the lake,” he said, the camera still aimed at the mermaid. He’d always wondered of its mysteries. Maybe she knew where his siblings had gone.

Anita looked at him sideways, a look that might have been the mermaid equivalent of a human’s smile. Then she settled back against the slowly melting snowbank, folded her hands in her lap, and began to talk.

Jimmy listened.

This day would never repeat itself. School was always there.

Someday he might tell his father about meeting her. He knew his father liked mermaids. He giggled. But maybe not: the word “secrets” existed for a reason.

 

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The Spot Writers:

 

Val Muller: http://www.valmuller.com/blog/

 

Catherine A. MacKenzie: https://writingwicket.wordpress.com

 

Phil Yeats: https://alankemisterauthor.wordpress.com

 

Chiara De Giorgi: https://chiaradegiorgi.blogspot.ca/