sink.
Quinn Huang

I had always wanted to be a mermaid. It started the summer before sixth grade, when I first went swimming in my cousin Loretta’s new backyard pool. We didn’t have the space—or money—to build our own. The air smelled like radiation, an uncomfortable fuzzy furnace. My bare feet burned against the sun-baked asphalt, and my sunscreen did nothing to alleviate the sting of the July rays on my skin. But once I was in the water, enveloped in cold bubbles, the sun couldn’t get to me anymore. I was invincible, and no one could tell me otherwise.

 

My dad never cared about that; not in the way dads didn’t care if their toddler went on to be a kindergarten teacher or a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It was more like, “Go talk to your mom about it” because this wasn’t his problem. The way he nodded at me when I talked about growing pink-and-purple fins and riding dolphins and singing underwater and collecting human mementos from shipwrecks mirrored the mundanity of his shop’s lucky cat paw. He was just wired that way, programmed to sit behind the register of his Asian grocery store with thick glasses resting too low on the bridge of his nose, eyes glued to a Chinese newspaper dated that day exactly one year ago, grunting gruffly at anyone who wasn’t a paying customer buying a rare flavor Indomie noodles not sold at Costco. 

 

But I never knew what to say to my mother. Her brown eyes paled with impassiveness, two entrances into a vacant trench. She asked me what I wanted to be for Halloween; I said Ariel. She wondered what I was doing after school; I told her dance team practice. She saw me with all my girl friends and the pink nails they gave me. Her reaction would always be the same. Unreadable, unblinking, simply stared at me. Then she knitted her eyebrows and scrunched her nose. “You’re a silly boy, Brandon,” she said, her voice ruffled. “Come, let’s have dinner.” She’d continue on to play one of her orchestral music CDs, the one with unsettling string ensembles underlying a rotund, rambunctious woodwind quartet. Her music had no words whatsoever; it felt alien. 

So, I never told her where I was going with my mesh shorts and flippant smile. I would’ve gone to Loretta’s if it weren’t for her house being in a neighboring town. I found, instead, a hole in the chain link fence bordering the town’s central park separating the nice neighborhood from ours. Three blocks away, freedom awaited. The public pools were fashioned with bright ivory-colored marble walls and floors, shimmers of gold threading the tiles. Electric blue water sparkled under the cresting sun, bubbling from all the swimmers gliding underneath the surface. A fountain crowned one end of the pool, while the other was manned by a lifeguard perched atop his high chair. The pool was always so busy—Wednesdays were filled with elderlies for their aquatic therapy something; Thursday mornings saw parent-toddler swim classes; Friday nights hosted free flow cocktails at the bar for the ladies, most of which were soccer moms with hoop earrings, Gucci sunglasses, and a sheer kaftan with either ethnic tribal or animal prints. 

I’d slide so easily into the water, gliding through it better than I walked on land. I had still been too short for the big pool, but at the time, the kids’ one worked just fine. Plus, it had a dolphin mosaic on the floor. After an hour, and hour and a half, I would walk around the park, air-drying my shorts and hair. The smell of chlorine needed two rounds of shampoo to wash out of my hair, but even then, a subtle odor still lingered. I had to wash my shorts in the shower with hand soap, too. Otherwise, the dinner table would be a closed interrogation with answers Mom wouldn’t approve of. With her, who knows what the questions would be about? “You know I love you, right?” she’d always end with. Knowing is often different from feeling. 

Saturdays soon became my favorite day at the pool; that was when Mars would come in and hold swimming lessons for children. I would sit on the trim, watching kids from the nice neighborhood clutch onto the ledge on the other end of the pool and kick and paddle and splash the water. When they weren’t looking, I’d copy their moves. Mars’s instructions were loud enough for me to hear all the way across, and I’d take them into account. 

 

I never bothered to dry off or wash the chlorine out of my hair on Saturdays. Mom would always be at some children’s hospital somewhere. The pungent odor would bite the air, lingering in my wake, and Dad would look up from his newspaper with a disgruntled murmur. “I want swimming lessons,” I told him, “with Mars at the pool in the place over the fence.” All he would do was the lucky cat nod as he flipped the rustling pages of an irrelevant newspaper. As usual: “Go ask your mom about it.” 

But I didn’t. I just went back every Saturday morning, off to the side on my own as I watched Mars train kids whose dads didn’t act like cat statues and whose moms listen to not classical music. I watched as they turned into mermaids, one by one, each with their sparkling colors. The ginger girl with freckles had orange fins with a matching orange prickly starfish adorning her hair; the boy with black hair grew scales the color of wine that glittered with silver specks; the kid with white fins was the prettiest because it looked so ethereal, and turned translucent-gold as if dripping in crystals when she wiggles along the surface of the water. I wanted my tail to be purple on top, melting seamlessly to its pink fins like a picturesque pastel twilight sky; I mourned a little for this mermaid who couldn’t flaunt his fins like them. 

Mars was different. Mars’s tan skin dissolved into blue scales around his waist, crowned with aquamarine fins ruffling against his hip bones. His velvety black hair turned so dark I could almost see my reflection in it. When he craned his neck upward, his eyes turned into an elfish sapphire, like the ocean on a pellucid spring day beckoning its depths to be explored. Pearls beaded every inch of his skin, imparting a brilliant honeyed glow. 

I begged my mother. I wanted fins and tails and scales and hairshells. This time, I thought, I would be ready for the interrogation. I could fathom the murky waters of Mom’s dull trenches. But she didn’t call me a silly boy, and she didn’t put on her classical music. This time, she arched her eyebrow, pointedly narrowing her eyes at me. “Swimming lessons?” Inquisition rippled through her parroted echo of my request. I affirmed with an enthusiastic, cautious nod. 

Two weeks later, on a Saturday, I got what I wanted—but not quite. It wasn’t the one with Mars I told my mom about. It was at some dingy sports complex where the walls were muted, concrete gray and the roof was sheet metal. Puddles stained the floors like oil spills floating on the surface of a dirty seawater. Not a single soul there was a mermaid, not with their squared shoulders and puffed chests and razor sharp eyes and teeth. The water was cold and unyielding, as if I was diving into Jell-O. It stung my skin, icy and sharp, not the temperate blue I was used to. My mind traversed back to Mars and his pearlescent kingdom, and for a moment, these shark-infested waters felt okay. 

No one in this new pool could see my scales. The kids and instructors wanted me to swim with my tail maneuvered left and right even though I wasn’t the sharks they were. They bumped their snouts into my ribs, grazed my skin with their dorsal fins, reared their razor-sharp teeth each time they opened their mouths. They smelled blood, and I think their favorite was mermaid’s. 

Mom didn’t mind though. She didn’t seem too perturbed when I told her a shark bumped my back. The sandpapery skin flaked my iridescent scales off, but I couldn’t show her. Then she put on Mozart (or whoever, I didn’t really know). She wasn’t too upset about the lacerations lining my fins either, because I still couldn’t show her. 

I began finding pink and purple scales littered on my bedroom floor. In the showers. At the bottom of the dark frigid pools. It had been months since I last saw Mars.

 

Then I turned thirteen. 

But my scales were halfway gone. I was losing the color on my fins, the pinks and purples leeching away to reveal a tough, spotty gray. Still, I was a mermaid, even though I had to flip my tail from left to right. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t erase the fact that I was made to swim in an up-and-down motion. 

The instructor wasn’t happy, but he was nice about it. 

Mom wasn’t. The dinner table would turn into a fishing hole where she would cast her net and collect any flaw she could. “Remember, this was what you wanted,” she warned with the boom of a foghorn. The allure of mermaids was incomprehensible to her. No siren song could affect her, because she wasn’t another pirate that could be easily lured to death by drowning. She was the razor-toothed marine predator, a massive warning sign for all mermaids. For all I know, she might be a shark. 

“You know I love you, right?” Taking her oolong tea, then, she put on her loopy Debussy record and loudly sipped, scanning the room again with her vacant eyes. I turned to Dad, but he reverted to his default as the lucky cat statue. 

My next practice was odd. Mom stayed and talked to the instructor after she had dropped me off. Five, ten minutes, and she still hadn’t left his office. Other sharks in the pool sniffed me out, their stares like jellyfish stingers, erecting the hair on the back of my neck and those beginning to grow on my arms and legs. After twenty minutes, maybe, Mom left, but not before telling me, “Listen to whatever your instructor says, okay?” To which I nodded too enthusiastically, hoping for a reassuring smile. But she only added, “Don’t be a silly boy, Brandon. I’ll see you at dinner.” 

After practice was over and everyone left, I alone was told to stay behind with the instructor. He smiled through his growing beard, telling me this would be a great opportunity for me to improve my form. “But I don’t see anything wrong with my form,” I argued. It wasn’t my fault everyone else was a shark and I was a mermaid. It certainly wasn’t my fault Mom wasn’t fond of mermaids. 

Still, as the instructor descended into the water, I found myself haunted by Mom’s words, further amplified by the nod the instructor gave with a toothy grin as he propped my legs up. His hands were beefy, a little rough as the callouses rubbed against my skin. One then moved up to my stomach, just inches away from my pulsating heart. His touch was cold, colder than the water. He bent my body in the way he wanted me to move. I leaned into his steady grip, my back brushing against the hairs on his chest. He wasn’t a shark; he felt more like a seal. He might not be out for blood, but he still swam with his tail flipping left and right, and his paws were still stronger than my fins. I closed my eyes and swam. Dove deep into those uncharted waters. I tried to find the calm, especially since no one else was there with me. I relied on the water and only the water to protect me. 

But when I got home, I found an elliptical ring of crimson blooming on my shoulder. Small rows of holes punctured my skin on the top half, abrasive lacerations on the lower half. I didn’t feel it. Didn’t hurt, even. But it was there. Still, my parents couldn’t see it. 

I didn’t come to practice the next week. Mom was out of town, for once, so this was my only chance. Bypassing Dad was easy; he hadn’t even noticed me slinking out of the house when he had his nose buried in last year’s Chinese newspaper. I wondered when he would start reading today’s news instead. 

When I arrived at the hole in the chain link fence, my heart pounded. It had been way too long, yet nothing seemed to have changed. Yet in so many ways, I had. 

It was almost closing time when I got to the fancy pool with the fountain and blue water. But Mars was still there. He even looked at me with his glossy sapphire eyes and smiled at me. Had he gotten taller? Tanner? His chest broader? “It’s been a while since I last saw you,” he quipped as he sauntered over to me. “I noticed you were gone for a while. I missed seeing you here.” 

I shrugged, averting my eyes from his to try and hide my warming cheeks. “How’d you notice?” 

“A mermaid like you can’t go unnoticed. Shouldn’t.”

If I had my fins right now, they would be flapping around. My belly buzzed a little, head lightening—turning dizzy, yes, but also relinquished of the heavy burdens of Mom and sharks and seals. 

Mars swam up to the side of the pool, touching my exposed foot, water dripping from his fingers into the creases between my toes and flip-flop. “Come join me in the water.”

 

So, I did. 

The water was temperate, a bright and blue welcome after the iciness of my usual concrete lake. Everything felt so at peace whenever I went under. I ignored the burning in my chest as I fought the pressure. The deafening in my ears was a paltry, if not welcome, discomfort. All the noise above the surface seemed so far away, possessing no real power to bypass the impenetrable aquatic shield. I could stay as long as I wanted, encapsulated in a vacuum where I was untouchable, where time didn’t move and nothing existed outside of me. I might be holding my breath, but at least it wasn’t because I was in anticipation of whatever unpredictable omen to come. 

A pair of extended hands greet me, scintillating blue fins whooshing excitedly, creating tiny bubbles around me. I laughed, because for the first time, my scales weren’t being chipped off by rough shark skins or oil slicks or numbing cold waters too dark to see through. I was allowed to swim with my tail flowing up and down, letting the ruffles of my fins billow in the crystalline blue, twirling around without fear because the water was protecting me. Because Mars, a majestic mermaid, was here with me. 

But, as it turned out, mermaids bite, too. Even through a pristine row of pearly whites that shone as he smiled, the gleeful chitter that mimicked a dolphin’s clicks.

The marks they left were different, though. Not as huge as a shark's, obviously; they were tinier circles, but more dispersed. And they bit deep into my flesh, leaving hollow dents along my shoulders, my neck, my arms. Down my chest, on my hips, under my rear right where my thighs meet my buttocks. 

I went back to my swim lessons the next week. Mom insisted, reminding me this was what I wanted. I didn’t dare defy her empty eyes and emptier “You know I love you’s”. But the water felt different now. Heavier, a weighted pressure enfolding me from all sides threatening to drag me down. The water wasn’t fun anymore. It wasn’t nice. Wasn’t even bad. It was lukewarm. 

So, I slowly stopped swimming. I had to fake injuries, because my real ones weren’t visible to anyone, for some reason, even though the bite marks were the size of a frisbee. No more Saturdays in those concrete coves with dark waters. No more Saturdays with Mars in his pearlescent glory. Mom still listened to classical music, and Dad still hadn’t updated his newspapers to the latest issues. 

Ten years later now, I can cover the shark bites a little. The impressions in my flesh from a mermaid’s bite, though, wouldn’t heal. They’re too deep for me to cover. I realized too late how much more dangerous a siren’s song is than a shark attack. 

As I’m standing on the wooden dock overlooking the lake, I’m left to wonder if things would’ve been different had I not wanted to be a mermaid. Had I been a great white shark with a mean bite and razor sharp teeth instead of a slender tail and ruffled fins, would the water have been kinder to me? 

I slip out of my jeans and Oxford shirt, folding them into a neat pile. On top of them, I place my boat shoes. The moon’s out tonight, a full disc hanging on the barely starry twilight sky. I lower my toes into the water; it’s cold, but not biting. Refreshing, even, I daresay, against my bare skin. The surface ripples, breaking the perfect stillness. Perhaps I should never have disturbed the stillness of the water by being in it. 

I wonder if I could ever feel about the water the way I used to again. Cold air bites my skin, gentle summer breeze caresses my face as I descend deeper, leaping off the dock. A sliver of that nostalgic serenity teases me when water laps against my body, licking the creases between my toes. I wonder if the catharsis that sheathed me when I go under the surface will ever return. Maybe I don’t want it to return. 

So, I’ll just float. 

I stare at the starry sky overhead. It isn’t every day I get to see such a clear cloudless sky that some constellations become visible. I close my eyes and imagine what it’d be to swim among them, basking in the glow of starlight and setting yourself free with the thought of how everything will be okay. When I open my eyes again, some of the stars blink away, the glow fizzling off. Even the stars seem to betray me. 

A lot can change with just one slip. Being on the surface is as soothing as can be, but all of that goes away the moment your body starts sinking. When you lose that levitation, there’s nowhere to go but down. My chest is tight and I realize it’s burning. 

What no one thinks about being surrounded by water is that it’s deafening. It engulfs you in yourself, and once the undercurrent drags you with it, it’s impossible to break the surface. No matter how hard you scream, you can’t hear anything, and no one can hear you. 

Yet, I screamed once more, using up the last of my breath. So, when I finally resurface, I wouldn’t disturb the crisp stillness in the air.