2024 Story Collection

The Merman in the Mountain Pond II

She's dying.

A sadness runs through him. A loss for a woman that he met only moments before. Because even though he saved from drowning, she will still die.

How had he, in only a moment, become so attached to her. Was it because he saved her? Was it because she saw him in this form and didn't run away? Was it because he had been so lonely his entire life that the small genuine interest she gave him made him feel things? Was it that her loneliness matched his?

He wants to ask a million questions. What's killing you? When? How long? Do you feel it too? But he settles for one that is more neutral.

"Why are you up here?" He asks, curious as to why she'd spend her last months alone up in the mountains.

"I don't know," she says. "I just drove until I ran out of road and walked after that. Eventually, I found myself here."

She spoke with an emptiness he knew too well. He can't help but push. He wants to know more-he has to know more.

"Yes, but why?"

"Why not?" She looks away from him. He realizes in that moment that he'd do just about anything to get her attention back. What is she doing to him?

But then he thinks, doesn't she have people she'd want to spend her time with, people who love her and would care for her during the time she has left? Did she just abandon them? Leave them behind?

"Don't you have people that love you? Why don't you spend your time with them?" A jealous note rings in his voice.

"I have no one," is all she says, still not looking at him.

He softens at her words. That's why her emptiness was so familiar. It wasn't the diagnosis so much as the fact that there was no one to mourn her loss, he guessed. But it doesn't have to stay that way.

"Then change that," he tells her.

She looks at him with a sharp glare. "What? Just so I can die on them?"

He flinches back but stands his ground. She deserves not to be alone, to have someone.

"Then find someone who just wants to have fun for a few months. Tell them you'll leave the state soon and want some no strings attached fun or something before you go," he suggests, though even as he says it he hates the idea of her being used by anyone.

"No," she snaps.

"So you don't want sex?" He asks before he can stop himself. She looks at him, face full of emotions.

"I want love." A tear falls from her eye. He reaches up and brushes it away with the back of his hand, careful not to cut her with his sharp nails. She doesn't flinch away. She just stares at him.

"When was the last time you ate?" He asks, avoiding all the things he wants to say, namely I could be that love.

"Way to change the subject," she jokes, rolling her eyes at him. He laughs and slips back into the water.

"Your one to talk." He rests his elbows on the dock next to her. "Answer the question."

"I don't know," she says. "Nothing tastes good anymore."

"You haven't had my cooking." He says with a smile. She looks at him with a look of disbelief. He chuckles.

He was a good cook, that was how he'd made his money. He started as a dishwasher and worked his way up to a chef, only to get kicked out and start again in a bakery as a pastry chef.