For the Water is Deep

The first time I saw the mermaid, I knew that I loved her.

I had been twelve, visiting The World Aquarium on a school trip with twenty of my classmates. The bus ride had gone by painfully slowly. It had been more than an hour; an hour of the parent volunteers trying to force us to sing I Met a Bear and Kumbaya, and kids screaming, asking if we were there yet or complaining about having to go to the bathroom. I had done my best to avoid most of the commotion, sitting beside my partner for the day and quietly reading my Monster Field Guide. This was a book I'd devoured, poring over time and time again as I lay in a tent made from the blankets on my bed, my only reading light a handheld flashlight that my brother Kyle had given to me.

The book had been threadbare, even then. I still have it, of course. It still sits on the highest shelf in my bookcase, too fragile now to use for much more than a display, but back then, I had carried it with me almost everywhere. The pages were dog eared, their edges rough with the many times I'd turned them, and there may have been a few unsightly stains on some of the pages where I had dropped crumbs on them, too absorbed in the words to put the book down while I ate.

The pages of that book had filled my head and my eyes with images of every monster one was likely to encounter in the wild. The illustrations, lovingly detailed paintings of the creatures, had leapt off the pages at me. I had a specific favorite: the illustration of the mermaids. Something about the way the half-fish half-human creatures floated below the surface of the water, their scales shimmering in the sun, had captivated me. I had spent years daydreaming about seeing one of those mesmerizing creatures in real life, and that class trip, barely a month after the aquarium had finally opened a mermaid exhibit, had been my chance to do it.

When we'd finally arrived, leaving the bus had been a slow, shuffling affair as Miss Hannigan and the parent volunteers counted heads, made everyone grab the hand of their partner and then hold it in the air, and finally let us get off the bus. We'd exited in a wave, leaving pair by pair, and I had bounced in the aisle, waiting beside my partner as the duos in front of us delayed everyone by digging around in their bags for a moment. Once we'd finally gotten off the bus, I looked around, drinking in the sights.

The parking lot hadn't exactly been exciting, but there'd been crowds that day. Crowds of families with very young children in strollers or holding onto their mom's hands and couples holding onto each other tightly. I looked on, hearing the jabbering voices of my classmates all around me but tuning all of them out, peering through the crowd to try and catch a glimpse of what I'd gone to see. I knew exactly where the mermaid exhibit was. As we'd passed through the main gates of the aquarium in a massive, roiling tumble, I tried to turn off in that direction.

"Caidin!" Miss Hannigan's authoritative voice had stopped me in my tracks. Ducking my head, I'd glanced at her where she walked at the front of the group, leading us. "Stay with the group!"

I had no choice but to follow the stream of people, turning in the opposite direction of where I wanted to go.

The World Aquarium had been built on a massive plot of land. It's main building had smaller exhibits with the typical ocean fish you'd expect to see in an aquarium, swimming among the seaweed and rocks that had been placed around their tanks to simulate a real ocean habitat. There'd been colorful reef fish, and an entire room full of jellyfish, glowing with the black lights they'd used to illuminate the tanks. I had shuffled my feet as we looked at the regular fish for way too long, but eventually we'd moved outdoors, to where some of the other exhibits had fascinated me far more.

Outside, there'd been simulated rivers and ponds, where we'd looked at Grindylows and Kappas. Naiads, shimmering, vaguely feminine creatures, had lounged around their simulated spring. In the swamp exhibit, we'd seen something called a Bunyip – one of my classmates had claimed he'd seen it, anyway. No one else had seen anything other than some faint lights bobbing above the surface of the swamp – Will-o-the-wisps, still glimmering in the hope of leading some poor traveler off the path to his murky demise.